Chapter 19 #2
"It's nine people who say they are nine people, and in two hundred and eleven months I have learned exactly one thing and it is that everything good in this world arrives at a fence and everything bad arrives at a fence too, and they look identical at four hundred yards."
"And if it's them?"
"If it's them, then the kids come back on the twentieth and they'll have missed one day."
"And if it's not?"
"Then we're eleven adults in the open and twenty seven people are four miles away in the hills," Tom said, "and I'll take that trade every single time for the rest of my life."
They came at eleven in the morning on the nineteenth of September.
Cass saw them first from the bench, and he came down and did not run, and said, "Nine. Three small. On the road. Half a mile."
"Speed?"
"Slow."
"How slow?"
"They're stopping every four hundred yards."
Tom went up on the rise and stood in the open where they could see him and waited, and Kindra stood beside him, and Loreen Tack, seventy one, refused to sit and stood on his other side with her hand on a fence post.
They came up the road.
At four hundred yards Tom could see that the report was right and that they were in bad shape, and at three hundred he could see that one of them was being helped, and at two hundred he could see the shape of it.
Eight people walking. One being carried on a litter made of two poles and a hide by two men who traded off every hundred feet.
They stopped at the fence at forty feet, which was the exact distance Tom would have picked, and which told him that they had read all twenty six slabs and had thought hard about every word.
The woman in front put her hands out from her sides.
"Hello the camp," she said. "There's nine of us. We've got one rifle and it's on the road four hundred yards back with everything else we own, and you can have all of it, and we've been walking since June of last year."
"What's your name?"
"Dorothy Yeoh."
"Where from?"
"Chelan, originally. Then the dam, for two years. Then not the dam."
Tom felt everything in his chest tighten.
"You came from the dam."
"We left the dam in June of last year," Dorothy Yeoh said, "and it took us fifteen months because of him."
And she stepped aside.
The litter came forward and the two men set it down on the road at forty feet, carefully, the way you set down something that hurts when it jars.
Tom Thorn looked down at the man on it.
He was not sixty. He looked eighty. He was down to nothing, wasted to the bone through the shoulders and face, with a beard gone entirely white and a right arm that lay across his chest in a way that said it had not moved on its own in years.
His right foot was gone below the ankle and the stump was bound in hide.
He looked up at Tom with pale grey eyes that had not changed at all.
"Thorn," he said.
Nobody on that rise moved.
"You're not dead," Tom said.
"I've been working on it." Wallace Wingman's voice was a ruin, and it came out about four words at a time. "Turns out I'm bad at that too."
"You wrote that you weren't coming back."
"I wasn't."
"Then what is this?"
Wingman's head moved a fraction, toward the eight people standing on the road behind him.
"They wouldn't go without me," he said, "and I couldn't talk them out of it, and I have been trying for fifteen months."
Dorothy Yeoh said, "He's been trying for fifteen months, and four of us have carried him nine hundred miles, and I'd do it again, and I want to say something before anybody says anything else."
"Go ahead."
"I know what he is." Her voice was hard. "He told us. All of it. Every name. He told us about the dog and the spring and the woodshed and about a man in a gulch with a hatchet, in a grain elevator in Idaho in January, to nine people who were carrying him."
"Why?"
"Because we asked him what he'd done," Dorothy said, "and he told us, and then he said, and now you can put me down wherever you like."
"And you didn't."
"No."
"Why not?"
Dorothy Yeoh looked at Tom Thorn for a long moment.
"Because we'd have died at the dam," she said, "and he got nine people out of there, and the only thing he'd take for it was that we let him stop."
And then, from behind Tom, a voice said:
"Look at me."
Nell came through the line.
She was twenty and she was tall and she walked with the small hitch that ten years without a toe had built into her, and she came to the fence and stood four feet from a man lying on a litter on a road.
Wallace Wingman turned his head.
Everything stopped.
"Mouse," he said.
"No," Nell said.
And then she said, "Say it again and say it right."
The old man on the litter did not answer for a long moment.
His mouth worked twice with nothing coming out of it, and Tom watched a face that had not changed expression in ten years of stories fail entirely.
"I don't know it," Wingman said.
"Yes you do."
"I never did."
