Chapter 9 #4
Pruitt found it. It was an old one, well established, holding back about two acres of shallow water, and Ivers cut the center of it out with a bar and a chainsaw in twenty minutes.
The water came out slow, which is how beaver ponds drain, and it spread across the bottom in a sheet an inch deep and eleven acres wide.
Then it froze.
Then they broke it, in patches, with sledges, and let it refill and freeze again.
By the third day there was a mile of bottom land that looked exactly like solid frozen ground and was, in about forty places, a shell of ice over six inches of slush and mud.
"They'll get one truck through," Pruitt said, standing on the bank looking at it.
"That's fine."
"One truck's not nothing."
"One truck is a hundred percent better than four," Joe said. "And the men in the second truck spend two hours in the dark in the cold pushing, and every one of those hours they're thinking about how much they want to be here."
Then they made the front door good.
That was the other half of it and it was more work.
They cleared the county road approach. Joe personally dragged brush off the shoulders of the last half mile with the truck and a chain.
They took the chain off the lower gate and hung it open.
They put a barrel by the gate with a lantern in it, unlit, and a hand painted sign that said WATER AVAILABLE ASK AT HOUSE.
Ivers thought he had lost his mind.
"You're inviting them."
"I'm choosing the ground," Joe said. "There's a difference and I need everybody to understand it."
He walked them through it at the table that night with the map and four candles.
"Here's what I know," he said. "I cannot win a fight against organized men at four in the morning on a mile and a half of river bottom. I cannot even find them out there."
"Agreed," said Pruitt.
"But here." He put his finger on the second switchback. "Four hundred and ten yards from my house. The road pinches to eleven feet wide with a cut bank on the uphill side and a forty foot drop to the creek on the other. There is no way off that road for a hundred yards in either direction."
"And you've got range cards on it," said Ivers.
"I've got range cards on it, I've got a rifle rest built into a woodpile, I've got two prepared positions above it, and I've got a five hundred grain bullet that will stop anything on wheels."
He sat back.
"If they come up the front, they come into that. And if they come up the back, they spend four hours in a swamp and arrive cold and wet and late and angry, and they arrive on foot, and they arrive at the bottom of a four hundred yard open slope."
Imogen said, "You've thought about this a lot."
"I've thought about nothing else since Tuesday."
"Joe." She was looking at him with an expression he did not like. "How much of this is the freeze and how much of this is you finally getting to do the thing you've read about for twenty six months?"
The table went quiet.
Joe did not get angry.
He sat with it for a long moment, because she had earned the right to ask and because he thought she might be right.
"Some," he said.
"How much?"
"I don't know. Enough that you noticed." He turned the pencil over in his fingers. "But Imogen, the note doesn't make the bottom road real. The bottom road was already real. Colby knew about it in September because he got stuck in it."
"That's fair."
"And the freeze isn't a prediction. It's minus four out there right now."
Imogen looked out the black window.
"Then say the last part," she said. "The part you've been carrying around all day."
Joe set the pencil down.
"If they get past the switchback," he said, "we don't fight for the house."
Nobody moved.
"Say that again," said Delores.
"If armed men get above the second switchback in numbers, everybody goes out the back and up the creek to the cache. Not the spring house. The cache, which nobody knows about, which has food and blankets and a stove pipe and four coats in it, because Imogen made me build it that way."
"And the house?"
"They can have the house."
"Joe, everything's in that house."
"Two thirds of everything is in that house," Joe said, "and one third is in a hole in a hillside four hundred yards northwest, and that one third will keep nine people alive until March, and I would rather have March in a dugout than a nice kitchen with people dead in it."
Bill Tandy said, very quietly, "You've been planning for this since the day Stance died."
"I've been planning for it since the day I saw a man walk up the middle of a road and not hurry," Joe said.
The freeze came on the fourteenth.
Minus eleven on the thermometer Joe had kept in the plywood box, hanging now on the north wall of the shed, and the ground rang under a boot heel like a struck pipe.
