Chapter 19
Tom read the paper four times and then handed it to Kindra without a word, and she read it and handed it to Cass, and Cass read it and sat down.
Nobody spoke for a while.
"It doesn't say his name," Kindra said finally.
"No."
"It says an old man who knows the road."
"There's about four hundred old men in the western United States who know a road," Tom said.
"Tom."
"I know. I'm saying it out loud so somebody in this camp has said it, because everybody at this fire is already nine years ahead of the evidence."
Cass Tunny was twenty five that year. He had a wife and a daughter of three and he had been running the eastern cairn rotation for six years, and he had not said anything in four minutes.
"Say it," Tom said.
"He'd be sixty," Cass said.
"He'd be about sixty."
"And he'd have a right shoulder that doesn't work and a right foot that's been wrong since 2027, and there was a boot in a cairn nine years ago that I saw with my own eyes."
"That's right."
"So he'd be walking with nine people." Cass's jaw worked. "And he wouldn't be carrying, and he'd know it, and he'd hate it every single day, and he'd be doing the only thing he had left, which is telling them where to walk."
Kindra said, quietly, "That's a very specific picture."
"I spent five weeks in a hole with him," Cass said. "It's the only picture there is."
The council met that night and Tom put four things on the table and then did something he had never done in ten years, which was to recuse himself.
"I'm not voting on this," he said.
"Tom."
"I'm not voting on it and I want the reason written down. There is a version of this where a group of nine people is walking east toward us with a man who taught us everything we know,
and there is a version where somebody has worked out exactly what this camp responds to and has put eleven ounces of wheat in a jar."
"And you can't tell which."
"I can't tell which, and worse than that, I want one of them to be true, and I have spent ten years telling everybody here that wanting a thing is the single most dangerous piece of information you can have."
Loreen Tack was seventy one and had been on the council since the first day and she said, "That's the right call and I hate it."
"So do I."
"Then get out of the circle and let us work."
He got out of the circle and sat forty feet away at the second fire with his son, who was nine, and answered questions about wheat for two hours while four people decided.
"Can we grow it?"
"Eleven ounces is about four hundred and eleven feet of row. If every seed takes and nothing dies you get maybe eleven pounds."
"That's nothing."
"That's nothing to eat. That's everything to plant." Tom drew it in the dirt. "Eleven pounds next year is four hundred pounds the year after and four thousand the year after that. That's three years to a wheat field and eleven to bread every day."
"Why don't we already have wheat?"
"Because nobody left us any, and because seed wheat is a thing a person has to have deliberately saved for a decade, and because there's four steps between a wheat field and a loaf that we can't do yet."
"Which steps?"
"Threshing, winnowing, grinding, and leavening." Tom counted them. "We can thresh, because you kids jump on hides. We can winnow, because there's wind. We have no mill and no yeast."
"Can you make a mill?"
"You can make a quern out of two flat stones and about four hundred hours of pecking," Tom said. "Hobby's been talking about it since the fourth year and never had a reason."
"And yeast?"
"Yeast is in the air," Tom said, "and it always has been, and you make it by mixing flour and water and leaving it out and feeding it for eleven days, and if there's ever wheat in this valley again I'll be doing that on about the second afternoon."
The council decided at midnight and Loreen came and got him.
"Four things," she said. "One. Nobody goes west."
"Good."
"Two. The eastern cairns get doubled. Every one from the Clark Fork to the flats gets restocked twice a week instead of once, starting tomorrow."
"That's a lot of walking."
"That's eleven people volunteering in about four seconds," Loreen said. "Three. Camp Three at the big bend goes up now, not in September. Nine people, this week, with the fourth copy of the book."
"And four?"
"Four is the one you're not going to like."
"Say it."
"The wheat goes in the ground in September," Loreen said. "All eleven ounces. At Camp Two, four miles south, in the hills, and not here."
Tom sat down slowly.
"Because if somebody's coming with trucks."
"Because if somebody comes up that road with trucks, the first thing they see is the ranch and the second thing they see is the big garden, and I am not putting the only wheat in Montana in a field beside a road."
"That's right," Tom said.
"I know it's right. I'm telling you because you'd have voted the other way."
"Would I?"
"You'd have wanted it where you could watch it," Loreen said, "and that's exactly why you recused yourself, and it's the smartest thing you've done in four years."
