Chapter 20 #3
"A strategy is a thing you do because of what you expect the other fella to do," he said.
"I ran this valley on strategy for two years. I buried food in four places and I built a stone wall nobody could see and I walked away from my own house at four in the morning and let it burn. Every single one of those was correct and I'd do all of them again."
"And?"
"And none of them ever changed one single person," Tom said.
"Not one. In eleven years, every human being who ever joined this camp came because somebody left something on a rock with a number on it. Not because we hid well. Because we told the truth about how many we were to somebody who had no reason to believe it."
Alder stood at forty feet with his board under his arm.
"You've got fifty one people," he said.
"Fifty one."
"And a garden I can see and a barn and a forge and something at four miles south that I couldn't see but I know is there because your water path's wrong on the fourth day."
Tom laughed out loud, once.
"Is it."
"Everybody's water path is wrong on the fourth day," Alder said. "That's the whole of what I do. Nobody can run a rotation for four days without somebody being in a hurry."
"That's fair."
"So tell me what you think happens now."
"I think you walk back to that ridge and you write fifty one on your board," Tom said, "and then you walk four hundred miles west and you tell a man at a dam about a settlement in Montana with fifty one people and a wheat field and a forge and a book,
and then in October there's four trucks on that road."
"That's what happens."
"That's what happens," Tom said, "unless we do the other thing."
"Which is?"
"Which is that you come in and eat something and stay four days and we show you every single thing we have," Tom said, "including the book and including the fifty one settlements and including the eleven entries about your trucks,
and then you go home and you write down whatever you decide to write down."
Kindra, from eleven feet away, said nothing at all, which was how Tom knew she had seen it coming.
Alder said, "That's insane."
"Probably."
"You'd show me your stores."
"Every one."
"Your caches."
"There are nineteen of them and I'll walk you to all nineteen."
"Mister, I have done this in eleven places and I have never once been shown a cache," Alder said. "People lie to me about food the way other people breathe. It's the most predictable thing in the world."
"I know."
"So why?"
And Tom Thorn said the thing he had been building toward since four in the morning.
"Because I don't think you know what you've been doing," he said.
The silence went out across forty feet of cleared ground.
"Say that again," Alder said.
"You count a settlement and you come down and you make a real offer and it's a true offer," Tom said. "There's a doctor. There's power. There's penicillin and there's a school. Every word of it's true and I've had it from four separate people and I believe all of it."
"Then what's the complaint?"
"The complaint is Wilbur," Tom said.
Alder went absolutely still.
"Twenty six taken in September," Tom said. "Nine left behind. And in May of the following year there were two, and one of them was a boy of about fourteen who wasn't right, and they'd eaten the seed in February and they were living on cattails."
"That's a lie."
"That's a sworn account from a man who sat with them for eleven days," Tom said, "and who then walked forty miles back to your dam and found a woman named Dorothy Yeoh, whose son was on your September list, and told her, and she called him a liar too."
Alder's jaw had gone tight.
"And she went and looked," Tom said. "Eleven days each way. And she found two people."
"Dorothy Yeoh."
"You remember her."
"I signed her," Alder said. "Her and her boy. July, three years back. She was on the Almira truck."
"She never got on it."
"No," Alder said slowly. "She didn't. And I put it down as changed her mind, because about one in eleven change their mind and you can't do anything about that."
"Is that what you wrote?"
"That's what I wrote."
"How many have you written that for?"
Alder did not answer.
"Say the number," Tom said. "You'll know it. You're a man with a board."
"Forty one," Alder said.
Tom let it sit for four seconds.
"Forty one people changed their minds," he said, "and you never once asked one of them why."
Alder came in.
That was the thing Tom had not actually expected, and afterward he admitted it at the fire: he had run four versions of that conversation in the rocks and in every one of them the man walked away.
He stayed nine days.
He would not sleep inside a shelter and he would not eat more than he had brought for the first two days, and on the third day Kindra put a bowl in front of him and sat down across from him and said, "You're doing arithmetic about whether eating my food obligates you."
"Yes."
"It doesn't. And I want to tell you the exact rule, because it's a rule in a book and it's older than half the people in this camp."
