Chapter 7 #2
Joe set the wood down on the pile very carefully.
"What'd he say?"
"He said pediatric. He said she wouldn't know a damn thing about cancer that a book couldn't tell her." Pruitt leaned on the maul. "And then he said, why, and I said, my wife, and he said, Nephi, and I said, how'd you know, and he said, I towed your car out of her sister's driveway in 2019."
Pruitt laughed. It was a terrible sound.
"Twenty two years of invoices," he said.
Joe stood in the dark with his hands shaking and was glad of the dark.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because he wrote it down," Pruitt said.
Joe did not answer.
"Come on, Mister Henfry. He gave you a folder. Tomás told Colby and Colby tells everybody everything."
Pruitt turned around. "And you've been four feet from me on a crosscut saw for nine hours on Saturday and you were somewhere else the whole time. I've known you five weeks and you're the most present man I ever met and on Saturday you weren't there at all."
Joe put a hand on the woodpile.
"Fourth name on the list," he said. "Dated the eleventh."
"Yeah."
"You could have said nothing and I'd have watched you all winter."
"I know."
"Why didn't you?"
Pruitt picked up the maul.
"Because that's the thing he does," he said. "He hands a man a true fact and lets it rot the house from the inside, and he doesn't lift a finger, and eleven weeks later he drives up a road where nobody trusts anybody and takes whatever's left."
He set a round on the block.
"He did it to Stance," Pruitt said. "In 2017. Told Stance one true thing about a hand who'd been with him nine years, and Stance let him go over it, and it turned out the true thing meant something else entirely, and that hand's in Wyoming now and he doesn't speak to anybody from this valley."
Joe looked at the lit windows of his house.
"So how do I know," he said, "that this isn't the same thing? You getting out in front of it?"
"You don't."
"That's not helpful."
"It's the truth, though." Pruitt split the round. "You don't get to know. Nobody gets to know anything anymore. All you get is what a man does over time, and I've been on this bench nineteen days and I dug a hole in a hillside for two of them, and that's all I've got to offer."
He stacked his own split wood.
"If it helps," he said, "I'll sleep in the shed."
"You'll sleep in the house."
"Mister Henfry."
"You'll sleep in the house," Joe said, "and you'll eat at that table, and tomorrow we're going to sit down with Bill and figure out how to get eleven tons of feed wheat out of an elevator, and you're going to draw me a map of it, because you're the only man in nine miles who's been inside."
Pruitt stood there in the dark.
"Okay," he said.
"And Pruitt."
"Yeah."
"When the road opens in the spring, we'll go to Nephi."
Pruitt did not say anything at all.
He picked up an armload of wood and carried it inside and Joe stayed out by the block for a while with his breath going up white.
They checked Merrit at ten.
Three eleven, and the ketone strip came up a shade darker than it had at seven, a real pink now instead of a hint of one.
Imogen's voice did not change and Joe saw her hands change.
"Okay," she said. "That's moderate. That's what I did not want."
"Is that bad?" Merrit asked.
"It's a problem we can fix if we get on it right now, which is why I'm glad we're checking every three hours instead of every twelve like a normal house."
"Do I get a shot?"
"You get a correction dose and you get another liter of fluid in you over the next two hours, and you get to sleep in the front room where I can hear you breathe."
"Can Mack sleep in there?"
Imogen glanced at Joe.
"Mack sleeps where Mack wants," Joe said. "He's been making that clear for four years."
Imogen ran the dose off the log. She showed Hazel the number and made her check it, and then made Sylvie check it, and then did it herself a third time.
"Three people on every dose," she said. "Always. Every time. That's the rule from tonight forward and it never changes no matter how tired anybody is."
She gave the shot in the back of the girl's arm.
Then she sat down on the floor next to the cot with her back against the wall, and she stayed there.
Joe brought her a blanket at midnight and she waved it off and he put it over her anyway.
"Go to bed," she said.
"No."
"Joe."
"You've been up eighteen hours."
"Yes, and in about four more I'm going to find out whether the thing I did at ten worked, and if it didn't I need to be awake and thinking clearly, and if I sleep now I'll wake up stupid."
Joe sat down on the floor next to her.
"Then I'll be stupid with you."
They sat in the dark listening to a nine year old breathe.
"Joe."
"Yeah."
"If this goes wrong tonight."
"Don't."
"I have to say it once." Imogen's voice was very quiet. "If this goes wrong tonight, if she gets worse, if I lose her in this front room on a cot, then at nine in the morning there is going to be a man in the yard."
"I know."
"And nothing I say will matter and nothing you say will matter."
"I know."
"And I want you to promise me one thing."
Joe turned his head.
"You don't shoot him," Imogen said.
"Imogen."
"You don't shoot him, Joe. You let him in this house and you let him see her and you let him sit with her for as long as he wants and you do not put a hand on him and you do not say one single word in your own defense."
"He'd kill you."
"Then he'd kill me," Imogen said. "And that would be a completely understandable thing for a father to do and I have made my peace with it, and if you start a gunfight over my body in front of our children then everything I have done in this house for six weeks is worth nothing."
Joe sat in the dark for a long time.
"Say it," Imogen said.
"I won't shoot him."
"Thank you."
"I'll hate every second of it."
"I know. That's why I asked."
She leaned her head on his shoulder.
At one in the morning the girl woke up and said she felt sick and Imogen was on her feet before Joe registered the sound.
"Sick how?"
"My stomach."
"Are you going to vomit?"
"I don't know."
"Okay. Sit up. Sylvie, bucket. Hazel, get me the strips."
They were both there in eleven seconds, out of a dead sleep, and Joe realized they had been sleeping in their clothes on the floor by the stove and had never said a word about it to anyone.
Merrit did not vomit.
She sat on the edge of the cot and breathed and held Imogen's hand and after four minutes she said the feeling had passed.
The two o'clock reading was two ninety one.
Down.