Chapter Thirty-three · Sienna #2
Charity Teague came with the two-year-old and stayed all afternoon and ran the wrapping table with Del Danner.
Trip Odom, five months out from a rifle round, loaded boxes with one arm and was told to sit down all afternoon and sat down twice.
Dutch Voyles sat in a chair by the fire barrel and told a nineteen-year-old prospect the swimming pool story, and I watched that boy actually listen to it, and I understood that this is how a thing gets carried in a place like this: an old man tells it to whoever is standing there until he dies, and then somebody else does.
Cutter worked the loading line all afternoon and did not once come stand next to me, and about every twenty minutes he would look over from wherever he was, and I would already be looking, and neither of us did one thing about it, and I am thirty-six years old and it was the best afternoon I have had since I was twenty-six.
Diesel found me by the fence at about four o’clock.
“Let me say a thing to you and then I’ll leave you be,” he said.
“All right.”
“Last summer I asked you to train my men and you said no, and then you built the version of yes you could live with, and I have watched what came out of that for six months.” He looked out at the lot.
“Sienna, in November this club sat in a room with its kits open and did not move until a woman sent it an address. Thirty years ago that would not have been possible. Five years ago it would not have been possible. I’ve been trying to get these men to that place my whole life and I could not do it in eleven months of open books and votes. ”
“Diesel...”
“You did it with a whiteboard and six rules and a stopwatch,” he said, “in a barn, for free, while my county was taking your job away from you an inch at a time.”
He put his hand out.
I looked at it for a second. Then I shook it, in front of everybody, in the gravel lot of the Copperhead clubhouse two days before Christmas, and I want to tell you that ten years of something came off my back when I did.
That night, on my porch, with the whole valley lit up cold and clear and the ridge black behind it, Cutter Reeves asked me what I wanted.
Not what I wanted to do about him. What I wanted. Out of all of it, in five years, if I got to write it down.
And I found out I had an answer, and that it was not the one I would have given in June.
I sat with it a while, because he had asked it properly, which almost nobody ever does. Not *what do you want to do.* What do you want.
“A hundred more,” I said.
“A hundred more what.”
“Trained. Another hundred, and then the four counties in that report, and then I want to teach the instructors instead of the class, because a hundred and thirteen people is a thing that dies with me if I’m the only one who can teach it.
” I pulled my coat around me. “And I want the station at one seventy-eight, and I want it built with money that doesn’t have his name on it, and I would like to live long enough to see somebody cut that ribbon and not have to say a second half. ”
He nodded slowly.
“And?”
“And I want to be somewhere in ten years where a man asks me what I want,” I said, “and I don’t have to think about whether he’s going to try to arrange it.”
“And I want the tox from the state to come back and match hers,” I said, “and I want a name in January, and I want Charity Teague to get told to her face by somebody with a badge, in a room, the way she asked for in that church in front of four hundred people.”
“That one’s not up to you.”
“No. But I’ve quit assuming that means it won’t happen.
” I looked out at the valley. “That’s the thing that changed in me this fall, and I don’t entirely trust it.
In June I would have told you nothing ever moves.
And then a woman in Greensboro answered a subpoena in nine days, and a fire chief bought a coat rack, and a truck driver in Bristol sent a check with GED on the memo line.
It moves. It moves slow and it moves ugly and it moves about four months after it should.
But I have seen it move now, and I cannot unsee that, and it has made me a great deal harder to handle. ”
“That’s not an answer about me,” he said.
“No,” I said, and I turned and looked at him. “It’s the whole answer about you. It’s just in my language instead of yours, and you’re going to have to get used to that, because I have been alone in this house for ten years and I do not have another way of saying things.”
Cutter Reeves sat on my porch step with his elbows on his knees and looked out at that valley for a while.
Then he laughed. Once. Low and rough and surprised, the way a man laughs who has not done much of it lately.
“Sienna,” he said, “I have understood every word you’ve said to me since the ninth of July.”
“That’s the ditch.”
“That’s the ditch.” He was still looking out at the dark. “You told me to get out of your light.”
“I remember.”
“I have been trying to do it ever since,” he said, “and it turns out that’s the entire job, and it took me ten years and four in a cell and a dead friend to work out that a man can stand right next to a woman and still not be in her light.
That’s all I’ve got. That’s my answer, in my language.
” He looked over at me. “You want a hundred more trained and a station with a clean name on it and a man who don’t arrange things behind you.
I’d like to be here for all three, and I’ve got no plan for how, which is new for me and I don’t care for it. ”
I sat down on the step beside him. Not four feet. Beside him.
“Start with January,” I said.
“January,” he agreed.
And we sat there on my porch in the cold and looked out at Blackthorn County, at the lights strung out along the corridor and the ridge going up black behind them and Route 11 running north through all of it the way it has since before anybody alive was born, and neither one of us said the next thing, because both of us already knew it.
Five weeks. He had said we would have his name in January.
He has never yet said one thing to me that was not true.