Chapter 16 #2
"And then somebody better have figured out how to tan a sole leather with bark," Hobby said, "and that's a two year project and I'd start it this fall."
They started it that fall.
Dee and Loreen began four oak bark tanning pits in September using bark stripped off the cottonwoods and willows, which was not oak and which everybody knew was inferior, and Tom wrote in the book: BARK TAN, COTTONWOOD, STARTED 11 SEP, CHECK JUNE.
The third hard thing was Nell's foot, which went wrong in August.
The stump had healed clean in February and she had been walking on it since April, and in August she developed a pressure sore on the ball of the foot, because the missing toe had changed how she loaded it and nobody had thought about that.
It went deep before anyone saw it, because Nell did not report pain, and that turned out to be a thing about her that everybody had to learn.
"Why didn't you say?" Kindra said, looking at it.
"It didn't hurt."
"It's got a hole in it."
"It didn't hurt," Nell repeated, and then, with difficulty: "Things hurt and then they stop. That's just how feet are."
Kindra sat back on her heels.
"Nell, that's not how feet are."
"It's how mine are."
"That's because you spent a year where nobody was going to do anything about it, and your body worked out that reporting it was a waste of time."
Kindra took her by both shoulders. "So here's a new rule and it's for you specifically. You report everything. Every scrape, every ache, every time something's wrong. And if it turns out to be nothing, that's a win, not a bother."
"That's a lot of reporting."
"I'd rather hear four hundred nothings than miss one of these."
It took six weeks to close and Hobby built her a moccasin with a shaped insole that redistributed the load, and it did not come back.
The fourth hard thing was the one Tom had known was coming since June.
It arrived on the fourth of September in the form of smoke.
Cass saw it. He was on the bench above the creek at six in the morning, on the watch rotation that Tom had built the day they arrived and had never once allowed to lapse, and he came down and did not run.
"Smoke," he said. "East. Down the flats road."
"How far?"
"Four miles. Maybe five."
"How much?"
"One column. Not big."
Tom put down his cup.
"All right," he said. "Everybody. Right now."
Twenty people got to the creek bottom shelters in eleven minutes, and the old and the small got carried the last two hundred yards, and Tom stood at the mouth of the camp and counted heads twice out loud and got twenty both times.
Then he went up on the bench with Cass and McKenzie and lay in the rocks and looked east for four hours.
The smoke burned all morning and went out at about one in the afternoon.
Nothing came up the road.
"What was it?" Kindra said, that night.
"Somebody cooking, or somebody signalling, or somebody burning a building." Tom rubbed his face. "It was a fire four miles away on a road that goes somewhere, and that's all it was, and we spent eleven minutes hiding twenty people and four hours lying on a rock."
"Was that wrong?"
"No. It was exactly right and I'd do it again tomorrow, and I want to talk about what it means."
He called the whole camp together the next evening.
"Yesterday there was smoke four miles east and we all went to ground and nothing happened," he said. "I want to say four things about that."
"Go ahead," Loreen said.
"One. That was a good drill and it took eleven minutes and it should take six."
"With Hobby and me in it, it'll never take six," Loreen said.
"Then it'll take eight, because we're going to build a stretcher rig that two people can move you on at a jog, and we're going to practice it until it's boring."
"Fine."
"Two. It's the fourth of September. In two weeks that garden starts coming in properly and there's going to be a thousand pounds of squash lying in the open on a south slope four hundred yards from a road."
Nobody said anything.
"Three. Everybody in this valley who's still alive is doing arithmetic right now, same as us, and in about six weeks they're going to know exactly how much food they've got and exactly how short they are."
Tom looked around the fire. "October is when people move. Last year, everything happened in October."
"And four?" Kindra said.
"Four is that I don't know what's out there anymore." Tom sat down on the log. "And I want to say that plainly, because for eleven months I knew. There was Wingman and there was the orange beard and there was the Yard down the valley, and I could name them and count them and predict them."
"And now?"
"And now the orange beard's dead and his people went down the Clark Fork in April, and Wingman's gone or he isn't, and there's been nobody east of us since spring, and I have no idea whether that's because the valley's empty or because I've had my head in a bean bed since May."
"So what do we do?"
"We go look," Tom said.
That was the argument of the autumn and it took nine days.
