Chapter 12 #2
And Francis Deckham, the grey man, the man nobody saw, the man who could move unseen through hostile country and carry a message and vanish, was the one person on the whole plain built to do it.
He started small. Careful. The first farm he made contact with, he watched for two full days before he approached, and when he approached it was at dusk, grey, hands open, the way you approached frightened people, and he read the family the way he read everyone,
and he found them exactly what he'd hoped.
Beaten down. Grieving. Complying. And underneath, when he spoke to them low and careful in their dark kitchen, a coal of hatred for the Combine that had never quite gone out.
He did not ask them to fight. Not yet. That would come. He just planted the seed. You're not alone. There are others. There's a man out west who said no. And when the time comes, when there's a plan, there'll be a way to be free of them. Hold on. Stay ready. Someone will come with the word.
And he left them, grey, back into the dark, before he could be caught, before he could be a risk to them or they to him.
One farm. Then, nights later, another. Then another.
Slowly, carefully, invisibly, Francis Deckham began to weave the frightened alone farms of the eastern plain into the first threads of an army, and no one saw him do it, and Stanley Macklemore, in his warehouse, counting his fuel,
had no idea that the insurance man he'd humiliated and thought broken was moving through his kingdom like a ghost, carrying the one word that could bring it all down.
You are not alone.
And all the while, night by night, farm by frightened farm, Francis worked his way east.
Toward the warehouse. Toward the fuel and the trucks and the count he needed. Toward the wolf who had spat on Ruth.
Francis found Dale Crotinger on the ninth night.
He had not gone looking for him, exactly.
He had been working east, farm to farm, planting his seeds, weaving his threads, and he had come to a place at the edge of a dry wash where a single old farmhouse sat off by itself, apart from the others, further out toward the mountains than any farm he'd read yet.
And this one was different.
Francis watched it for a full day, the way he watched them all, and what he saw made him careful in a new way.
This farm was not beaten down. This farm was not frightened.
This farm had defenses. Real ones. He read them from the ridge above the wash, the way Nathan would have, the way Nell had taught him.
Firing positions. Sightlines cleared. A single approach, watched.
Whoever lived here was not a frightened complier waiting for the trucks.
Whoever lived here was dug in. Ready. Dangerous.
And whoever lived here was alone. One man, Francis judged, from a day of watching. One man, running a fortified farm by himself at the far edge of Combine country, defended like a bunker, connected to no one.
An old man. Francis got a look at him near dusk, moving between the house and the barn, careful even in his own yard, checking angles out of habit.
Old. Big once, gone lean and hard with age and hunger.
Grey. Moving with the particular economy of a man who had spent a life around danger and never once relaxed.
Something turned over in Francis's chest. A hunch. The claims hunch. The number that fit a slot he hadn't known was empty.
He almost moved past. A fortified old man alone was a hard, risky contact, exactly the kind Earl would tell him to leave alone. But the hunch would not let him go.
So Francis did the thing he did. He got close, grey and careful, in the dark, and he read the man's routine, and he found the moment, and he made contact the safest way he knew how, which was to be already inside the wire, already past the defenses,
already sitting quiet in the dark of the old man's own barn when the old man came out to check it before bed.
He announced himself the way Earl had once announced himself to him. Gently. From the dark. Before the old man could reach a weapon.
"I'm not here to hurt you," Francis said, from the shadows of the barn.
"I'm sitting down, my hands are empty, and I've got a knife I'm not reaching for. I got past your defenses, which I'll grant were good, and I did it because I need to talk to you and I couldn't risk doing it any way you might shoot me first.
So let's both agree not to make each other use what we're holding. That work for you?"
The old man had gone very still in the barn door.
And then, slow, he'd struck a match, one-handed, easy, and in the flare of it Francis saw a weathered lined face under grey hair, hard pale eyes, a shotgun held low and ready but not yet pointed.
"That's a hell of a thing," the old man said.
His voice was rough and dry. "A man in my barn talking like an old friend. You got past my wire. Nobody gets past my wire. I've killed men for less than what you just did."
The match burned. "But you're sitting down, and your hands are empty, and you woke me gentle instead of cutting my throat, which you could've, sitting there in the dark while I came out fat and dumb. So."
