Chapter 17 #3
"The leaving's not the hard part." Ada's hands were working in her lap.
"The hard part is the second hour. I sat down twice in the second hour and the second time I sat down for about forty minutes with three kids and I very nearly took them back, and the only reason I didn't is I'd have had to explain to the nine year old why."
"What got you up?"
"He did," Ada said. "He said, Auntie, is it much further, and I said yes, and he said okay."
They drafted the four lines for two hours and rewrote them eleven times.
Tom's first draft said: WE HAVE FOOD AND WE DO NOT KEEP PEOPLE.
Frankie killed it.
"That's what the first rock says. She's read that. If the second rock says the same thing it's an advertisement and she'll read it as one."
"Then what?"
"Then it has to say something only somebody who knows her could say."
"We don't know her."
"Ada does."
So they asked Ada Kemper, who had refused to ask for anything, what her sister would need to read on a rock.
She thought about it for a long time.
"She'd need to know the children are alive," she said. "That's all. That's the only thing in the world she cares about and she's been going on faith for two weeks and faith runs out."
"Would a name do it?"
"Four names would do it."
"Then that's the first line," Kindra said.
The final draft, cut into a slab by Dee Marchetti on the seventeenth of July two hundred yards from a house with two rifles in it, said:
ADA AND THE 3 ARE FED AND SAFE AND THEY GOT HERE IN 2 DAYS
THERE IS ANOTHER PILE LIKE THIS 1 MILE WEST ON THE ROAD
AND ANOTHER AFTER THAT
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO DECIDE TONIGHT
THE FOOD WILL BE HERE NEXT WEEK AND THE WEEK AFTER
THE BOY ASKED IF IT WAS MUCH FURTHER AND WHEN I SAID YES HE SAID OKAY
Tom fought the last line for forty minutes and lost the vote four to one.
"It's sentimental," he said.
"It's the only line on the rock that proves we've met them," Ada said.
"That's my point. It's an emotional lever and I don't like using one on a woman who's going to be standing alone in a draw making a decision that could get her killed."
"Tom," Kindra said. "She's a mother who let her children go and stayed."
"I know."
"You don't get to protect her from feeling something. That's the whole of what she's got left."
They built four cairns.
One in the draw. One a mile west. One three miles west at the culvert. One at the flats where the road came over the rise, four hundred yards from the big cairn with the cap slab that nobody was allowed to touch.
And Tom made a rule and wrote it in the book and read it out loud to the whole camp on the twenty first of July, because he wanted it to be an institution and not a kindness.
"We're going to restock those four every week," he said. "One person, a different one each time, out and back in two days, forever. Not until she comes. Forever."
"Forever's a long time," Hobby said.
"That's the point."
"Explain it."
Tom stood up.
"Last October a man burned my woodshed and poisoned my spring and I spent four months thinking about nothing but him," he said.
"And the thing that actually beat him wasn't the stone wall and it wasn't the maze and it wasn't the quinzhee. It was that we kept putting four pounds of dried elk in a dead fir tree every week for a child we'd never met and who might not have existed."
The camp was quiet.
"And it took six weeks and it brought us Nell," Tom said, "and Nell brought us Birdy, and Birdy's writing brought us June, and June brought us Cass, and Cass brought us nine people and a barn full of food and four cans of seed. Every single thing this camp has came off that tree."
"So the cairns are the tree," Loreen said.
"The cairns are the tree, and there's going to be four of them and then there's going to be eleven of them, and in ten years there's going to be a chain of rock piles with food in them from here to the Clark Fork, and every one of them is going to have four lines on it,
and that's the only thing this camp is ever going to do that I actually care about."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Then Petey, who was eight now, said, "What if somebody takes it who's bad?"
"Then a bad man gets four pounds of elk," Tom said.
"That's not fair."
"It isn't fair at all, and here's why we do it anyway, and I want every kid here to understand this because you're going to be running these piles when I'm dead."
Tom crouched down to the boy's level. "We cannot tell who's who from four hundred yards. Nobody can. Every single time this family tried, we got it wrong."
"You got Nell right."
"We nearly didn't. I sat in a rockpile for eleven minutes in December deciding whether an eight year old was a trap, and I was about sixty forty."
Tom's voice had gone rough. "So we stopped guessing. We put food where hungry people walk, and we write down where we are, and we let them decide. Some of them will be bad. Most of them won't be anything, they'll just be hungry. And four of them a year will be Nell."
