Chapter 6 #2
"Eleven vials," she said. "How many units, did he say?"
"No."
"Standard vial's a thousand units. A nine year old, depending on weight, might run somewhere between twenty and thirty five units a day total between the two." She was staring at the table. "Call it thirty. So a vial is about a month. Eleven vials is eleven months if nothing goes wrong."
"That's not bad."
"That's a fantasy," Imogen said. "That's the number on paper. The real number is worse and he knows it, which is why he came up your road."
"Why is it worse?"
"Because insulin at fifty two degrees in a creek is not insulin in a pharmacy refrigerator. It degrades. Unrefrigerated it loses potency fast, and at fifty two you're slowing it down but you're not stopping it,
and he has no way to test whether a vial has gone weak except by putting it in his daughter and watching what happens to her blood sugar."
Nobody said anything.
"And test strips," Imogen said. "Did he mention strips?"
"He said he wanted somebody who could teach him to test without them when they run out."
"There is no testing without them," Imogen said.
"That's the answer. That's what I'd have to tell him. You can learn to read a child, you can learn the breath and the thirst and the flushing and the way they go quiet, and that gets you maybe sixty percent of the way to a guess. But there is no substitute for a number,
and when the strips run out he is flying blind on a nine year old, forever, until she dies."
"How long," Bill asked quietly.
"Depends entirely on the vials. If they hold, and if he's careful, and if she doesn't get sick." Imogen shook her head. "A stomach bug will kill her. A flu will kill her. Any illness that makes her vomit will put her into ketoacidosis in under a day and there's no ICU in four hundred miles."
"Can you help her at all?"
Imogen looked up.
"I can help her enormously," she said. "That's the terrible part. I can probably add a year to that child's life just by teaching that man four things he doesn't know. Insulin stretching. Sick day rules. How to read ketones off her breath. When to give fluids and how much and what to put in them."
"Then it's simple," said Delores.
"No it isn't."
"It sounds simple to me."
"That's because you're a good person who's never had leverage used on you," Imogen said, not unkindly.
"The minute I teach him those four things, I am the most valuable object in this county. Not the wheat. Not the spring. Me. And every single person out there who has a sick child, and there are hundreds of them, will eventually find that out, and they will all come up this road."
Silence.
"And I won't be able to say no to any of them," she said. "That's the part I keep hitting. That's the wall. I will not be able to say no. Not once, not ever, not to a single one of them."
She put her hands flat on the table.
"So I need all of you to understand," Imogen said, "that when I say yes to Arlan Crowe's daughter on Tuesday, I am not saying yes to one child. I am opening a door that does not close, and I am doing it with my eyes open,
and I need somebody in this room to tell me they understand that before I do it."
Joe looked around the table.
Bill Tandy said, "I understand it."
Sylvie Kessick, from the doorway, said, "I understand it," and her voice cracked in the middle.
Hazel said, "Mom, that's just the job. You said it was the job."
And Zachary, who had been listening to every word with his chin on the table, said, "Is the girl going to come to our house?"
"Yes," Imogen said. "On Tuesday."
"Is she nice?"
"I don't know yet."
"I hope she's nice," Zachary said. "I'll show her the lids."
Joe had to get up and go to the window for a second.
The afternoon went into work, because there was nothing else to do with an afternoon.
They dug.
That was the decision Joe made standing at the window, and he made it in about eleven seconds, and it turned out to be the most important decision of the entire month.
"We're building a cache," he said.
Bill turned. "A what?"
"A second cellar. Off the property. Something that isn't under this house."
"Why."
"Because everything we own is in one hole under one building," Joe said, "and the entire population of this valley is going to spend the winter figuring out that there are two kinds of houses on this mountain. The ones that burned and the ones that didn't."
He pulled the map down off the shelf.
"If they ever get in this house, we lose everything at once. That's a single point of failure and I've been looking at it for four days and pretending I wasn't."
"Where," said Pruitt.
Joe put his finger on a spot.
"There's a bench above the spring house, about four hundred yards northwest, in the aspen. There's an old cut in the hillside where somebody took gravel out in the fifties. It's on the back side of a fold. You cannot see it from the road, you cannot see it from the knob,
and you cannot see it from the house."
"How much are we moving?"
"A third," Joe said. "Not half. A third. Wheat, rice, beans, salt, and eleven quarts of the canned meat, and one of the ceramic filters and a spare pot and about four hundred rounds."