They came in on the nineteenth of September.
It took them five weeks to cover the last forty miles, and the cairn reports came in all through August and September like a slow tide: four pounds gone at the Clark Fork on the eleventh, at the ridge on the sixteenth, at the culvert on the twenty fourth.
By the first of September the whole valley knew they were coming and roughly how fast.
"Four miles a day," Cass said, on the fourth, doing it on his fingers. "That's not nine people walking. Nine people walk eleven."
"Somebody's slow."
"Somebody's very slow, or somebody's being carried, or they're stopping to do something."
On the eleventh of September the runner from the flats cairn came in at a dead run with something in her hand.
It was a second jar.
Empty of seed, this time, and inside it a folded piece of the same actual paper, and on it, in the same ballpoint, a longer message.
It said: WE ARE 9 AND WE WILL BE AT THE PLACE WHERE THE ROAD COMES OVER THE RISE IN 8 DAYS. WE HAVE READ ALL 26. WE WILL COME IN THE OPEN IN DAYLIGHT WITH OUR HANDS OUT AND WE WILL LEAVE WHAT WE HAVE ON THE ROAD. THERE ARE 3 CHILDREN. ONE OF US CANNOT WALK FAR AND WE ARE NOT LEAVING HIM.
Tom read it standing in the middle of the garden with his hands shaking and thirty eight people waiting.
"Eight days," he said.
"That's the nineteenth."
"That's the nineteenth."
Kindra said, "Read the last line again."
He read it again.
One of us cannot walk far and we are not leaving him.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
"That's not him," Tom said.
"Tom."
"That is not necessarily him and I want everybody to stop before we build eight days of a story that doesn't survive contact."
"Nobody's building anything," Loreen said.
"Everybody in this camp is building something. Look at them."
He was right and everybody knew it.
Sofie Thorn was sixteen and she had been six when a man raked her dog, and she had spent four days asking Nell questions she had never asked in ten years.
Oliver was twenty and he had been ten when a woodshed burned and he had told his father, at dinner on the twelfth, that whatever happened on the nineteenth he wanted to be on the perimeter and not at the fence, and Tom had not asked why.
And Nell.
Nell had not said one word about it in eight days.
Tom found her on the seventeenth at the tanning pits, alone, working a hide over a beam with a drawknife she had made herself, and he sat down eleven feet away and did not say anything for about four minutes.
"You're going to ask me if I'm all right," she said.
"No."
"Then what?"
"I'm going to ask you what you want to happen on the nineteenth."
Nell kept scraping.
"That's worse," she said.
"I know."
She worked the hide for a while.
"I've thought about it four hundred times in ten years," she said. "Every version. Him walking up that road. Him dead nine years ago in the timber somewhere. Him at the dams being the man who counts."
"And?"
"And in about half of them I'm glad and in about half of them I want to put a knife in him, and I've stopped trying to work out which one's real, because I think they both are and they always will be."
Tom nodded slowly.
"That's the most honest thing anybody's said about him in ten years," he said.
"Here's what I actually want." She stopped scraping. "I want him to be a person who walks up a road and stands at a fence with his hands out and gets looked at by thirty eight people who all know exactly what he did."
"Why?"
"Because he spent five months trying to make us come out and stand in the open," Nell said, "and if he's alive, then the last thing left is for him to do it."
They spent eight days preparing and Tom ran it the way he had run everything since the second of February a decade earlier, which was on the assumption that the best case was a story and the worst case was arithmetic.
He built the meeting ground at the top of the rise, four hundred yards from the ranch buildings, in the open.
"In the open?" Frankie said. "You?"
"In the open, with a fence line and four hundred yards of cleared ground on the west side of it that we cut this week."
"Why on earth?"
"Because nine people coming up a road want to be seen," Tom said, "and because if I put them in cover I can't count them, and because every single good thing that's ever happened to this camp happened at a fence at forty feet in daylight."
He did the rest of it cold.
Thirty eight people. Eleven at the meeting ground, all of them adults, all of them unarmed and visible. Four on the perimeter with rifles, out of sight, under Oliver, with orders that Tom made him repeat back four times.
Everybody else, every child, every person over sixty, four miles south at Camp Two, gone since the seventeenth.
That was the fight of the week and Tom won it by refusing to discuss it.
"It's nine people and three of them are children," Kindra said.