They were ready, insofar as anyone is ever ready.
Night one: nothing.
Night two: nothing, except a coyote that had Colby awake and shaking at two in the morning.
Night three: a light in the river bottom at eleven forty, a single moving point that Joe watched through binoculars for forty minutes and never identified. It came half a mile up the flat and then it stopped for a long time and then it went back.
Night four: nothing.
Night five, Joe slept four hours for the first time in a week, and woke up furious with himself, and went out at dawn to find Pruitt already on the roof with a rifle.
"Anything?"
"Nothing."
Night six was the seventeenth of November.
At ten fifteen, Mack came off the rug and stood in the middle of the front room and faced east.
Not north, toward the timber. Not down the drive.
East.
Joe put his hand on the dog's back and felt the ridge come up under his palm.
"Positions," he said.
It took ninety seconds and it was silent and Joe would think about that later with something like pride. Nine people, four of them under sixteen or over seventy five, in their assigned spots in ninety seconds with no lights and no talking.
Imogen took the children and Delores down the cellar stairs. Sylvie was not with them, because Sylvie had refused four days ago in a conversation Joe had lost.
She was in the mudroom with the shotgun Bill had taught her on, and she was fifteen, and she was steady.
Joe went out to the woodpile.
Pruitt went up the bank.
Bill took the front window.
And nothing happened for eleven minutes.
Then, from the east, from the direction of the goat pen and the fence line and absolutely not from any road at all, a voice said:
"Henfry. Don't shoot. I'm coming in from the pen and I'm alone."
Joe's whole body went cold.
He knew that voice.
He had heard it in his own kitchen eleven days ago saying, this is genuinely good work.
"Ivers?" he called.
"It's me."
"Why are you in my goat pen at ten thirty at night?"
"Because I walked eleven miles up the river bottom to get here and I did not want to come up your road," Ivers said. "And Mister Henfry, you need to come out here right now, because I have got a man with me and he is in very bad shape and I could not carry him the last four hundred yards."
Joe did not move.
"You said you were alone."
"I said I'm coming in alone. He's laying in the ditch by your east fence." Ivers's voice cracked. "Joe, I've been walking since four o'clock this afternoon."
Joe looked up the bank.
He could not see Pruitt and that was correct.
"Come forward," he called. "Hands out. Stop at the corner of the pen."
Ivers came.
He came slowly and badly, limping, and when he got to the corner of the pen and Joe put a red light on him for one second, Joe saw that the little bald man's coat was frozen stiff to the waist and that he had gone through the ice somewhere and kept walking.
"Where'd you go in?"
"Two miles back."
"How long ago?"
"Four hours."
Joe swore.
"Sylvie!" he shouted. "Get Imogen up here, we've got a cold water immersion and a four hour walk after it!"
Then he was moving, out past the pen, along the east fence line, with a headlamp on red and the rifle slung.
He found the man in the ditch at a hundred and eleven yards.
He was face down and he had crawled the last part, because there was a drag mark.
Joe got him over.
Gray face. Beard, short and gray. Green coat, plain, not camouflage, the sleeves dark with something that had frozen.
A rifle with a wood stock lying eleven feet back in the weeds where he had dropped it.
Joe stared down at the man who had knocked on his door twice.
The man's eyes came open.
They tracked. They found Joe's face and stayed there, and his mouth moved, and nothing came out on the first try.
Joe got down on one knee.
"Don't talk," he said.
The man's hand came up and got a fistful of Joe's coat and pulled with more strength than any dying man should have had.
"They're not coming up your road," he said.
"What?"
"Tonight. They're not coming here." The words came out in pieces. "They went to the elevator."
Joe's whole world stopped.
Bill Tandy and Sylvie Kessick had been sleeping at Harlan Batey's for four days.
"How many?" Joe said.
The man's grip loosened.
"Nineteen," he said. "And they've got a fuel truck."