Chapter 20
They gave him the morning, and then they gave him the winter, and it turned out to be the most productive winter either camp ever had.
Wallace Wingman did not die in September and he did not die in October.
Kindra got eleven pounds on him by the first of November, on the ration she had built for a starving child in a snow shelter a decade earlier, and by December he could sit up for four hours at a stretch and use his left hand, and the thing that came back with the weight was not health.
It was the map.
That was Hobby's word for it and it stuck.
"He's got a map in his head," the old man said, in the second week of October, coming back from the shelter where they had put him. "Nine hundred miles of it. Every settlement, every road, every bridge that's out, and he's been lying on his back for fifteen months going over it."
"Can he draw it?"
"He can't hold a nail. He can talk."
So they wrote it down.
That became the winter's work and it consumed four people for five months, and it was, in Tom's judgment afterward, the single most valuable thing that ever happened in that valley.
Sima Hale ran it. She was twenty four by then and she had walked from Spokane herself at fourteen, and she had been copying the book for nine years, and she had the handwriting of a woman who had never once been in a hurry.
She sat with Wallace Wingman four hours a day, every day, from the eleventh of October to the nineteenth of March.
"Start at the dam," she said, the first morning.
"That's the wrong place to start."
"Why?"
"Because you'll get the dam and nothing else, and then in June somebody'll say what about the road and I'll be dead." He was propped on four hides with his good arm across his chest. "Start at the Idaho line and work west. That's the order somebody'd walk it."
They went settlement by settlement.
Fifty one of them.
Not all of them alive. About half were places Wingman had walked through and found empty, and he made Sima write those down too, with the dates, and when she asked why he said, "Because an empty house with a roof is worth four hundred miles of forest to somebody walking."
For each one: how many people when he saw it, what they had, where the water was, whether there was a stove, whether the ground would grow anything, and what had happened to them.
And for eleven of them: what Alder's list had done.
"Wilbur," he said, on the fourth day. "September of the year before last. Twenty six taken, nine left. When I got back in May there were two."
"Names?"
"I don't."
"Wallace."
"I don't have their names," he said. "I sat with them for eleven days and I never asked and I have thought about that about four hundred times."
Sima wrote: WILBUR. 35 PEOPLE. 26 TAKEN SEPT. 9 LEFT. 2 ALIVE IN MAY. NAMES NOT RECORDED.
And then, because she had been raised in a camp where you wrote down the failures, she wrote underneath it: HE DID NOT ASK. HE SAYS HE SHOULD HAVE.
By January the thing had a shape and Tom started coming to the sessions.
He came in the afternoons, after the wood, and he sat at the back and mostly listened, and it took him three weeks to work out that what they were building was not a map at all.
"It's a census," he said, on the ninth of January.
Sima looked up. "What?"
"It's not a map. It's a list of everybody left between here and the Columbia, and what's been done to them."
"So?"
"So that's the same thing Alder's got."
The shelter went very quiet.
Wingman said, "Say the rest of it."
"There are two documents in the Northwest," Tom said slowly. "There's a clipboard at Grand Coulee with fifty settlements on it and how many can work. And there's a book in this shelter with fifty one settlements in it and where the water is."
"And?"
"And they're the same information," Tom said, "and the only difference in the entire world is what the person holding it intends to do."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"That's the whole thing," Kindra said, from the doorway. "That's what I've been trying to say since September and couldn't."
"Say it now."
"We've spent ten years being the people who put food on rocks," she said. "And we've just built a document that would let somebody run this valley like a farm, and it's sitting in a shelter, and in forty years somebody's going to inherit it who isn't any of us."
Tom put his head back against the pole.
"That's the thing that frightens me," he said, "and it isn't Alder."
"I know."
"It's that we're going to die and the book's going to outlive us and there's nothing in it that says what it's for."
Wallace Wingman said, "Then write that in it."
Everybody turned.
"Write what?"
"Write what it's for." The old man's voice was down to almost nothing and he had to go four words at a time. "Thorn, I have watched you run this valley for ten years off a book of bean dates and frost dates and how deep to put the debris. And there's not one line in it that says why."
"There doesn't need to be."
