Chapter 8 #2
"A year and a half."
"For the whole valley."
"For the whole valley," Joe said. "If nobody hoards it and nobody burns it and nobody sells it and the mice don't get it."
Bill Tandy put both hands flat on the table.
"Then we do it," he said.
"Bill."
"Son, I've sat in this house for two weeks watching you make one decision at a time about nine people, and every one of them was right, and I've been proud to watch it."
Bill's voice was rough. "But that right there is not a nine person decision. That's the whole valley making it through to next fall, and if you don't go knock on Harlan Batey's door I will walk there myself on these eighty one year old legs."
Imogen said, "There's a problem."
Everyone turned.
"If Joe goes out to four houses," she said, "Joe is off this bench for four days. And there's a man in the timber with a scoped rifle who walked up to our shed at four in the morning."
The room cooled.
"That's true," Joe said.
"So which is it?" Imogen said. "Because I'm not going to pretend it isn't a choice. It's a choice, and I want it made out loud at this table instead of in your head at three in the morning."
Joe looked around at them.
"Then we make it a smaller choice," he said. "I take two days, not four. Two houses. The two that matter most. And I don't go alone and I don't sleep anywhere but here."
"Who goes?"
"Bill, because everybody in this valley knows Bill Tandy and nobody's afraid of him. And Sylvie."
Sylvie looked up.
"Me?"
"You're Dave Kessick's granddaughter," Joe said. "You worked the counter at the feed store for three years. Every single one of those board members has bought something from your hand."
Sylvie sat back.
"Huh," she said.
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
They left at first light on Thursday.
Harlan Batey lived in a brick rambler on nine acres of alfalfa at the bottom of the canyon, and he came out on his porch with a lever action carbine and squinted at the truck for a full minute before he recognized Bill.
He was seventy four, and stooped, and he had buried his wife in April before any of it started, and he had been alone in that house for six weeks.
He cried when Sylvie hugged him.
They sat in his kitchen for three hours.
Harlan Batey knew more about that elevator than anybody alive, because he had sat on the board since 1996 and had personally argued about every bin in it.
"Eleven hundred tons is high," he said. "It's more like nine. Bin three's got barley in it and bin five's half empty because we shipped in September."
"Nine hundred tons is still enormous."
"It is. It's also full of dockage and it's not cleaned and if anybody eats it straight out of the bin without screening it they're eating mouse." He tapped the table. "And it's going to spoil."
Joe's head came up.
"Why?"
"Because a bin that size has aeration fans in the floor and those fans have not run in six weeks," Batey said.
"Wheat breathes. You put nine hundred tons in a steel can and don't move air through it, you get moisture migration, and by February you get a crust and a hot spot, and once a bin goes hot it can burn from the inside."
"Can we run the fans?"
"With what?"
Joe thought about eleven solar panels lying behind his shed.
"How much power?" he said.
Batey looked at him.
"Five horse motors, four of them. That's about fifteen kilowatts if they all run at once."
"And if they don't all run at once? If we ran one at a time, for a few hours a day, on a cold dry morning?"
Harlan Batey sat back in his chair.
"Son," he said slowly, "are you telling me you've got panels?"
"Eleven of them. Four hundred watts each."
"That's four and a half kilowatts. That's not enough to start a five horse motor."
"Not directly," Joe said. "But it's enough to charge a battery bank, and with a big enough inverter and a soft start."
He stopped.
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't know if it would work. I'd need somebody who actually knows motors."
"Arlan Crowe's got a man named Ivers who rewound the pump motor at the fire station in 2019," Batey said.
The kitchen went quiet.
Joe looked at Bill.
Bill looked at Sylvie.
"Harlan," Joe said carefully. "About Arlan Crowe."
"I know what he did to Stance," Batey said. "Tomás told my nephew."
"And?"
The old man was quiet for a long moment.
"And I have known Arlan Crowe since he was a boy," he said. "His daddy hauled beets. I sold that man his first truck and I have never once in forty years known him to do a thing he hadn't already thought about for a week."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer I've got." Batey pushed his coffee away.
"What I'll tell you is this. There's four of us left on that board and Arlan Crowe could have taken that elevator on day four and nobody could have stopped him, and he didn't, and I've gone to sleep every night for six weeks wondering why."
"He says it's because it'd make him the man who stole the wheat."
Harlan Batey laughed, short and dry.
"Well," he said. "That's the truest thing about him anybody's ever said."
He got up and went to a drawer and came back with a spiral notebook.
"I'll convene the board," he said. "I want Ivers looking at those fans inside a week, and I want a scale, and I want a book with every name in it, and I want you standing there when the first load comes out, because if it's just Crowe's trucks then it's Crowe's wheat no matter what we write down."
"Why me?"
"Because nobody's afraid of you," Batey said. "Which is the single most useful thing a man can be right now, and you ought to know it's temporary."
They came home in the dark.
Joe was tired in a way that felt good for the first time in weeks, and he came up the drive at six with the headlights off and the window down, and he was already planning how to tell Imogen.
He saw the lamp in the window.
He saw Mack come off the porch.
And then he saw Hazel standing in the middle of the yard in her coat with her arms crossed, waiting, and even at forty yards in the dark he could see how she was standing.
He was out of the truck before it fully stopped.
"What."
"Dad."
"Hazel, what."
"Somebody came to the house," she said. "This afternoon. On foot. He came right up to the porch."
"Is everyone."
"Everyone's fine. Nobody's hurt." Her breath was going up white and fast. "He didn't do anything. He knocked."
"He knocked?"
"He knocked on the door and Mom opened it because she thought it was Pruitt, and there was a man standing there and he had a rifle on his shoulder and he took his hat off."
Joe's hands went cold.
"What did he say?"
"He asked for you by name," Hazel said. "He said, is Joe Henfry home. And Mom said no and he said, that's fine, I'll come back."
"That's it?"
"No." Hazel's chin was shaking now. "Dad, he gave her something. He handed it to her and then he walked off down the drive and Mom's been sitting with it at the table for four hours and she won't let anybody else touch it and she won't say anything."
Joe went past her at a run.
Imogen was at the kitchen table with a lamp turned low and everybody else pushed back against the walls, watching her.
In front of her, in the middle of the table, was a folded square of green canvas.
She looked up when he came in.
Her face was wrong. It was not fear. Joe had seen her afraid twice now and this was not that.
"Open it," she said.
Joe unfolded the canvas.
Inside was a photograph, curled at one corner, and a single .308 cartridge standing upright.
The photograph was old. Nineteen eighties, maybe. A backyard somewhere, a chain link fence, a young man with a beard holding a baby, and beside him a girl of about eleven with dark hair squinting into the sun.
Joe turned it over.
On the back, in pencil, in handwriting he had never seen:
IMOGEN, AGE 11. AND HER FATHER'S FRIEND.