Epilogue
Sofie Thorn was eighty one years old the summer they came to ask her about the rock piles.
They came up from the Clark Fork in the last week of July, four of them, a woman of about forty and three young people, and they came on foot because most people still came on foot, and they stopped at the fence at forty feet in daylight with their hands out from their sides,
because that was how it was done and had been for ninety years and nobody could have said exactly why anymore.
She had them fed first. That was the rule and it was on the second page.
Then they sat with her under the cottonwoods on the bench above the creek, where the old shelters had been and where there were houses now, four of them,
with real roofs and a well with a pump Hobby Nils's great grandson had cut the leathers for out of bark tanned cottonwood in a pit that had been running continuously since the third year.
"We're making a record," the woman said. "Of the beginning. There's a school at the dam now and they've got four copies of the book but nobody who remembers any of it."
"There's nobody left who remembers any of it."
"You do."
"I was six," Sofie said.
"You were there."
Sofie Thorn looked out at the garden, which was eleven acres that year, and at the wheat beyond it, which was a field and not a plot and had been for sixty years.
"I was six," she said, "and I remember four things clearly and everything else is a story somebody told me, and I want that written at the top of whatever you make, because it matters."
"What are the four things?"
"I remember a dog screaming in the dark."
The young people wrote.
"I remember my mother's hand over my brother's mouth while a woodshed burned, and I remember it because of how hard it was, not because of the fire."
"And the third?"
"I remember timing the boil." Sofie's hands had gone in the last ten years and she folded them in her lap. "That was my job. I was six and I had to say the alphabet twice, slowly, and nobody was allowed to take the pot off until I was finished. Not even my father. Especially not my father."
"Why especially?"
"Because he was the one most likely to be in a hurry," Sofie said, "and because he knew it, and he gave the job to the only person in that cabin who couldn't be argued with."
"And the fourth thing?"
Sofie was quiet for a while.
"The fourth thing is a girl coming out of the snow," she said.
"On the twelfth of December. And my father went out and carried her in and she had a foot that was white to the arch, and my mother said the same four rules about frostbite that I said to a boy at this table three winters ago, in the same order, with the same words."
"Nell."
"Nell." Sofie smiled. "You know the name."
"Everybody knows the name. There's a school at Almira called after her."
"Is there."
"You knew her."
"I shared a loft with her for four years and a camp for sixty," Sofie said.
"She died the winter before last and she was ninety three or ninety four and nobody ever settled it, and she was still teaching until the last autumn. She taught every child in this valley to read for about seventy years and she did it with a stick in the dirt because that's how she was taught in a
snow shelter."
The woman said, "Can I ask about the other one?"
"You may."
"Wingman."
"Everybody asks about Wingman."
"They argue about him at the dam."
"They've argued about him here for a hundred years and they'll argue about him after all of us," Sofie said. "And I'll tell you what my father told a man with a clipboard in the fourteenth year, which is the only honest answer anybody's ever produced."
"What is it?"
"He was both, and it took him fourteen years to get it that fine, and he never got it any finer."
One of the young people, a boy of maybe seventeen, said, "That's not an answer."
"No," Sofie said. "And I want you to sit with how unsatisfying that is, because my father said that too, and it's the most useful thing in the whole book and it isn't written down anywhere in it."
They walked her out to the rise in the late afternoon, slowly, because at eighty one she went slowly and refused to be carried.
The cairn was still there.
Five feet of flat river rock, laid in courses, chinked with smaller stone, with a cap slab on top that somebody had carried from somewhere nobody remembered. It had been re-chinked eleven times in ninety years and the rule had never changed: nobody digs, nobody takes the rock.
The cut lines were worn nearly smooth.
"Can you still read it?" the woman asked.
"I can't see it," Sofie said, "and I know every word."
She put her hand flat on the cap.
"It says: if you are standing here then you came east in the spring like I said. I am not under this, do not dig. I put it here so there would be something on this road that says somebody was here. The old man was right about you and wrong about me and that is the whole account."
Nobody said anything.
"And down there," Sofie said, pointing with her chin down the road, "four hundred yards, is the other one, and that's the one that matters."
They walked her down.
It was smaller and newer, only sixty years old, and it had food in it, because it always had food in it, and it had been restocked twice a week by two people on a rotation since before any of them were born.
The cap slab was legible because it had been recut four times.