He lit a lantern off the match. "Talk. Fast. Before I decide the novelty's worn off."
Francis looked at the old man in the lantern light.
And he took the gamble. The whole gamble. Because there was only one way to know.
"I'm looking for a man named Dale Crotinger," Francis said.
The old man went rigid.
The shotgun came up an inch. His hard pale eyes narrowed to slits, and the whole easy dryness went out of him, replaced by something coiled and lethal.
"Nobody knows that name," the old man said, very low, very cold. "Nobody's said that name to me in years. So you'd best explain, right now, real careful, how a stranger in my barn knows the name Dale Crotinger, or this conversation ends with you in a hole out back."
And Francis understood he'd been right. The hunch had been right. This was Dale.
"Because Ruth told me," Francis said.
The name landed on the old man like a physical blow.
Francis watched it hit. Watched the hard pale eyes change, watched something crack open behind them, something old and buried and enormous, watched the shotgun waver for the first time.
"Ruth," Dale said. It came out of him strangled. "You know Ruth. Ruth's." He stopped. Started again, and there was a terrible hope in it, awful to hear. "Ruth's alive? You've seen her? Ruth's alive?"
And Francis, who did not lie, who had learned from a dead old man that you did not lie about the small things or the big ones, looked at Dale Crotinger and had to give him the worst possible answer to the most hopeful possible question.
"She was," Francis said gently. "Until four days ago. She found her way to my farm, out west. She'd been walking a long time. She was with us for weeks. She taught me. She was." His voice caught. "She was my friend. She was one of the best people I've ever known."
"Was," Dale said. The word came out dead. "You said was."
"Stanley Macklemore came to my farm four days ago," Francis said.
"Early. In force. To make an example. Ruth walked out into the yard to face him, with the Glock you gave her. The one you taught her to shoot. She took three of his men down before it ran empty. Three, Dale. Kneeling in her own blood with her hip shot out, she killed three of them."
Francis made himself hold the old man's eyes.
"And then Macklemore shot her. In the head. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I watched it happen from a ridge a mile away and I couldn't reach her. She's gone, Dale. Ruth's gone."
The lantern hissed in the silence.
And Dale Crotinger, the hard old man, the fortified survivor, the last of a line, made a sound Francis would not soon forget.
A low broken sound, torn up out of the bottom of him, and the shotgun sagged in his hands, and he put his other hand against the barn door frame to hold himself up, and for a long moment the old man simply stood there, holding himself up, while the news went through him and took everything.
Francis waited. He did not move. He let the man grieve, the way you had to, the way Earl had once let him grieve in a dark house.
"Twenty years," Dale said finally, thick, staring at nothing.
"I had her twenty years. And I threw it away. I threw it away like a damn fool over."
He stopped. His jaw worked. "And I never fixed it. Never found her. I thought about it, this whole last year, thought about going to look for her, and I never did, because I was a coward and I was ashamed, and now she's."
His voice broke. "Now she's dead in a yard a mile from your ridge and I never got to tell her I was sorry. I never got to tell her she was right. About everything. About Sarah. About all of it. She was right and I never told her."
And there it was. Sarah. The old man had said the name himself.
Francis stayed very still. He'd found more than he'd hoped for. Not just Dale alive. Dale grieving, Dale broken open, Dale saying Sarah's name with a hatred to match Ruth's own.
"She told me about Sarah," Francis said quietly. "Ruth did. Before she died. She told me the whole thing. About you and her, and about Sarah taking you, and about what Sarah is."
Dale's head came up. His pale eyes were wet and terrible.
"What Sarah is," he repeated. "She told you what Sarah is. Then she told you the truth, because it's the truest thing there is. Sarah's a."
He searched for it, the same way Ruth had.
"She's a thing that drains you. Takes the life right out of you and leaves you grey and doesn't even notice. I know what Ruth called her. She called her an energy vampire, didn't she. Because that's exactly what she is, and there's no other words for it,
and everybody thinks you're crazy when you say it."
His hand tightened on the door frame. "I didn't believe Ruth. That was the thing. Twenty years and Ruth tried to warn me and I didn't believe her, I thought she was jealous, I thought she was a bitter old woman making up stories about a younger woman. And I chose Sarah.