Chapter 4
Joe did not sleep at all after that.
He sat in the chair by the stove with the radio dead in his hand and the fire down to coals, and somewhere around two in the morning he went upstairs and stood in the doorway of his daughter's room for eleven minutes without going in.
Hazel slept on her side with one hand under her cheek.
She had her mother's jaw and his stubbornness and she was eleven years old, and a man on a radio had counted her.
He went back down.
At first light he woke Imogen and told her and watched her face do something he had never seen it do before.
"Say the exact words," she said.
"The blonde one, eleven or so. She was out behind the shed with him today."
"Today."
"Yesterday. They were watching us yesterday."
Imogen got out of bed and started getting dressed and her hands were completely steady, and that was worse than if they had shaken.
"Then they were in the timber," she said.
"Or up on the ridge with glass."
"How far can they see us from the ridge?"
"Everything," Joe said. "From that knob above the spring you can see this whole bench. The house, the shed, the yard, the pen, the drive. I know because I stood on it in March and thought, that's a hell of a view."
Imogen pulled her hair back.
"Then we stop being visible," she said.
They spent the morning learning to live in their own house differently.
Joe moved the woodpile work to the north side of the shed where the building blocked the sight line.
He rigged a screen of cut fir along the fence between the yard and the pen.
He walked the whole bench with a pair of binoculars, standing in the places an enemy would stand, looking back at his own home and writing down everything he could see.
The list was awful.
Everything. He could see everything.
He came back and told them so, flatly, and then he told them the rule.
"Nobody crosses open ground alone. Nobody stands still in the yard. Anything that needs doing in the middle of the yard gets done in under ninety seconds or it gets done at night."
"That's not sustainable," Bill Tandy said.
"It doesn't have to be sustainable. It has to be true for the next week."
Two of Stance Ulebrook's men rode in at ten.
One was a wide, quiet man of about forty named Pruitt who said four words in the first hour and all four of them were useful. The other was a kid of maybe twenty with a sunburn and a bad mustache who introduced himself as Colby and then talked without stopping for the rest of the day.
They brought a hundred and eleven feet of good wire, a post driver, four coils of barbed wire, and the news that Stance was moving the hay.
"Startin' tomorrow," Colby said. "Wagons. Two trips a day if the horses hold up. He figures four days."
"Four days is a long time on a road," Joe said.
"That's what Pruitt said."
Pruitt, from under the fence line, said, "It is."
They worked all day.
Joe and Pruitt built a gate on the drive four hundred yards below the house, at the second switchback, where the timber pinched in on both sides and a vehicle had to slow to make the turn. It was not much of a gate. Two cedar posts and a chain and a length of pipe.
But it was in the right place, and the right place was worth more than the gate.
Then Joe walked out the ranges from the house and the shed and the stump and wrote the numbers on a card and taped the card inside the mudroom door.
Four hundred and ten yards to the second switchback.
Two hundred and sixty to the first bend.
One hundred and forty to the corner of the pen.
Eighty to the gate post.
Forty to the woodpile.
"Why does that matter," Sylvie asked, reading the card.
"Because in the dark, with your heart going, everything looks like the same distance," Joe said. "And if you know it's four hundred and ten, you know it's four hundred and ten no matter what your eyes are telling you."
Tobin Kessick sat up in a chair that afternoon for the first time and ate a bowl of elk and broth and said, in a thin voice, that the bandage itched.
Imogen told him that was the best sentence she had heard all week.
That night the radio was silent.
The night after, also silent.
By the third day Joe had started to believe, in the stupid animal part of himself, that maybe the calm voice had meant it. Scratch the bench. We're not doing the bench.
He knew better.
He believed it anyway for about forty hours, and later he would think about those forty hours a great deal.
On the fourth morning Stance Ulebrook came down the road with two wagons and eleven hundred pounds of hay.
He came in at a walk with the bay gelding tied on behind the second wagon and he was not riding, he was driving, sitting up on the box of the lead wagon with the lines in both hands and the coach gun in a scabbard by his knee.
Four riders came with him. Pruitt and Colby and two more Joe did not know.
Stance set the brake in the yard and climbed down and looked around at the fir screen and the new gate and the empty roof where the panels had been.
"You've been busy," he said.
"You've been driving a parade wagon down a county road in daylight."
"I have."
