Chapter 9 #2
"He gets you to sit at this table for ten hours," he said.
Imogen's head came up.
"He gets you unable to think about anything else," Joe said. "He gets every adult in this house standing against the wall watching you, instead of standing at a window watching the timber. He gets me driving home in the dark at a hundred miles an hour with my headlights off."
"That's Crowe's trick."
"That's everybody's trick," Joe said. "Crowe just told us the name of it."
He picked the photograph up.
"But there's a difference," he said. "Crowe hands you a true fact and lets it rot the house. This man handed you a question. And a question is worse, because a fact eventually runs out and a question doesn't."
Morning came gray and very cold.
Joe made a decision before breakfast and he made it out loud.
"We work," he said. "Everything on the list. Nothing changes."
"Joe," said Bill.
"No. That's exactly what he wants and I'm not paying it."
He pulled his coat on. "There is a man out there who has been watching this bench for at least ten days and has fired one shot and knocked on one door and neither time did he hurt anybody. That's now eleven days of him not hurting anybody. I'm going to weigh that."
"And if you're wrong?"
"Then I'm wrong while we've got two hogs butchered and a bin fan running, instead of wrong while we all sat in a kitchen looking at a picture."
They worked.
It was the hardest, best week on that bench since the lights went out.
The pork got processed. All of it, over three days, with Delores running the operation like a foreman and everybody else doing what she said.
Joe learned what leaf fat was actually for.
They rendered it in the big cast iron kettle over a low fire in the yard, cut into cubes, stirred every eleven minutes, and it came off clear and pale and smelled like nothing at all, which Delores said was exactly right.
"Lard that smells like pork is scorched lard," she said. "It'll go rancid by February. You want it to smell like nothing."
Sixty two pounds of it, poured hot into every clean jar they had, sealing itself as it cooled.
"How long does that keep?" Sylvie asked.
"In a cold cellar? A year. Two if you're careful."
"And what's it for?"
"Everything," said Delores. "You fry in it, you bake with it, you put it in bread, you eat a spoonful of it when you're starving and it's four hundred calories. It's the most important thing in that cellar and nobody under sixty knows it."
They salted the hams and hung them in the smoke shed.
They made bacon, twelve slabs, in a cure of salt and brown sugar and the last of the black pepper.
They cased sausage, actually cased it, Bill Tandy at one end of a hand cranked stuffer and Zachary at the other with his tongue between his teeth, and made forty one pounds of it.
"Fresh sausage won't keep," Bill said. "So we eat that this week. That's the tax you pay."
"That's a good tax," said Colby.
Joe and Pruitt went up the mountain on the fourth morning and killed an elk.
It was a cow, four hundred yards below the aspen bench, and Joe made the shot at a hundred and ninety yards off a rest with the thirty aught six and she went eleven steps and went down.
He knelt beside her for a moment.
"You all right?" Pruitt said.
"Yeah."
"First one?"
"Third," Joe said. "First one that mattered."
They packed her out in four loads over two days and it nearly killed both of them.
Two hundred and ninety one pounds of usable meat.
Joe wrote the number on the card and looked at what it did to the bottom line and had to sit down on the bucket in the cellar for a minute.
Second week of April had become the last week of May.
May was the difference between a winter and a disaster.
Ivers came on the fifth day.
He came up the road alone in a wrecker at nine in the morning with his hands visible and the truck's flashers on, which was such a strange and old-world thing to do that Joe laughed out loud when he saw it.
He was a small, bald, ferociously talkative man of about sixty with hands like a dockworker.
"Mister Crowe says you got panels," he said, before he was fully out of the truck.
"I've got panels."
"Show me."
Joe showed him.
Ivers walked the ground mount array behind the shed for four minutes without saying anything, and then he got down on his knees in the snow and traced the wiring with a finger, and then he said a word Joe had never heard used as an adjective before.
"This is good work," he said.
"Thank you."
"No, listen to me, this is genuinely good work. You've got it fused right. Everybody fuses it wrong." He stood up. "Four thousand four hundred watts nameplate. What are you actually seeing?"
"About twenty eight hundred at noon on a clear day this time of year."
"Battery bank?"
"Eight lead acid golf cart batteries. Forty eight volt."
"Amp hours?"
"Four hundred and twenty eight at the twenty hour rate."
Ivers whistled.
"And the inverter?"