"You wrote it on a board in October," Nell said. "You wrote it and I asked you what it said and you told me it was my name, and I said that's not my name, and you said it is here."
The silence went on.
"Nell," he said.
"Say the whole thing."
"Nell." His voice broke on the second one. "I don't know the rest of it. I never knew the rest of it. You came into that house in June and the first ones had been calling you Mouse for two months and nobody ever said another one."
"You could have asked."
"Yes."
"Four months. You asked me four hundred questions in four months and every single one of them was about what a scared person would do." Nell's voice did not rise at all. "And you never once asked me what I was called."
"No."
"Why?"
Wallace Wingman looked at the sky for a while.
"Because a name is a thing you give a person," he said, "and I wasn't running a house full of people. I was running a house full of costs."
Nobody moved.
"And you were the cheapest one in it," he said, "and you were the only one who ever told me the truth about anything, and I worked out in about September that you were worth more to me than nine adults, and I never once told you that either."
"I know," Nell said. "I read the bark."
"What bark?"
"She is my compass." Nell's chin was absolutely steady. "You wrote it on a scrap and threw it in a corner and I picked it up in November and drew a map on the other side of it and gave it to him for Christmas."
Wingman closed his eyes.
"I wondered where that went," he said.
"It nearly got me thrown out of this family," Nell said. "On Christmas Day. They sat at a table for two hours deciding whether an eight year old was a trap, because of four words you wrote to yourself and never thought about again."
"Nell."
"And they decided I wasn't, and they were right, and that's the entire difference between them and you."
The old man on the litter lay very still.
"Yes," he said.
Tom stepped forward then, because he could see Nell's hands, and because he had learned four years earlier that there is a moment in a hard thing where somebody has to change the subject or it goes past where it can come back from.
"Nine people," he said. "Three children. One rifle four hundred yards back on the road."
"That's right," Dorothy Yeoh said.
"Then here's what happens and it happens in this order."
Tom raised his voice so all nine of them could hear it.
"Everybody sits down right here on this ground. Nobody comes through this fence yet. There's water and there's broth coming in about four minutes and you're going to get about a cup each and you're going to hate how little it is."
"We know about that," a man said.
"You know about it?"
"He made us do it," the man said, nodding at the litter. "In Idaho. We came into a place in February where there were four people dead and about eleven hundred pounds of canned goods, and he made us eat a cup of broth a day for six days."
"And did anybody die?"
"No," the man said, "and two of us wanted to kill him about it."
Tom looked down at the litter.
"That's mine," he said. "That's Kindra's. That's the ration she built for a starving child in December of the year the lights went out."
"I know whose it is," Wingman said.
"How?"
"Because June Cullen told Cass and Cass told me in a cut bank in February," the old man said, "and I have used it four times in nine years and it has never once failed."
Tom stood there with that.
"That's a strange thing to be proud of," he said.
"I ain't proud of anything," Wingman said. "I'm telling you what happened to a thing after you did it."
They fed nine people on the road on the nineteenth of September and it took four hours to get through the first stage, and Kindra ran all of it, and Tom stood at the fence the entire time and did not once go through it.
The three children were eight, six, and four.
The eight year old was a boy named Ib and he had walked nine hundred miles and he was the first one to stop being frightened, which happened at about the second hour when Shyla's great grandson, a pale rangy dog named Cutter, came and sat down eleven feet from him and put his chin on his paws.
The four year old had been born at the dam.
That was the detail Tom could not get past for four days afterward. A child born in a place with electric light, who did not remember it.
At three in the afternoon Tom sat down on the ground on his own side of the fence, four feet from the litter, and said, "Tell me about the dam."
"That's a long one."
"I've got four hours and nine people who need to not be walking."
Wallace Wingman turned his head.
"It's real," he said. "That's the first thing and everybody always wants to argue about it. There's power at Grand Coulee. There's about eleven miles of grid and four buildings on it and a machine shop that can turn a shaft."
"How?"
"Because a hydro station is a lump of iron and water, and the pulse took the control systems and the switchyard, and it didn't touch the turbines, and there were four men who'd worked that plant for thirty years and one of them was sixty eight and knew how it had been run in 1952."
"And they got it running."