Imogen said, "And blankets. And a stove pipe. And four coats."
Joe looked at her.
"You're not building a cache," she said. "You're building a place to run to. If you're going to do it, do it honestly."
He nodded slowly.
"Yeah," he said. "I am."
They worked until dark and they worked the next day too.
It was the hardest labor Joe had ever done, and the strange thing was that it was good.
Nine people with shovels and a pick and a crosscut saw, cutting into a gravel bank, shoring the sides with lodgepole rounds, cribbing a roof out of poles and laying sod over it.
Hazel ran the buckets. Zachary ran the small tools and the counting, and Joe put him in charge of the inventory list, and the boy took it more seriously than any adult would have.
Sylvie turned out to be strong.
Genuinely strong, in a way that surprised everybody including her, and by the second afternoon she was swinging a pick alongside Pruitt and matching him stroke for stroke.
"I worked at the feed store," she said, when Joe remarked on it. "Fifty pound bags. Eleven hours on a Saturday."
"How long?"
"Since I was twelve."
"That's not legal."
"It was my granddad's store," Sylvie said. "He said the law didn't apply to family, and I said the law applies to everybody, and he said, Sylvie, get the bags."
She stopped swinging.
"He's dead," she said. It was not a question.
Joe set down the shovel.
"Yes," he said.
"Imogen was going to tell me. She kept starting."
"She was."
"I already knew." Sylvie wiped her face with her wrist and left a stripe of dirt across it. "I knew on the first night. He had a bad heart and he had pills and the pills were in the house and I saw the house from the road and it was dark and I just, I made myself not know it."
"That's allowed."
"Is it?"
"For about a week," Joe said. "That's my honest answer. You get about a week and then you have to pick the thing back up and carry it, and I'm sorry, and that's how it works."
Sylvie looked at him for a long moment.
"You're not very comforting," she said.
"No."
"That's kind of why I believe you."
She picked the pick back up and swung it into the bank.
The cache was finished at dusk on the second day.
It was eleven feet deep and six wide and five high at the crown, and it held a third of everything they owned, and from thirty feet away it was a fold of hillside with aspen growing out of it.
Joe stood inside it with a candle and looked at the shored walls and felt something in his chest that was almost peace.
That night the radio was quiet.
The next morning a rider came up the drive at seven, alone, hands visible, and stopped at eighty yards and shouted the way people shouted now.
He was about nineteen and he had a jacket four sizes too big and a message he had clearly memorized.
"Mister Crowe says Thursday's today," he called. "Says the bench above the Ulebrook barn, off the north side, there's a limestone outcrop. Says ten o'clock. Says come alone or don't, doesn't matter, nobody'll be there but one man with a shovel and it won't be him."
"Why won't it be him?"
The kid hesitated.
"He said you wouldn't want him there," he said. "He said it'd ruin it."
Joe went at nine.
He took the truck because nine miles over a saddle on foot was four hours and he did not have four hours to be away from his family.
He took Bill Tandy, who did not ask permission and simply got in.
And he took the gun rig on the seat between them, the crossdraw holster with the ivory gripped Uberti in it, because he had given his word about that and it was the only piece of this entire week that was clean.
The Broken Y was a wreck.
That was the first thing.
They came over the saddle and down into the home place and the barn doors were standing open and there were no horses in the corral and the hay Stance had spent four days moving was simply gone.
"They took it," Bill said.
"Somebody did."
"After all that."
Joe drove past the barn without slowing.
The bench above it was pretty, which felt obscene. Bunch grass and a few limber pines and a limestone outcrop breaking out of the hillside like a shoulder, and a view down the whole valley to the Wasatch going blue and white in the distance.
There was a hole in the ground.
There was a man standing beside it with a shovel and a straw hat, an old Hispanic man with a face like weathered oak, and when Joe got out of the truck the man took the hat off and held it in both hands.
"Se?or Henfry."
"Yes."
"I am Tomás. I worked here nineteen years."
Joe looked at the hole.
"Is he in there?"
"Sí."
"Wrapped?"
"Canvas. From the shop. It is good canvas." Tomás's chin came up a little, defensive. "I did it myself. I would not let them do it."
Joe took the rig off the seat.
He walked to the edge and looked down.
The shape at the bottom was long. Longer than it should have been, which made sense, because the man had been long.
There was a hat on top of the canvas.
Somebody had put his hat on him.