WE ARE NOT COUNTING YOU
WE ARE TELLING YOU HOW MANY WE ARE
WE ARE 219
THERE IS FOOD IN THIS PILE AND IN 74 MORE GOING EAST AND 31 GOING WEST
COME IN THE OPEN AND CALL OUT
NOBODY WILL SHOOT YOU
"Two hundred and nineteen," the woman read.
"It was fifty one when my father put the first number on a rock," Sofie said.
"And it was thirty eight before that, and thirty one before that, and the very first one said nineteen, and my father cut it himself with a nail in September of the second year while eleven people stood around and told him he was wasting his time."
"Why did he do it?"
Sofie Thorn stood on a road in Montana in the sun with her hand on a rock pile.
"Because of a tree," she said.
"A tree?"
"There was a dead fir, three hundred yards up a draw from a cabin that burned down ninety three years ago," Sofie said.
"And my father put four pounds of dried elk in the split of it every week for a child he'd never met and who might not have existed. And everybody told him it was four pounds a week thrown away."
"And?"
"And it was Nell," Sofie said. "And Nell brought Birdy, and Birdy's writing brought June and the baby, and the baby's mother brought Cass, and Cass brought nine people and a barn with two hundred and eleven pounds of elk in it and four cans of seed,
and that seed is what's growing in that field behind you, and every single person alive in this valley today is descended from somebody who walked to a rock pile."
She turned around.
"My father said that at a fire when he was forty five and I remember it because I was sixteen and I thought he was being sentimental," she said. "And then I lived seventy more years and watched it happen four hundred more times."
The young ones were writing.
"Put this down," Sofie said. "This is the part they get wrong at the dam."
"Go ahead."
"They think it was the wall," she said. "The stone wall in the draw. The caches. The three camps and the water routes and the ninety second drill. They teach the methods, because the methods are in the book and they're easy to teach."
"And?"
"And all of that kept fourteen people alive for two years," Sofie said. "Every bit of it was necessary and none of it was the thing. Not one person ever joined this valley because we hid well."
"Then what was the thing?"
Sofie Thorn put her hand on the cap slab.
"He never stopped putting the number on the rock," she said.
"That's all. For sixty three years, through two bad winters and one worse one, when we were nineteen and when we were thirty one and when we were four hundred and we'd have been better off nobody knowing. He wrote down how many we were and he put it where a hungry person walks."
"That's dangerous."
"It was extremely dangerous and he knew exactly how dangerous and he did it anyway, every spring, until the year he died," Sofie said.
"And I cut the number myself the following March because my mother made me, and I've cut it every year since, and last spring my great granddaughter cut it because my hands have gone."
She let the woman take her arm for the walk back.
Halfway up the rise she stopped.
"Write one more thing," she said.
"Go ahead."
"My father's name was Tom Thorn and he was forty two when the lights went out and he was a software man from Bozeman with a beard and a cabin he thought was a fortress," Sofie said.
"And a man lied about that on a road in October of the first year with his chest opened up, to protect us, and died for it."
"Tyler Clubman," one of the young ones said.
Sofie stopped.
"You know that name?"
"It's on a slab at the culvert."
"Is it."
"There's four names on it. Clubman, Charter, Tack, and one that just says PETE, DRANK FROM A BEAVER POND."
Sofie Thorn laughed out loud, a cracked old sound on a road in the sun.
"That's Chip's," she said. "That's a hundred years of a story about a man who drank out of a pond because he was in a hurry, and Chip told it to my father in the first week, and my father told it to us four hundred times,
and every child in this valley knows not to drink standing water and not one of them knows it was a joke."
"Was it a joke?"
"Pete was real and Pete died," Sofie said. "That's the whole of what anybody knows about Pete. And a hundred years later there's a rock with his name on it at a culvert because somebody thought a dead man deserved to be on a road."
They got her back to the bench at sundown.
She sat under the cottonwoods with a blanket over her knees and the valley going gold and the wheat standing still in the last of the light, and the four of them sat with her because nobody wanted to be the one to leave.
"Last question," the woman said.
"Ask it."
"If there were one line. One. For the school at the dam, on the wall, where the children see it every day."
Sofie Thorn thought about it for a long time.
"They'll want the fourth line of the front matter," she said. "If you find yourself counting who is worth feeding then you are holding this book wrong. That's the one they'll want, because it's stern, and grown people love a stern line."
"But?"
"But it's not the one."
"What's the one?"
The old woman looked out at the field her family had grown out of eleven ounces of wheat in a jar left in a rock pile by a stranger ninety three years ago.
"Put the number on the rock," she said.
The End