Chapter 17 #4
RENNA IS HERE AND SHE IS ALIVE AND FED AND SO ARE ADA AND THE 3
WE ARE 25 AND WE HAVE A GARDEN AND A FORGE AND NOBODY HERE CARRIES A RIFLE TO EAT
IF YOU COME WEST YOU COME IN THE OPEN WITH YOUR HANDS OUT AND YOU LEAVE THE RIFLE ON THE ROAD
THAT IS THE WHOLE PRICE AND THERE IS NOT ANOTHER ONE
They never came.
That was the part Tom did not expect and it bothered him for two years.
The cairn in the draw was restocked eleven times that autumn and the food kept going and the slab stayed where it was, and on the fourth restock in October the runner reported that somebody had cut four words into the bottom edge of the slab with a knife, badly.
The words were: NOT YET.
Nothing else ever came.
In April of the following year a runner found the big bend house empty with the door open and the rack down and no bodies and no note and both rifles gone, and no tracks worth reading after a winter.
Tom wrote in the book: BIG BEND ABANDONED SOMETIME WINTER. 2 MEN UNACCOUNTED. NOT YET STILL CUT IN THE SLAB. LEAVE THE PILE.
They left the pile.
The baby came on the fourth of October at two in the morning and it took nineteen hours and Loreen Tack ran all of it.
Tom was not allowed in for the first eleven hours, which was Kindra's decision and not Loreen's, and he spent them splitting wood by lamplight until Hobby came and took the axe away from him.
"You've split about a third of a cord."
"I know."
"It's two in the morning."
"I know."
"Thorn, sit down."
He sat down.
"It's going to be all right," Hobby said.
"You don't know that."
"No," Hobby said. "I don't. Sit down anyway."
It was a boy and he was small and loud and entirely healthy, and Kindra Thorn lost more blood than Loreen liked and stopped losing it before it became the other thing,
and at nine in the evening on the fourth of October Tom sat on the ground in a half dug shelter in the creek bottom and held his fourth child.
"What's his name?" McKenzie said, from the doorway.
Tom had not thought about it once in eight months. He had a superstition about it and had never said so to anybody.
He looked at Kindra.
"You pick," she said. "I did the last nineteen hours."
Tom looked down at a baby who had been born fourteen months after the lights went out, in a camp of twenty five people with a forge and a garden and a book, on ground his mother had chosen because the water ran right.
"Charter," he said.
Kindra started to laugh and then had to stop because it hurt.
"You cannot name a baby Charter."
"Chip's a nickname. His name was something else and none of us ever asked him, and that's a thing I'm going to regret for the rest of my life."
"So you're naming him after a surname."
"I'm naming him after the only man who walked into my yard and insulted my wife inside of ninety seconds and then died uphill on purpose," Tom said. "And I'd like somebody in this valley to have to say that name out loud every day for the next eighty years."
Kindra looked at the baby for a while.
"Charter Thorn," she said.
"It's a terrible name."
"It's a completely terrible name and I'm not going to fight you about it," she said, "because in forty years somebody's going to ask him why he's called that, and he's going to get to tell them."
Winter came on the second of November and it was easy.
That was the word Tom used at the fire on the solstice and he used it deliberately, and eleven people objected to it and he held his ground.
"I know what it cost," he said. "I know Frankie's hands are wrecked and I know we've all been cold since the ninth and I know we lost the four hens to a marten in October and that's a real loss."
"Then don't say easy," Frankie said.
"I'm going to say it and I'll say why."
He stood up.
"Two years ago on this night I was in a cabin with five people and eleven cords of wood and I thought I'd won," he said. "And in nine weeks I had no woodshed, no spring, no weir, no cache, and a man had raked my dog and stacked my traps in a pot to show me he could."
Nobody said anything.
"One year ago on this night I was in a creek bottom with nineteen people who'd met six months before and I could not have told you whether any of us would be alive in March."
"And tonight?"
"Tonight there's twenty five of us and nine hundred pounds of squash in a barn loft and four thousand parsnip seeds in a jar and a baby that's eleven weeks old and a book with two hundred pages in it."
He sat down.
"That's easy," he said. "That's what easy is. It's not comfortable and it never will be, and nobody in this valley is ever going to be comfortable again as long as any of us is alive. But it's easy, because for the first time since the lights went out,
nothing that happens this winter is going to be a surprise."
He was wrong about that.
He was wrong about it on the ninth of February, at four in the morning, when Shyla stood up off the hides in the big shelter and went to the entrance tunnel and put her nose at the crack and her hackles came up from the shoulders to the tail and she did not make a sound.
Tom was on his feet with the GP100 before he was properly awake, and every single person in that shelter was moving in eleven seconds, because the drill had never once lapsed in twenty two months.
"Positions," he said. "Everybody. Now."
And from outside, forty feet away in the snow, a voice that nobody in that camp had ever heard before called out, very quietly, in the dark:
"Hello the camp. There's four of us and one of us is hurt and we come from the west."