Chapter 18 #4
He did it at the fire at Camp One with both camps present, because it was the first week of May and both camps came together four times a year and this was one of them.
Thirty eight people.
"Nine years ago," he said, "a man left a hatchet head and a boot and a strip of red cloth at the bottom of a cairn on the flats road, and cut four lines into a cap slab, and I've told most of you that story."
Everybody went quiet.
"Some of you were born after and you've heard it wrong," Tom said. "So here's the true version and then I'm going to tell you what came into the easternmost cairn last month."
He told it plainly.
Wallace Wingman. The raked dog. The note. The woodshed. The spring with a coyote in it. The pot with eleven noisemakers stacked in it. The twelve fires. The morning of the second of February.
And then the other half: the cairn in the dooryard with four lines on it. The bark in the tree. The map with the guard positions. The dead man on the pass. The hay bale wall in the barn with two hundred and eleven pounds of elk behind it and four coffee cans of seed.
"Everything in this camp came off that," he said. "The corn in your bowl came out of a can he put in that barn. The parsnip seed we've grown for nine years came out of four rows I left in the ground in a garden he burned the house next to."
"Was he good or bad?" a child asked.
Tom looked at her for a while.
"Both," he said. "And I've had nine years and I can't get it any finer than that, and I want everybody here to sit with how unsatisfying that is."
"That's not an answer," the child said.
"No."
"Loreen says he was a murderer."
"Loreen's right."
"And Cass says he saved his life."
"Cass is right too," Tom said. "He killed a man I loved with a hatchet. He also gave a fifteen year old boy a rifle and told him to go home and feed people. He starved nine people to eleven days of food and then spent three months robbing a dead man's camp to fill a barn for them.
Every one of those things is true and none of them cancels any of the others out."
Kindra said, from across the fire, "Tell them the rest."
Tom took the bark out of his chest pocket and unfolded it.
"This came into the Clark Fork cairn last month," he said. "It's old. It's been carried a long way by somebody before it got left, and it's his hand, and I've read it about four hundred times in four days."
He read it out loud.
I AM NOT COMING BACK
I HAVE BEEN WEST 4 YEARS AND THERE IS A MAN AT THE DAMS
HE COUNTS BEFORE HE COMES IN
I KNOW WHAT THAT IS BECAUSE I DID IT
IF THE ROCK PILES ARE YOURS THEN YOU DID THE OTHER THING AND IT WORKED
TELL THE MOUSE
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Nell was twenty that year, or nineteen, and nobody had ever settled it, and she was sitting on the far side of the fire with a nine year old asleep against her.
She did not move.
"That's four years ago," Cass said. "At least. That bark's grey through."
"That bark's four years old at least and it's been in somebody's coat," Tom said. "Which means he gave it to somebody going east, and that person carried it, and either they put it in the cairn or they gave it to somebody else who did."
"So he could be dead."
"He's almost certainly dead," Tom said. "He was shot through the shoulder in 2026 and he couldn't carry forty pounds in 2027 and he'd be about sixty now."
"Then why does it matter?"
"Because of the third line," Kindra said.
Everyone looked at her.
"He counts before he comes in. I know what that is because I did it." She was looking at the fire. "That's a man on the far side of the state recognizing something and sending a warning back down a road he never expected anybody to be using."
"And the fourth line?" June said.
Tom folded the bark.
"The fourth line is between him and one person," he said, "and I'm not going to interpret it in front of thirty eight people."
Nell got up and walked around the fire with the sleeping child on her shoulder, and stood in front of Tom, and put her hand out.
He gave her the bark.
She looked at it for a long time, and Tom watched her read it, and watched her read it again.
"He taught me my first word," she said.
"What?"
"Not you. Him." Nell's voice was perfectly level, the way it had been since she was eight.
"He used to draw on the board and say things out loud and I'd watch. And in October of that year he wrote something and I asked what it said and he said, that's your name, Mouse, and I said that's not my name."
"And what did he say?"
"He said, it is here."
She folded the bark and handed it back.
"That's the whole thing," she said. "That's everything he ever was, right there in one sentence. He gave me a name that was a smaller thing than I was and he meant it kindly and he never once understood what he'd done."
Tom put it back in his pocket.
"And then a man gave me a spoon with a mouse on it," Nell said, "and told me it was the most effective survival strategy on the mountain."
"I remember."
"I've still got it."
"I know you have."
"I use it every day," Nell said. "And the reason I tell people that story is not the spoon. It's that somebody bothered to think about it for two weeks first."
The council met on the ninth of May about the man at the dams, and they decided four things, and Tom wrote them in the book in his own hand because he wanted his name on them.
One: nothing changes this summer. The gardens go in, the runners run, the cairns get stocked.
Two: Camp Three at the big bend gets built properly, with people in it, before winter. Eleven people volunteered and nine were taken.
Three: a fourth copy of the book gets made and goes east with Camp Three.
Four: the westernmost cairn on the Clark Fork gets a new cap slab.
They cut it in June and it took Dee Marchetti, who was fifty by then and still did not speak, eleven days.
It said:
IF YOU CAME UP THIS ROAD FROM THE WEST THERE IS FOOD IN THIS PILE AND IN 25 MORE GOING EAST
WE ARE 38 AND WE DO NOT KEEP PEOPLE AND WE DO NOT TAKE CHILDREN
IF YOU ARE COMING WITH TRUCKS AND A LIST THEN TURN AROUND
WE HAVE NOTHING YOU CAN DRIVE AWAY WITH
WE HAVE BEEN COUNTED BEFORE
In August of that year, the eleventh cairn east reported that somebody had taken four pounds of elk and left, in its place, a sealed glass jar with a rubber ring and a metal clamp lid.
Inside it were seeds.
Not garden seed. Wheat: eleven ounces of hard red winter wheat, clean, dry, viable, of a kind that nobody in that valley had seen since the world ended.
And tied to the jar with wire, a scrap of paper, actual paper, torn from something, with writing on it in ballpoint pen.
It said: WE ARE 9. WE ARE COMING SLOW. THERE IS AN OLD MAN WITH US WHO SAYS HE KNOWS THIS ROAD.