"There does when you're dead," Wingman said. "Every single thing in that book is a method and methods don't have a direction. Somebody can read your census and your cairn instructions and your ration tables and build exactly what Alder built, and they'd be following it correctly."
Tom sat with that for four days.
He came back on the thirteenth and said, "You're right and I've been wrong for ten years."
"About what?"
"I thought writing down what we did was enough." He sat down on the hide. "I thought if the methods survived, the thing survived. And it doesn't, because a method is a tool and a tool goes where it's pointed."
"So what do you do?"
"I don't know yet," Tom said. "But I know I've got about four years to work it out, and I'm forty five, and Kenz is twenty three and she's the one who'll be holding it."
He started it that winter and it took him the rest of his life and he never finished it.
It went in the front of the book, before the planting dates, before the frost tables, before the four hundred pages of method, and it was the only part of it he wrote in his own hand rather than dictating.
It started with four lines and by the time he died there were eleven pages.
The first four lines, written on the nineteenth of January in a shelter in a creek bottom in Montana, said:
THIS BOOK WILL OUTLIVE EVERYBODY WHO WROTE IT
EVERYTHING IN IT IS A TOOL AND TOOLS GO WHERE THEY ARE POINTED
WE POINTED THEM AT KEEPING PEOPLE
NOT AT COUNTING THEM
IF YOU FIND YOURSELF COUNTING WHO IS WORTH FEEDING THEN YOU ARE HOLDING THIS BOOK WRONG AND IT IS NOT YOURS ANYMORE
The winter did four other things and Tom made sure every one of them got done, because he had learned in nine years that a camp which spends a whole season on one big frightening question comes out of it having forgotten how to grow beans.
They built the quern.
Hobby Nils was fifty nine and his hands had gone in the seventh year and he directed it rather than doing it, and Sima and a nineteen year old named Pel did the pecking.
It took four hundred and eleven hours between November and March.
Two granite rounds, twenty two inches across, the bottom one with a spindle set in dead center and a shallow dish worked into the face, the top one with a feed hole and a handle socket and a face pecked with radiating furrows that got shallower toward the rim.
"Why the furrows?" Charter asked. He was ten that winter.
"Because the grain has to travel," Hobby said. "It goes in the middle and it comes out the edge, and the furrows are a road. Flat stones don't grind, they just mash and clog."
"How do you know how deep?"
"I don't. That's why we're going to grind eleven pounds of wheat through it in September and then take it apart and re-peck it four times over two years."
They tested it on beans in February and it worked badly and then worked.
They got a coarse meal on the fourth attempt and a real flour on the ninth, and on the eleventh of February, Frankie Pell made four flatbreads out of bean flour and water and cooked them on a hot stone, and thirty eight people each got a piece about the size of two fingers.
Nobody said anything for four minutes, which by then was a tradition older than half the people in the camp.
"That's not bread," Loreen Tack said, seventy two years old, chewing.
"It's not bread."
"It's a beginning of bread."
The wheat came up.
It had gone in the ground at Camp Two on the fourth of September, four hundred and eleven feet of row, and it came through the winter under snow the way winter wheat is supposed to, and it greened up on the nineteenth of April.
Tom walked four miles south to look at it and stood at the edge of the plot for a long time.
"How much?" he asked.
Dee Marchetti, who was fifty two and who had spoken her first words in the sixth year and used them sparingly ever since, said, "Nine pounds. Maybe eleven."
"Out of eleven ounces."
"Out of eleven ounces."
"And next year?"
"Next year that's four hundred pounds of seed," Dee said, "and the year after that it's four thousand and we run out of ground before we run out of wheat."
They ran the drill.
That was the fourth thing and Tom made it the biggest single change since the Three Camps, and it came out of one sentence Wingman had said in October and would not stop saying.
"He counts for two days from a ridge before he comes down."
So Tom spent the winter working out what a man on a ridge would see.
He did it the way he had done everything since the first autumn, which was to go and stand in the enemy's place.
In November he climbed every ridge within four miles of all three camps and lay on each one for a full day with Oliver and Cass, and they wrote down everything visible from each.
The results were bad.
"From the north bench you can see the main garden, the ranch buildings, the barn, the creek crossing, and about eleven of the shelter roofs," Oliver reported. "In a day you'd get a count within four people."
"And Camp Two?"