"Six thousand watt, forty eight volt, split phase. It's in a box lined with screen and it's been in there since the night it happened."
Ivers stopped moving.
"It's undamaged?"
"It's undamaged."
"Show me."
Joe took the inverter out of the plywood box and set it on the bench and Ivers put both hands on it like a man handling a relic.
"You understand what this is," he said.
"It's an inverter."
"It's the last working six kilowatt inverter in this county," Ivers said.
"I have looked. I have been inside eleven houses with solar and every single one of those inverters was on the wall wired to a grid tie, and every single one of them is a paperweight, because the transient came in on the utility side and walked right through them."
"All of them?"
"Every one." Ivers turned it over. "There's a man in Midway with a whole array on his barn roof, undamaged, forty panels, and he cannot do one single thing with it, and he cried when I told him why."
Joe looked at the box.
Nine hundred dollars and four weekends and Imogen's complete bafflement.
"So can we run the fans?" he said.
Ivers sat down on the bench.
"Let me think out loud," he said.
He thought out loud for two hours.
It was the most engaged Joe had been in weeks.
"The problem," Ivers said, "is not running a five horse motor. Five horse at two thirty volts three phase is about thirty seven hundred watts running. Your inverter does six thousand. That's fine."
"So what's the problem?"
"Starting it. A motor that size across the line pulls six, seven times its running current for about two seconds. That's twenty five thousand watts. Your inverter will fold over dead."
"Soft start?"
"Soft start," Ivers agreed. "Or better. You got three phase motors on those fans and you've got single phase power, so you need a variable frequency drive anyway, and a VFD is a soft start built in."
"Where do you get a VFD?"
Ivers grinned.
"That's the fun part," he said. "There's four of them on the wall at the elevator running those exact fans, and they're fried, because they were wired to the grid. But there's a fifth one in a crate in the parts room that Harlan Batey bought as a spare in 2021 and never installed."
Joe stared at him.
"In a crate."
"In a wooden crate with a plastic bag around it, sitting on a steel shelf in a windowless concrete room in the middle of a grain elevator," Ivers said. "Which is not a Faraday cage, but it's a hell of an impression of one."
"Does it work?"
"That," said Ivers, "is the eleven hundred ton question."
The board convened on the ninth of November.
Four old men and one old woman in Harlan Batey's front room with a wood fire going and eleven people from four different households standing around the walls.
It took six hours.
Joe said almost nothing for the first three. He had decided that on the drive down, and it turned out to be the correct decision, because the moment he opened his mouth the room's whole temperature changed.
Instead he let Sylvie talk.
Sylvie Kessick, fifteen years old, in her dead grandfather's coat, stood in front of five people who had all bought feed from her hands and explained what happens to nine hundred tons of wheat in a bin with no aeration, using the words Harlan Batey had used at his kitchen table,
and not one person interrupted her.
When she finished, the woman on the board, whose name was Alta and who was seventy nine, said:
"Whose idea was all this?"
Joe stepped forward.
"Arlan Crowe's," he said.
The room went cold.
Bill Tandy had told him not to say it. Ivers had told him not to say it. Crowe himself had told him not to say it.
"I'm going to tell you the whole thing," Joe said, "and then you can throw me out."
He told them.
He told them about the road and the wagons and the man who walked up the middle of it and did not hurry. He told them about the radio and the daughter and the eleven vials in a hole in the ground. He told them about fourteen men and two he had put out on the fourth of October.
And he told them exactly why Arlan Crowe would not touch that elevator.
"He says the minute he takes it, it becomes his," Joe said. "And then he's the man who stole the wheat, and then somebody organizes against him, and then the valley eats itself over a grain bin."
"He's right," said Harlan Batey.
"He's right," Joe agreed. "That's the problem with him. He's right about almost everything and he'll still kill a man in a road, and I have not worked out what to do with that and I'm not going to pretend to you that I have."
Alta looked at him for a long moment.
"Young man," she said. "Do you trust him?"
"No."
"Then why are you standing in this room?"
"Because trust isn't the thing that matters," Joe said. "What matters is whether his interests and ours point the same direction, and for this one thing, for about six months, they do. And I'd rather use that six months than spend it deciding whether I like him."
Alta sat back.
"That's the most sensible thing I've heard since the lights went out," she said.
They voted four to nothing.
Joe drove home in the dark with Bill asleep against the window and Sylvie talking the entire way, riding the high of it, replaying every minute.