Renna Kemper came on the eleventh of August.
She came alone and it had taken her four days because she had gone the wrong way twice, and when Cass brought her in she was so far past exhausted that she did not recognize her sister for about eleven seconds.
Then she did.
Nobody in the camp watched that. Tom made sure of it, because there are things you do not watch, and he took twenty people to the garden and kept them there for an hour.
She told it that night, sitting up against Ada with a blanket around her.
"I left on the seventh," she said. "I'd been reading that rock every day for three weeks."
"Every day?"
"Twice a day. I took the water haul off Shan when she left, so I went down that draw morning and evening, and I read it every single time." Her voice was thin and strange. "And it kept being there."
"That's why the rule," Tom said quietly.
"What rule?"
"Every week. Forever. Because the thing that works isn't the food, it's that it's still there the next time."
Renna nodded slowly.
"Reese found the first one in the fourth week," she said.
The camp went very still.
"He found it?"
"He found the draw one. Somebody'd been careless with the slab and he went down there because I'd been taking too long."
"What did he do?"
"He read it," Renna said. "And then he sat down on the ground next to it for about two hours and I watched him from the house."
"And then?"
"And then he came back up and he didn't say anything about it, and the next morning the meat was gone out of it and he'd put the slab back."
Ada made a sound.
"He took it?"
"He took it and he never said a word to me or to Dell and he's been going down there himself every four or five days since," Renna said.
"And that's how I got out. Because on the seventh he went down to the draw at four in the afternoon and I walked west on the road while he was sitting at that rock pile eating our food."
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"Renna," Tom said. "Did he know you were going?"
She looked at the fire.
"He left the rifle on the wall," she said.
Tom put both hands over his face.
"He's never once left that rifle anywhere," Renna said. "In fourteen months. It's been on him or in his hand or against the wall between his knees, and on the seventh of August he walked down that draw and left it leaning by the door and he was gone two hours and forty minutes."
"That's not nothing," Kindra said.
"It's not nothing and I don't know what it is and I've walked four days thinking about it," Renna said. "I've been married to him eleven years and I don't know if that was a kindness or if he just forgot."
"Does it matter?"
"Yes," Renna said. "To me it does."
The council met on the fifteenth of August and there were now twenty five people in the camp and the question on the table was Reese Kemper and Dell, and it was the first time the council made a decision that Tom disagreed with and accepted.
He argued for leaving them alone.
"Two men, one working rifle, six rounds or fewer, eleven miles east, no food coming in, no garden," he said. "By November they've got two choices and both of them end with them walking somewhere, and if they walk west they'll walk into four rock piles with writing on them."
"And if they walk west with a rifle?" Loreen said.
"Then we're twenty five and they're two."
"That's the argument you made about the big bend last September," Frankie said. "Wait and they'll be fewer."
"Yes."
"And four people died."
Tom did not answer.
"I'm not scoring a point," Frankie said. "I voted with you last September and I'd vote with you again. I'm saying that's the same argument and we should know it's the same argument."
The drawn seat that quarter was June Cullen.
"Can I ask Renna something?" she said.
"Ask."
They brought her in.
"Renna, if a person walked down that road and stood four hundred yards off and called out, what would Reese do?"
Renna Kemper thought about it for a long time.
"Two months ago he'd have shot at them," she said.
"And now?"
"Now I don't know, and that's the honest answer, and I've been trying to work out for four days whether a man who sits by a rock pile for two hours is a man who's coming round or a man who's giving up."
June nodded slowly.
"Then that's the vote," she said.
"What is?"
"We don't go down there and we don't leave them alone either," June said. "We do the thing this camp does. We put a rock pile on their road with four lines on it, and we put the four lines directly at them, and we let them decide."
Tom sat back.
"That's the third time," he said.
"Third time what?"
"Third time the drawn seat's found the answer," Tom said, "and I'd like it written down that I argued for the wrong thing twice and got outvoted by a thirteen year old, an eleven year old, and a woman who walked eleven miles with a starving baby,
and that the lottery seat is the best idea this camp ever had and it wasn't mine."
They cut that slab in September and it was the hardest thing Dee Marchetti ever wrote and she rewrote it nine times.
It went in the draw, two hundred yards from the house, replacing the second one.
REESE AND DELL