"That's a long, slow, loud thing to be doing right now."
"It is," Stance agreed. "And I'll be done tomorrow, and then it'll be hay in a barn nine miles from where anybody thinks it is, and every day after that I'll be glad I did it."
They unloaded.
Everybody unloaded. Nine people and four horses and a shepherd who ran back and forth barking at the hay bales as if they were a personal insult.
Stance stayed for coffee.
He sat at the table with his hat off and asked after Tobin and then, when Sylvie went out of the room, he said quietly to Imogen, "Their granddad's dead. Dave Kessick. I found out yesterday."
Imogen closed her eyes.
"When."
"First night. He had a heart thing and there was no ambulance and there was never going to be one." Stance turned his cup. "I'm not going to be the one to tell that girl. I've thought about it for a day and I'm a coward about exactly one thing in this life and that's it."
"I'll tell her," Imogen said.
"You don't have to."
"I'll tell her. It's my job. I'm the one everyone lives longer for." She said it without any irony at all. "That means I'm also the one who says it out loud."
Stance looked at her for a moment.
"Ma'am," he said, "I don't know where your husband found you, but he ought to send them a card."
He left at two in the afternoon with both wagons empty.
Joe walked him to the yard.
"Tomorrow's the last run," Stance said. "Four wagons' worth left. I'll take two loads in the morning and two after noon and then I'm done and I'll sleep for a week."
"Take a different road."
"There isn't a different road. That's the thing about a dead end valley. It's a blessing four days out of five."
He put a boot in the stirrup of the wagon box and stopped.
"They been on the air?"
"Nothing in three days."
Stance's face did something.
"That's not good," he said.
"I know."
"Three days of quiet means either they moved on or they finished planning." He pulled himself up onto the box. "Henfry, do me a kindness. Tomorrow afternoon, about four, be somewhere you can see the county road."
"Why."
"Because that's when I'll be coming through with the last load," Stance said, "and I'd like there to be one person in this world who knows where I'm supposed to be."
They came at three forty in the afternoon.
Joe was at the second switchback with Pruitt, setting the last brace post on the low gate, when Mack came up off the ground and faced downhill.
Then he heard it.
Engines. Two of them. Gas, not diesel, and running rough, the sound of old carbureted motors that had been made to start again by somebody who knew how.
And under the engines, the flat slap of hooves at a trot.
Joe went up the bank on his belly with the thirty aught six and got the binoculars on the county road four hundred yards below and downslope.
He saw it all.
Stance Ulebrook had both wagons on the road and he had them moving, which meant he had heard the engines before Joe did, and he had made the decision a teamster makes, which is that a loaded wagon does not outrun anything and the only thing left is to get to ground you like.
He was making for the cut where the road went between two banks.
He did not get there.
The first vehicle came around the bend behind him. An old Bronco, primer and rust, doors gone, four men in it.
The second came up out of the barrow ditch ahead of him and stopped crossways in the road. A flatbed. Three men.
The wagons stopped.
Joe heard a voice on the road. Just a voice, no words at that distance, calm and unhurried and going on for a while, the cadence of a man making an offer.
He saw Stance stand up on the wagon box.
"Pruitt," Joe said. "Pruitt, I need"
And then the world came apart.
Stance Ulebrook brought the coach gun up off his knee and thumbed both hammers and fired.
The double report rolled up the canyon a full second after the smoke, two barrels almost together, and Joe saw the buckshot go into the flatbed's hood and the windshield post and a spray of gravel behind it.
It hit nobody.
Eighty yards was too far and he knew it and he fired anyway.
The road answered.
It answered with the flat fast hammering of two AR-15s on semiautomatic going as quick as fingers could work, and the sound of it was nothing like the coach gun, it was a cheap ripping crackle, and it went on and on.
Stance came off the wagon box.
He did not jump. He was knocked.
Joe watched through the glass as the tall man in the old duster spun and went down between the wagon wheels and the horses screamed and lunged and the whole rig lurched sideways into the ditch.
Five hits. Joe counted five, or thought he did, and later he would learn it was exactly five, and every one of them was below the belt line.
Two in the left thigh. One through the outside of the right knee. Two through the hips, one of which went in the front and came out the back and took a piece of the pelvis with it.
Stance Ulebrook hit the road on his shoulder.
And then he started to move.