Kindra was against it and said so for four of those days, hard, in front of everybody, which was how this camp did things now.
"You are describing a patrol," she said. "You're describing sending people out, away from here, into country where the entire strategy that's kept us alive is never being where anybody's looking."
"I'm describing knowing something."
"You've said for a year that knowing is the most expensive thing anybody buys in this valley."
"And I was right, and I bought it anyway, four times, and every single time it paid," Tom said.
"I climbed that ridge in September and found six fires. I went to the boulders in December and found Nell. I went to the cairn in February and found two hundred and twenty five pounds in the ground and four lines on a rock."
"And the time you went up the gulch after Chip."
"And that time I found out my friend was dead and that five men had done it and that one of them had a chunk out of his right heel, and every single thing I built after that came out of knowing it."
Kindra folded her arms.
"Say what you actually want," she said.
"I want to know if there's anybody left," Tom said.
And then, because he had been circling it for two months, he said the rest of it.
"Because there's twenty of us. And there's four coffee cans of seed and a garden and a forge and a well and two hundred and eleven pounds of elk in a barn that a man left us. And if there are nine people sitting in a house forty miles from here burning their own fence and waiting to die,
then I want to know about it before the snow, and not in March."
Nobody said anything.
"That's the whole thing," Tom said. "I'm not going out to look for enemies. I've spent a year looking for enemies."
Loreen Tack said, "That's the first foolish thing you've said since May."
"Probably."
"It might get somebody killed."
"Yes."
"And you want to do it anyway."
"I want to send two people east down that road for four days and have them look, and come back, and tell us," Tom said. "And then we decide in the spring, and not in an hour, and not because anybody's got a soft heart, mine included."
They voted on the eleventh of September and it went fourteen to four with two abstentions.
Cass and McKenzie went east on the fourteenth.
Tom did not go. That was Kindra's condition and he accepted it without argument and hated every hour of it.
"You're forty three and you're the only person here who can do everything," she said. "You don't get to be the scout anymore."
"Kenz is twelve."
"Kenz is thirteen in November and she's the best woodsman in this camp and everybody knows it including you."
They went with four days of food, one rifle with eleven rounds in it, and four rules that Tom made them repeat back to him.
Do not go closer than four hundred yards to anything.
Do not go into any building.
If you see people, count them and leave.
Six days. Not seven.
They came back on the nineteenth at four in the afternoon, both of them, filthy and thin and walking fast, and McKenzie was carrying something wrapped in her coat.
Tom got to them first.
"Count," he said.
"Eleven," McKenzie said.
"Eleven people?"
"Eleven people at the Tolliver place, which is not the flats, it's four miles further at the big bend." She was breathing hard. "Four men, three women, four kids. They've got no fence and no garden and they've been eating fish."
"Are they armed?"
"Two rifles that we saw."
"Did they see you?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
"Dad," McKenzie said, "I was four hundred yards out in willow and I never stood up once in two days."
Tom let out a breath.
"All right. Good. Sit down, both of you, eat something."
"There's more."
"Sit down first."
"Dad, there's more."
And McKenzie Thorn unwrapped her coat and held out what was inside it, and Tom Thorn looked at it and felt the entire year go out from under him.
It was a revolver.
Long barreled, blued, eight and three eighths inches, the front sight ramp worn bright.
"Where," he said.
"In a rock cairn," McKenzie said. "On the road, at the eight mile mark, right in the middle of it where nobody could miss it."
"Kenz."
"There was a stake next to it with a rag on it," she said. "Red."
Tom took the Smith & Wesson in both hands and sat down on the log because his legs had stopped being interested in the conversation.
It was Chip Charter's.
There was no question and there never had been from the moment he saw the length of that barrel.
He had held it once, on the tenth of October of the previous year, for about four minutes, standing in a dooryard that no longer existed, and he had handed it back to an old man butt first because of arithmetic.
He turned it over.
The grips were the same, walnut worn smooth at the heel. The bluing was gone along the top strap in the same worn line.
He opened the cylinder.
It was loaded. Six rounds, .44 Magnum, clean and bright, and not one of them was a case with a struck primer.
"That's six," McKenzie said.
"That's six."
"He had nineteen and he fired four in the gulch and he never loaded the last chamber."
"You remember that."