Chapter 20 #4
"They couldn't have farmed it anyway." Tom leaned forward. "That's true and it's the reason and it's also the whole of what's wrong, and I've had eleven years to find the words and the person who found them was a woman of twenty who'd had a toe freeze off."
"What did she say?"
"She said: being willing to die yourself doesn't buy you the right to sort people. It just means you were consistent."
Alder did not say anything.
"And the man she said it to was the worst man in this valley," Tom said, "and he lay on a litter for four years afterward telling fifty one settlements to a girl with good handwriting, because she'd given him the word for what he'd done."
"Which was?"
"Sorting," Tom said. "He'd been calling it arithmetic for nine years."
Alder left on the ninth day.
He left at six in the morning and Tom walked him to the top of the rise, to the big cairn with the cap slab that nobody in that valley had been permitted to touch in fourteen years.
They stopped at it.
"Is he under this?" Alder said.
"No. He's up the creek under a wall Cass built. This one's older. He put it here himself in the ninth year and cut four lines on it and one of them says I am not under this, do not dig."
Alder read them.
"The old man was right about you and wrong about me and that is the whole account," he said.
"That's the last line he ever cut with his own hands."
"Who was the old man?"
"His name was Chip Charter and he walked into my yard fourteen years ago and insulted my wife inside ninety seconds and I nearly shot him," Tom said, "and then eleven days later five men killed him with a hatchet in a gulch a mile and a quarter from my house,
and he ran uphill away from us on purpose the whole way, breaking branches so they'd follow him."
"Why?"
"To buy us a day."
Alder looked at the cairn.
"And the man with the hatchet built him a monument."
"The man with the hatchet built him four of them," Tom said, "and put his own last possession at the bottom of this one and then went west and spent four years dictating a document that might be the most valuable object in North America,
and I have had fourteen years and I still cannot tell you what he was."
"That's not much of an ending."
"No," Tom said. "It isn't."
Alder shifted the pack on his shoulders.
"You know what I'm going to do," he said.
"I've got no idea what you're going to do, and I want to say that plainly, because I have spent nine days being very careful not to ask."
"Why not?"
"Because a man who's been asked for something spends the walk home defending himself," Tom said, "and a man who hasn't spends it thinking."
Alder almost smiled.
"He taught you that."
"No," Tom said. "My wife did. In about the fourth year."
They stood at the cairn for a minute.
"I'll tell you what I know," Alder said. "I'm going to write fifty one on my board, because it's true and because I've never written a false number in four years and I'm not starting."
"All right."
"And I'm going to put in the column next to it that this settlement declines, because that's true too."
"Also all right."
"And then there's a man named Renner who runs the shop and a woman named Aguilar who's the doctor, and there's about four hundred people, and there's going to be a meeting."
"About what?"
Alder looked west down the road.
"About whether anybody's been back in May," he said.
He went four steps and stopped.
"There's one more thing and I want to ask it properly," he said. "The record. Fifty one settlements."
"Yes."
"I'd like a copy."
Tom did not answer for a moment.
"That's the whole thing, isn't it," he said. "That's the actual question and it's taken nine days to get to it."
"Yes."
"Because in the wrong hands that document is a route map for four trucks and eleven men, and in the right hands it's the only list of the living between here and the ocean."
"Yes."
"And you want me to decide which you are."
"No," Alder said. "I want you to decide what you are. I already know what I am and I've had nine days of being extremely uncomfortable about it."
Tom Thorn stood at a cairn on a road in Montana on the seventh of August in the fourteenth year and thought about a dead fir with four pounds of dried elk in it and a child he had watched for eleven minutes in a snow shelter before deciding.
Sixty forty. That was what it had been. He had never told anybody that.
"Sima finished the copy on Tuesday," he said.
Alder's head came round.
"You already made it."
"We made it on the second day," Tom said. "Four people worked on it for six days and it's in a rawhide wrap in that pack you've been carrying since Wednesday, underneath the food, and I've been waiting all week to find out whether you'd ask."
"And if I hadn't?"
"Then you'd have found it in four days somewhere past the Clark Fork," Tom said, "and you'd have had four hundred miles to think about the fact that we gave it to you without being asked and without knowing what you'd do."
Alder stood in the road with his hand on his pack strap.
"You people are out of your minds," he said.
"We've been told."
"Fourteen years and this is what you've built. You give away your census to the man with the trucks."
"Fourteen years and this is what we've built," Tom agreed. "Fifty one people, three camps, a wheat field, a forge, four copies of a book, and twenty six rock piles on a road with the number on them."
"And that's the whole of it?"
"That's the whole of it, and I'll tell you the part that actually matters and then you should go, because you've got four hundred miles."
"Go ahead."
"Not one of those fifty one people came here because we were strong," Tom said.
"Every single one came because somebody left something where a hungry person walks and put a true number on it. And I have tried for fourteen years to find a better way and there isn't one,
and the reason I'm giving you that book is that it's the only thing I've got left to leave where a hungry person walks."
Alder Mesik walked west on the seventh of August and the Clark Fork cairn reported the pack gone on the eleventh and the ridge pile on the fourteenth, and then there was nothing for four months.
In December, the easternmost cairn reported a jar.
Sealed glass, rubber ring, metal clamp. Inside it, on actual paper, in a hand nobody recognized:
THERE WAS A MEETING. IT TOOK 9 WEEKS. THE INTAKE IS CHANGED.
NOBODY IS LEFT NOW. IF A SETTLEMENT COMES IT COMES WHOLE OR IT DOES NOT COME.
WE HAVE BEEN BACK TO WILBUR. THERE WAS NOBODY. WE HAVE BEEN BACK TO ALMIRA AND THERE WERE 4 AND THEY ARE HERE NOW.
THE RECORD IS COPIED 4 TIMES AND ONE IS AT THE DAM AND ONE IS AT ALMIRA AND ONE IS GOING SOUTH.
WE ARE 411.
WE ARE TELLING YOU HOW MANY WE ARE.
Tom Thorn read it out loud at the fire to fifty one people on the nineteenth of December.
Then he sat down on the log and did not say anything for a while, and Kindra put her hand on the back of his neck, and McKenzie, who was twenty seven and who had been writing the book since she was twelve, took the paper out of her father's hand and read it again to herself.
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"Where does this go? The book, or the record?"
Tom looked at the fire for a long moment.
"Neither," he said. "Cut it on a slab."
"Which one?"
"All of them," Tom said. "Twenty six. Every cairn on that road. It's four hundred hours and it'll take Dee and Sima until August and I don't care."
"What does it say?"
"It says the same thing it's always said," Tom said. "It says somebody's counting, and it isn't us, and they've told us how many they are."