Chapter 16 #3
"You said it eleven times in November," McKenzie said.
Tom closed the cylinder.
"So somebody's had this for a year, and they've cleaned it, and they've fed it six rounds of .44 Magnum, which do not exist anywhere in this valley."
"There was a case of thirty aught six in the barn," Cass said.
"There was, and there was no .44, and I looked, because I've looked in every box I've opened since February." Tom set it on his knee. "Six rounds of .44 Magnum in September means somebody has been carrying that gun and not using it for eleven months."
Kindra had come up behind him.
"Tell me about the cairn," she said.
McKenzie pulled a hide off her pack and laid it out.
"It's at the eight mile mark east on the road, right where the road bends south around the shoulder. We came back that way on the seventeenth and it wasn't there on the fifteenth when we went out."
"You're sure?"
"We walked past that exact spot going east and I marked the bend in my head because it's the only place on that road where you can see both directions."
"So it was built between the fifteenth and the seventeenth."
"Between about noon on the fifteenth and four in the afternoon on the seventeenth."
"How was it built?"
"Same as the other one." McKenzie's voice had gone flat and careful. "Flat river rock, laid in courses, about three feet. Dad, it's the same hands. I sat and looked at it for twenty minutes and it's the same courses and the same chinking."
Tom rubbed his face.
"And the gun?"
"On top. Laid flat on the top course, not stuck in, not wedged. Just laid there." She hesitated. "And under it there was a flat rock with the writing on it and I didn't take the rock because it weighed about forty pounds."
"Then say what it said."
McKenzie took a breath and recited it, which was how she remembered anything she could not carry.
"It said: THE OLD MAN OWNED THIS AND I TOOK IT. Then: IT IS THE LAST THING OF HIS I HAVE. Then: I CANNOT WORK IT ANYMORE. And then: THE 11 AT THE BIG BEND ARE NOT ARMED THE WAY THEY LOOK. And then the last line was: THEY HAVE 2 RIFLES AND 9 ROUNDS."
Nobody said anything.
"That's an inventory," Kindra said.
"That's an inventory."
"Of people we were about to walk up on."
"That's the twelfth time," Tom said. "Twelfth message. Dog, note, pot, soap, rag, ripped cache, cairn, bark in the tree, map of the flats, bark on the pass, box in the barn, and now this."
He stood up and walked eleven feet and turned around.
"And every single one of them since February has been information he had no reason to give us."
"He gave us the guard rotation at the flats when the flats were his," McKenzie said.
"He gave us that in April."
"And he gave us the barn in May, and now he's given us the strength of an armed group four miles east of our garden in September."
Cass had not said anything since he sat down.
"Cass," Tom said.
"He's dying," the boy said.
Everybody looked at him.
"Say more."
Cass Tunny had his hands between his knees and his eyes on the fire.
"I can't work it anymore." He said it slowly. "That's not about the gun."
"Explain."
"That gun weighs about four pounds loaded. It's a heavy piece and it's a big round."
Cass's jaw worked. "When I was with him in February he could hold a rifle up for about ten seconds before his arm went. The hole was through the top of his shoulder and it took something in there. He said the arm never came back right."
"So?"
"So he's been carrying a four pound revolver for seven months that he can't fire straight," Cass said, "and now he's put it on a rock."
"That's the fourth line," Kindra said slowly. "It's the last thing of his I have. He's giving away his last."
"Or he's laying it down," Loreen Tack said, from the other side of the fire.
Nobody had noticed her come over.
"What's that mean?" Sofie asked.
"It means, honey, that when a man who's been carrying something for a long while sets it down neat in the middle of a road where it'll be found, he's not usually planning on going far."
The camp went quiet.
"That's a hard thing to say in front of the children," Kindra said.
"They'll hear worse," Loreen said, "and they'll hear it from somebody who doesn't like them."
They spent four days on the eleven people at the big bend and it was the hardest argument the camp had.
It ran differently than the June argument, because this time there were twenty people with twenty opinions and no shared history, and Tom learned in about two days that the way he ran a family did not scale.
"You can't do this every time," Hobby told him, on the twenty second, at the forge.
"Do what?"
"Put everything to the whole camp and talk it out till it's done."
The old man turned a piece in the coals.
