Chapter 17 #2
And then she sat down in the dirt beside a rock pile on a hillside in Montana and put both hands over her face and stayed that way for four minutes.
"She's not taking it," Cass whispered.
"She's deciding."
"Deciding what?"
"Whether it's a trap, and whether she can carry it past the house, and whether the tall man counts the water buckets the way he counts the fish."
The woman got up.
She did not take the food.
She took the coffee can of seed, and she put it inside her coat, and she put the slab back and she picked up her buckets and she went down to the creek.
Frankie Pell let out a breath.
"She took the seed," she said.
"She took the seed."
"Why the seed? She's starving."
"Because meat in her coat is a thing that gets found tonight," Tom said, "and seed in her coat is a thing that means next year, and she made that decision in about ninety seconds."
Dee wrote on her board: SHE IS THE ONE.
They went home on the tenth and got back on the twelfth, and Tom reported to the camp, all of it, including the cuff across the back of a nine year old's head and the fact that they had left.
Frankie Pell reported separately, which Tom insisted on.
"She thinks I made the wrong call," he said, "and she's the drawn seat on the council and she was there, and everybody's going to hear it from her and not from me."
Frankie stood up.
"I think he was right," she said.
The camp went quiet.
"I've thought about it for four days walking and I think he was right, and I want everybody to know I spent two of those days furious about it."
She looked around. "And I want everybody to know exactly what right cost. There's a child at the big bend who got hit while four of us watched from four hundred yards, and we came home."
Nobody said anything.
"That's what right costs sometimes," Frankie said. "I want it in the book."
McKenzie wrote it in the book.
They came on the fourth of July.
It was the woman of about fifty, whose name was Ada Kemper, and the other woman, who was twenty four and whose name was Shan, and the nine year old boy and a girl of six and a boy of four.
Five people. They came up the creek at two in the afternoon in the open and Ada Kemper called out from three hundred yards in a voice that cracked, and Cass Tunny, who had the bench watch, came down and brought them in.
They had walked eleven miles in two and a half days.
They had left in the night on the first of July.
And Ada Kemper still had the coffee can of seed in her coat, unopened, with one cup of beans and one cup of squash in it, because she had decided on the ninth of June that it belonged to the children and she had not been going to eat it under any circumstances whatsoever.
Kindra fed them the way she always did, which was small and slow and often, and the six year old cried for four hours about nothing anybody could identify and then fell asleep against Loreen Tack and slept fourteen hours.
Tom did not ask Ada anything for two days.
On the third day she came and found him at the forge.
"You want to know about the men," she said.
"When you're ready."
"I'm ready now and I'd rather do it once." She sat down on the stump. "There's two of them and there was four in September and the other two are dead and I want you to know I'm glad about it, because you seem like a man who'd rather hear that up front."
"I'd rather."
"Gil died of his gut in November. Marty got shot in February by somebody down the river and came back and died of it in four days and nobody did anything for him."
"And the two left?"
"Reese is the tall one and he's my sister's husband and he has been running that house since the first week and he is not a bad man and I want you to understand that, because if you think he's a monster you'll get him wrong."
Ada Kemper's hands were flat on her knees.
"He is a scared man who found out in April of last year that if he held the rifle nobody argued, and that's all that ever happened to him."
"And the other?"
"Dell's twenty two and he does what Reese does."
"How many rounds?"
"Six," she said. "Two rifles and six rounds and one of the rifles hasn't worked since the winter and Reese carries it anyway because nobody knows."
Tom sat with that.
"Ada," he said. "Where's your sister?"
She had been waiting for it.
"She's still there," Ada Kemper said. "She wouldn't come. I asked her four times on the last night and she said no four times and then she helped me get the children out the window."
Tom put his hand over his mouth.
"That's the hardest thing I've ever heard," he said.
"It isn't," Ada said. "The hardest thing is that she was right to stay, because if she'd come with us Reese would have followed us, and because she stayed he thinks we went east."
Tom stood up and walked four steps and came back.
"How long before he works it out?"
"Weeks. Maybe never." She looked up at him. "Mister Thorn, I need to say the next part and I need you to not answer it today."
"Go ahead."
"There's one woman left at the big bend and she's thirty eight and she's my sister and her name's Renna."
"I know."
