Chapter 10 #3
"Alive and extremely talkative." The man consulted the clipboard. "Mister Batey, is that true? About the dust?"
"You know it's true."
"I know it's true in a general sense. I'm asking whether it's true right now, in that bin, at eleven below, with that much fuel in it."
Batey opened his mouth and closed it.
"It's a real question," the big man said. "I'm not being clever. Cold air holds less vapor. I've been standing here for two hours doing that sum myself."
Joe stared at him.
"You know," he said.
"I've got a degree in agricultural engineering from Utah State and eleven years with a grain handling company in Idaho," the man said. "I know exactly what I'm standing in. I've had two men on a dust survey since nine o'clock and we've been wetting down the headhouse since ten."
He set the clipboard against his leg.
"But I appreciate you walking in here to tell me," he said. "That took something."
Joe's stomach was ice.
"Who are you?"
"My name doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
The big man considered him.
"Teague," he said.
Joe felt the ground move.
"Crowe put a man named Teague out on the road on the fourth of October," he said.
"Crowe put my brother out on the road on the fourth of October," the big man said, "for something my brother did, which I don't defend, and then Crowe let him walk into a valley with no food in it and he died in a culvert eleven days later of an infection he got from a dog bite."
He said it without any heat at all.
"And I have spent six weeks assembling nineteen men," Teague said, "and I have not touched one hair on Arlan Crowe's head, because Arlan Crowe cannot be beaten by nineteen men with rifles."
"So you're burning the wheat."
"I'm burning the only thing he wants."
"He doesn't want it," Joe said. "That's the whole point. He's been sitting on it for six weeks on purpose."
"I know," said Teague.
"Then why."
"Because four thousand people in this valley are going to be hungry in February," Teague said, "and when they are, they will follow whoever has food. And Arlan Crowe has food. And so do I. And when that elevator is gone there will be exactly two men left in this valley who matter,
and one of them killed my brother."
He looked at Joe with an expression that was almost kind.
"And I'll tell you the rest, since you walked in here," he said. "There's three of us. Not two. You've got food on that mountain and a nurse in your kitchen and a spring that runs year round, and I have been reading about you for a month."
Joe did not move.
"So here's what I'm offering," Teague said. "I'm going to give you Bill Tandy. Tonight. Alive, on his feet, walking out of that office."
"And?"
"And you're going to go home and stay on your mountain until March."
"That's it?"
"That's it. Don't come down. Don't haul for the board. Don't fix anybody's fans." Teague shrugged. "Sit on your forty acres with your wheat and your family and let this valley sort itself out, and come spring, whoever's left will deal with you honestly."
Joe stood in the light.
"And if I say no?"
"Then you and Mister Batey walk back down that lane," Teague said, "and I finish what I'm doing, and Bill Tandy comes with me."
Behind him, in the office doorway, two men appeared with an eighty one year old man between them.
Bill Tandy's face was a mess. One eye was closed. He was standing on his own, barely, and when he saw Joe in the light he started shaking his head.
"Don't," Bill said. "Don't you take that deal."
"Bill."
"Joe Henfry, you listen to me." The old man's voice came out ruined and enormous. "There's four thousand people in this valley and I am one man and I am eighty one years old and I have had a good life and Delores knows it."
"Bill, stop."
"You take that deal and there's no board and no scale and no book, and every family on this road starves in March while you sit up there counting jars."
Teague watched all of this without any expression at all.
"Mister Tandy," he said, "you are making this very difficult for me."
"I'm trying to."
Joe stood in the light and looked at the old man who had driven up his driveway on the first night with his hands already raised.
"I need a minute," he said.
"Take two," said Teague.
Joe turned around and looked down the dark lane.
And the sky at the end of it was wrong.
There was an orange glow, low, to the south, in the direction of the gravel pit, and as he watched, it brightened, and then a sound came across the frozen alfalfa, flat and distant and unmistakable.
Gunfire.
A lot of it.
Teague's head came up.
One of his men shouted something and pointed, and eleven men turned at once, and the whole careful geometry of that parking lot came apart in about four seconds.
"That's the yard," somebody said. "That's Crowe's yard."
Teague did not look surprised.
He looked at his watch.
"That's eight of my men," he said, "and they left at eleven."
And then, from the top of the concrete silos, a hundred and eleven feet above the parking lot, in the dark, a rifle fired once.
The work light on the stand exploded.