"It worked in June because everybody was so glad to be fed they'd have agreed to anything. It's the twenty second of September and Frankie and Dee have been arguing for three days and neither one's going to move, and you've got a harvest coming."
"So what do I do?"
"You pick four people and you decide, and you tell everybody why."
"That's not how we've done it."
"That's how you've done it with six people who all trust each other and one of them's your wife," Hobby said. "It ain't how you do it with twenty."
Tom stood there for a while.
"That's the smartest thing anybody's said to me since May," he said.
"I've been sitting in a corner for five years watching people run things badly," Hobby said. "You get opinions."
So Tom built a council, and he built it in an evening, and it was the third institution of the camp and it outlasted everything else.
Five people: himself, Kindra, Loreen, Dee, and one seat that rotated every season and was drawn by lot from everybody over fourteen.
"Why a lottery seat?" June asked.
"Because four people who like each other will agree with each other forever," Tom said, "and because the day this camp stops being able to hear from somebody it didn't pick is the day it starts dying."
The first drawn seat was Frankie Pell, who had argued against everything for four days, and Tom afterward considered that the luckiest thing that happened all autumn.
The council met on the twenty fourth and decided in ninety minutes.
"Nobody goes to the big bend this year," Tom said, to the camp. "Here's the four reasons and everybody's entitled to disagree and nobody's entitled to relitigate it before March."
"Say them," Frankie said, who had voted against.
"One. It's the twenty fourth of September and there's a thousand pounds of squash on a slope and we have got about four weeks of harvest and preservation work that will not wait for anybody."
"Two?"
"Two. They've got four men and two rifles and nine rounds and no garden, and in November they are going to be desperate, and a group of desperate men who have just met a group with food does not become friends. It becomes arithmetic."
"Three?"
"Three. We are four miles from them and they do not know we exist, and that is the single most valuable asset this camp owns and it cost nothing."
"And four?"
"Four is the one I want everybody to actually hear," Tom said.
"Four is that in March, when their fish are gone and they're four people fewer, we can go and look again, and if there's still children in that house we can make an offer from a position where we've got a full cellar and they've got nothing, and they'll take it, and it'll hold."
"That's cold," Frankie said.
"It's freezing," Tom agreed. "And I want it written in the book with my name on it, and I want it read out loud in March, and if I'm wrong I want everybody to know exactly who was wrong."
McKenzie wrote it down.
The harvest took five weeks and it nearly killed everybody and it was the best five weeks of the year.
The squash came in at nine hundred and eleven pounds.
They cut them with four inches of stem, which Dee insisted on and which turned out to matter enormously, and they cured them in the sun on the barn roof for eleven days and then moved them into the barn loft where it was dry and dark and stayed above freezing.
"Never stack them touching," Dee wrote on a board, because she still did not speak, and the whole camp had learned to read her board.
The beans came in at two hundred and eighty pounds dry, which was less than hoped because of the June frost, and they threshed them by putting the whole plants in a hide and having the children jump on it, which took four days and produced more laughter than anything since Christmas.
"Why jump?" Petey asked.
"Because you're seven and you weigh forty pounds and you can do it all day," Tom said, "and because the pods break and the beans don't, and because we have no threshing floor and no flail and no mill."
They winnowed by pouring from a height in the afternoon wind.
The beets and carrots and turnips went into sand in the ranch root cellar, layer of sand, layer of root, no two touching, and Kindra did it herself with Birdy for four days and taught her every inch of it.
"Why me?" Birdy said.
"Because you're eleven and you'll be doing this for sixty years," Kindra said, "and because I want two people in this camp who can do it right, and Dee already can."
The kale they left, because kale gets sweeter after frost and does not care.
And the parsnips.
Thirty one of the sixty transplants had survived, and they had bolted in July into flower heads five feet tall, and on the fourth of October McKenzie and Nell and Birdy cut them and hung them upside down in the barn in paper made of birch bark, and threshed them in November.
They got, by actual count, four thousand and eleven parsnip seeds.
Tom held the jar in both hands and did not say anything for a while.
"That's every year from now on," Kindra said.
"That's every year from now on."
"Say it out loud at the fire."
He said it at the fire that night.
"There are four thousand parsnip seeds in a jar in the barn," he said, "and there's four coffee cans of seed a man left us in May, and starting this winter we are going to learn to save every single kind ourselves, and that is the actual end of the emergency."