"And I'm not asking you to go get her."
"Ada."
"I'm not, and I want it on the record that I didn't ask, because I have been in a house for fourteen months where people asked things of each other that couldn't be given, and I watched what it did." Her chin was absolutely steady. "So I'm not asking. I'm telling you she's there, and that's all."
Tom looked at a woman of about fifty who had walked eleven miles with three children and a coffee can of seed.
"That's the second time somebody's done that to me," he said.
"Done what?"
"Refused to ask."
"Who was the first?"
"A nine year old girl with a frozen foot," Tom said, "about a friend of hers with one ear, and I told her we'd wait a week and decide with information, and it took us five months and we got them both."
Ada Kemper's face did not move at all.
"Then I'll wait a week," she said.
The council met on the ninth of July and it was the hardest meeting the camp ever had, and it ended in a decision nobody expected, which came from the drawn seat.
The rotation had turned over on the first. Frankie was off it.
The new drawn seat was Oliver Thorn, eleven years old.
Tom had argued against letting anybody under fourteen into the lottery and had lost that vote in May to his own wife, and had said afterward that losing it was probably correct and that he hoped he would remember thinking so.
Oliver sat through ninety minutes of four adults going in circles.
Then he said, "Can I say the thing nobody's saying?"
"Go ahead," Loreen said.
"Everybody keeps arguing about whether to go get her." The boy's ears had gone red but his voice was steady. "And we did this exact thing about the tree."
Tom went very still.
"Say more."
"Last spring. Everybody said go or don't go, and then I said we never do it that way, we don't go get the elk, we put a spear in a gap and let the elk come."
He looked around the circle. "And then we made a place for them to come to, and June walked eleven miles by herself, and then Cass, and then all nine of them."
"And Ada walked eleven miles," Kindra said slowly.
"Because we put a rock with writing on it where the person who carries the water would find it," Oliver said. "So why is anybody talking about going down there with guns?"
Nobody said anything.
"There's one woman left," Oliver said. "And she stayed on purpose so the kids could go. She's not somebody who needs rescuing. She's somebody who already decided."
Dee Marchetti wrote on her board and turned it around.
It said: SO SHE NEEDS A ROAD, NOT A RESCUE.
They built the road over eleven days and it was the strangest piece of work the camp ever did.
Tom would not go himself. That was Kindra's condition again and this time he did not argue at all, because he had understood something on the bench above the big bend and had been turning it over since.
"I'm the one they'd see," he said, at the fire. "Forty three, big, beard, and I've spent two years learning to look at a house like a man deciding something. If Reese sees me at four hundred yards he knows exactly what he's looking at."
"And who does he not know what he's looking at?" Loreen said.
Tom looked across the fire.
"A boy," he said.
Cass Tunny went east on the fourteenth of July with Dee Marchetti, and Tom briefed them for two hours and made them repeat the whole thing back twice.
"You are not going to the house. You are not going within four hundred yards of the house. You are going to the draw, to the cairn, and you are going to do four things and then you are going to leave."
"Say the four things," Cass said.
"One. You restock the cairn. Meat, fat, and a second can of seed."
"Two?"
"Two. You cut a second slab and you set it beside the first one and you cut new writing on it, and Dee's going to do that because Dee writes better than anybody here."
Dee wrote: WHAT DOES IT SAY?
"That's the third thing and we're going to draft it tonight with the whole council, because four lines on a rock is going to be the only conversation anybody has with that woman and I want every word argued over."
"And four?"
"Four is that you build a second cairn," Tom said. "A mile west of the first one, on the road, where somebody walking away from that house would come to it after about twenty minutes."
Cass frowned.
"Why?"
"Because the worst moment in that walk isn't the leaving," Tom said. "It's twenty minutes later, in the dark, when she's alone on a road with nothing behind her and eleven miles in front of her and she starts to think about turning around."
"And a rock pile fixes that?"
"A rock pile with food in it fixes that," Tom said. "Because it means somebody was out there. It means the first one wasn't a fluke or a trick, and that there's a chain of them, and that the chain goes somewhere."
Ada Kemper, who had been sitting outside the council circle because she had asked to be and had refused a seat, said, "That's right."
Everybody turned.
"Sorry."
"No," Tom said. "Say it."