Chapter 3 #4
"Bill Tandy drove down my road at seven this morning and told my foreman there was a bench at the top of eleven with water on it and a nurse in the house."
Joe turned and looked at Bill.
Bill Tandy drank his coffee and did not look back.
"He's fast," Joe said.
"He's eighty one," Stance said. "He doesn't have time to be slow."
He pulled the hat off and set it on the table crown down, and Joe saw that the man's hair was gray to the temples and thinning and that the top of his forehead was a different color than the rest of his face.
"You've got a radio," Stance said.
Joe hesitated.
"That wasn't a question," Stance said. "You've got a radio, because a man who knows the pressure curve of a hundred and fifty year old cartridge has a radio, and probably has it in a box lined with screen."
"I've got a radio."
"Then you heard them."
The kitchen went absolutely still.
"Who," Joe said.
"Don't do that."
"I want to hear you say it."
Stance Ulebrook leaned back in the chair.
"Four forty six point zero," he said. "And they move around. Last night about eleven thirty a man with a real calm voice read out a property description like he was reading a grocery list. Gate on the north side, solar on the south roof, livestock, water uphill. Family of four."
"Plus a dog," Joe said.
"Plus a dog."
Imogen sat down.
"Two nights ago," Stance said, "they did the Ostermans. Night before that they did a place down on the river that I don't know. And this morning, about an hour before I saddled up, they did the Broken Y."
"They did your place."
"They read my barn out loud on an open frequency," Stance said. "Number of horses. Number of hands. The fact that we've got a hand pump on the stock well and eleven hundred gallons of dyed diesel in a tank behind the shop."
"How would they know that."
"Because I bought the diesel in August from a man who delivers diesel," Stance said, "and I signed a piece of paper when he did it."
Joe put both hands flat on the table.
"The propane guy," he said.
"Or the hay guy, or the gravel guy, or the fella who read your meter for eleven years, or a kid who worked one summer for the co-op and kept the route book."
Stance shrugged. "Doesn't matter which. It's somebody with paper, and paper's the whole game right now. Everybody in this valley spent thirty years writing down exactly what they had and handing it to a stranger in a company shirt."
"Jesus," said Bill.
"And here's what makes it bad," Stance said. "It's not a mob. A mob you can survive. A mob shows up hungry and disorganized and you feed eleven of them and the rest go somewhere easier."
"And this isn't that."
"This is a man with a list, a working radio, and time. This is somebody sitting down and putting the whole county in order from easiest to hardest and working down the sheet."
Nobody spoke.
Sylvie Kessick said, from the doorway where she had been standing without anyone noticing, "Do they shoot people?"
Stance turned around.
He took in the fifteen year old girl and the boy asleep on the table under the window with a line running into his arm.
"Who's that," he said quietly.
"Tobin Kessick," Imogen said. "Nine millimeter, through and through, left thigh. On the state road, first night, during a fight over a truck that still ran."
Stance was quiet for a moment.
"Dave Kessick's boy."
"You know him?"
"I know everybody." He turned back to Sylvie. "Honey, the answer to your question is that the ones on the radio haven't shot anybody yet that I know of. What happened to your brother was a scared man in a parking lot on the worst night of his life."
"Is that supposed to make it better?"
"No," Stance said. "It's supposed to make it accurate. There's a difference between the two and in about four months the difference is going to matter more than anything else in your life."
Sylvie looked at him for a long moment.
Then she nodded once and came in and sat down at the table with the adults, and nobody told her not to.
They talked for three hours.
Stance had a map. An actual paper map, a county road map from a gas station, folded so many times the creases were furred, and he spread it out and put a bean on it for every place he knew about.
Beans for the families still in their houses. Beans for the ones who had already left for relatives in Provo, walking, on the second day.
He put a bean on the Broken Y and one on the Tandy place and one on the bench.
"That's the triangle," he said. "Nine miles on the long leg, two on the short. All of it off the state road. Nobody comes through here to get anywhere else, and that is the single best thing any of us has going."
"Dead end valley," Joe said.
"Dead end valley with water in it."
"So we're either invisible or we're a prize."
"We're both," Stance said. "We're invisible until somebody says our name on the radio, and then we're a prize, and somebody already said your name on the radio."
Joe stood up.
He went to the window and looked out at the timber for a while.
Then he turned around.
"All right," he said. "I want everyone in this room to hear this at the same time, because I'm done keeping a list in my head that nobody else can read."
He started with the water.
He told them about the spring, three gallons a minute, gravity fed, and the sand filter and the two backup filters and the ceramic elements in the crate.
He told them about the creek.
He told them the number of gallons in every container in the house and what he thought the well could do by hand if somebody built the right pump for it.
He told them about the root cellar. Four hundred and eighty pounds of hard red wheat. The rice, the beans, the oats, the salt, the honey. Two hundred and eleven quarts of canned meat when he started this week and two hundred and sixty three now, after the freezer.
He told them the calories.
"At about twenty two hundred a day for an adult, what's in that cellar feeds four people for about fourteen months," he said. "It feeds nine people for about six."
The room absorbed that.
"Six months takes us to April," Imogen said.
"Six months takes us to April with nothing coming in. It's not six months if the garden goes in. It's not six months if there's elk. It's not six months if Bill's cattle come up here and we're smart about it."
"My cattle can come up here," Bill said immediately.
"And I've got eleven horses and four hands with families," Stance said, "and hay in a barn nine miles away that I would very much like to move before somebody burns it."
"Then that's the first job," Joe said.