She pushed the bowl an inch closer. "Nobody in this valley owes anything for food. Not work, not information, not staying. If you eat that and walk west tomorrow and bring four trucks in October, you'll still have been fed today."
"Why?"
"Because the moment food costs something, it stops working," Kindra said. "We learned that from a tree."
He ate it.
They showed him everything, and Tom ran it himself, and it took the whole nine days.
The gardens, all three. The wheat, which was four hundred and eleven pounds that year out of eleven ounces three seasons earlier, and which Alder stood at the edge of for a long time without saying anything.
The forge under its roof with the smoke trench, and Hobby Nils, sixty two, with his ruined hands, directing a nineteen year old at the anvil.
The quern, re-pecked four times, grinding.
The nineteen caches, every one, and Tom walked him to each and let him look in.
The tanning pits and the eleven year old cottonwood leather and the pump seals cut from it. The cisterns. The four water routes. The screened forge roof. The second exits on every shelter, which Alder crawled into and came out of and did not comment on for two days.
And on the seventh day, the book.
Four copies. Six hundred and eleven pages in the main one by then, bound in cedar boards with sinew, twenty three years of planting dates and frost dates and yields and failures and methods and eleven pages in Kindra's hand about wounds.
And in the front of it, before all of it, four lines and then eleven pages in a heavier hand that was going shaky at the edges.
Alder read the front matter three times.
"Who wrote this?"
"I did."
"When?"
"I started it eleven years ago in January and I've added to it every winter since and I'm forty six and I expect I'll be adding to it when I die."
Alder read it again.
"If you find yourself counting who is worth feeding then you are holding this book wrong and it is not yours anymore," he said.
"That's the fourth line."
"Who's it for?"
"Whoever's holding it in eighty years," Tom said. "Which isn't me and isn't my children, probably, and that's exactly why it's there."
Alder closed the book.
"You wrote that about me," he said.
"I wrote it eleven years ago about myself," Tom said.
"I'd never heard your name. I wrote it because I had just realized that everything else in that book is a method and methods go where they're pointed, and that I was going to die, and that a man could read the whole thing and build something monstrous and be following it correctly."
"And you think that's what I did."
"I think somebody at that dam built something out of good methods and pointed it at efficiency," Tom said, "and I think you're the man who carries it, and I think you have never once in four years gone back in May."
Alder did not say anything.
"Have you?" Tom said.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because there's always another settlement," Alder said. "Because I'm one man with four men and a truck and there's fifty places between the Cascades and the Bitterroot, and every single week I'm not out is a week somebody doesn't get a doctor."
"That's a real answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
"I know," Tom said. "That's what makes it the bad kind."
On the eighth night, Alder asked to see the record.
Sima Hale brought it out: fifty one settlements, in her handwriting, four years' worth of a dying man's memory.
He sat with it for six hours by lamplight and did not speak, and at about two in the morning Tom came and sat down eleven feet away and said nothing for a long time.
"Eleven of these are mine," Alder said, eventually.
"Eleven of them are places you took people out of."
"He's got the dates right." The man's voice was strange. "He's got the numbers right. Wilbur's right, twenty six and nine, I remember writing it."
"And the May entries?"
Alder turned a page.
"Almira. Nineteen taken, eleven left." He read it. "Four alive the following June."
"That's Dorothy's."
"Creston. Thirty one taken, four left. He wrote: NOBODY WHEN I WALKED THROUGH IN AUGUST. HOUSE OPEN. NO BODIES." Alder put the page down. "Four people. I left four people in Creston and I wrote down that they declined."
"Did they decline?"
"They declined," Alder said. "That's the part I can't get around. Every single person who stayed, stayed. Nobody was left. They chose, and I wrote down what they chose, and I drove away."
"With their seed."
Alder looked up.
"What?"
"You took half the food and all the seed," Tom said. "That's in the account four separate times. Half the food and the seed and the guns and everybody under forty."
"We take a share of the seed."
"Half."
"Half, because it's got to grow at the dam and there's four hundred people there."
"And what does a settlement of four people do in April with no seed?"
Alder sat with the book open in his lap.
"They were four people," he said. "They couldn't have farmed it anyway."
"No," Tom said. "That's true. And that's the exact sentence, isn't it. That's the thing."
"What thing?"