Chapter 11 #2
"Whose are you?" Crowe said.
"Teague's."
Everybody went very still.
"I was Teague's," the man said. "Till about two hours ago."
"Say your piece."
"There's a man on top of your silos."
"I'm aware."
"He's been on them since about eight o'clock last night," the man said, "and he let us work for four hours, and then when your boy walked into the light he shot the lamp out and he's been sitting up there ever since putting one round every eleven minutes into anything that moves."
"He's still up there?"
"He was at three."
Crowe and Joe looked at each other.
"How many did he hit?" Joe said.
"Nobody."
"Nobody?"
"Not one man," the ex Teague man said. "Eleven rounds. Every headlight, both radiators, the work light, a fuel pump, the hinge off the scale house door, and one right through the crown of Teague's hat while he was standing on the tanker step yelling at us."
"Through his hat."
"Took the crown out and never touched his head." The man swallowed. "And that's when four of us walked off, mister. That wasn't a fight. That was somebody grading us."
Joe felt the hair come up on his arms.
"Where's Teague now?"
"Pulled south an hour ago. He's got eleven men and one truck that runs and a three thousand gallon tanker that won't."
"And the wheat?"
The man almost laughed.
"Still in the bin," he said. "Every ounce of it. They pumped about four hundred gallons of diesel onto the concrete pad and into a collection hopper and never got a drop into bin two, because the man on the silo shot the transfer pump at ten o'clock and nobody could get near it after that."
Joe put both hands on the truck's fender.
"Nine hundred tons," he said.
"Nine hundred tons."
The sun came up on the bench at seven.
There were thirty one people on Joe Henfry's forty acres.
He stood in the yard in the freezing gray and watched them coming out of the house and the shed and the lean to, wrapped in blankets, and he did the count four times and got thirty one every time.
Nine of his. Nineteen of Crowe's, counting women and children. Harlan Batey. Ivers. And the man in the green coat, who was still alive, which nobody had expected.
He went inside.
Imogen was at the kitchen table with her head down on her arms, asleep sitting up, and she came awake the instant the floor creaked.
"Bill," she said.
"Alive. Face is bad. Two ribs, I think."
"Harlan?"
"Scalp split and a concussion."
"Sylvie?"
"Shot a ceiling and drove a truck."
Imogen put her face in her hands and breathed.
"Tell me about yours," Joe said.
"Ivers is fine. Genuinely fine, which is a miracle. Core temp came up in four hours and he's eating."
"And the other one?"
Imogen lifted her head.
"He's going to live," she said. "Which I would not have told you at eleven o'clock last night."
"What was it?"
"Through and through, left flank, four days old and packed with something he'd put in it himself."
She rubbed her eyes. "Joe, he'd packed it with yarrow and sphagnum moss and he'd done it correctly. That's why there was no sepsis. He kept himself alive for four days with plant material and it worked."
"That's real?"
"It's extremely real and I have never seen anybody actually do it."
"Has he talked?"
"He's said four things and all of them were about you." Imogen stood up. "He wanted to know if you got to the elevator in time, and if Bill Tandy was alive, and whether the wheat burned."
"And the fourth?"
Imogen hesitated.
"He asked whether the shooter on the silo was a big man or a small one," she said.
Joe went very still.
"He knows who's on the silo."
"He knows there's somebody on the silo," Imogen said, "which is more than we knew four hours ago, and I don't know how."
Joe slept for three hours and woke up at eleven with the house roaring.
Thirty one people. Eleven of them children.
It sounded like a school.
He came down to find Delores Tandy and two of Crowe's women running the kitchen like a shift change, and Hazel showing four strange children where the water buckets were, and Zachary conducting an inventory with a nine year old girl in a too big coat as his assistant.
"We recounted the lids," Merrit Crowe informed him.
"And?"
"Four hundred and eleven. Zachary was off by five."
"I was not off by five," said Zachary. "Five got used."
"Then you should have written it down."
"I did write it down."
"Then show me the page."
Joe left them to it.
He found Crowe outside behind the shed, sitting on a stump, cleaning the machetes with a rag and a can of oil.
He had washed. He had a different shirt on, someone else's, too big.
"You've been at that a while," Joe said.
"About an hour."
"They clean?"
"They were clean forty minutes ago."
Joe sat down on the woodpile.
They stayed that way for a bit.
"Thirty one people," Crowe said.
"Yeah."
"On forty acres."
"Yeah."
"You want to know the honest number?"
"Go ahead."
"Thirty one people, at eighteen hundred calories a day, which is starvation rations but survivable if nobody's doing heavy labor, which everybody will be." Crowe's hands kept moving on the blade. "That's fifty five thousand eight hundred calories a day. You've got, what?"
"Four hundred and eleven pounds of wheat left, two hundred and nineteen quarts of meat, sixty two pounds of lard, two hundred and ninety pounds of elk in the snow cache, four hundred pounds of pork in various states, and about eight hundred pounds of rice, beans and oats combined."
Crowe stopped moving.
"Say the elk again."
"Two hundred and ninety."
"You killed an elk."
"I killed an elk in the second week of November at a hundred and ninety yards off a woodpile rest," Joe said, "and I have been unbearable about it ever since."
"He has," said Imogen, from the corner of the shed.
Crowe almost smiled.
"That's about six weeks," he said. "Thirty one people. Six weeks, maybe seven."
"That's my number too."
"So we're eating the elevator or we're not eating."
"That's right."
Crowe set the machete down across his knees.
"Then I've got to say the thing I don't want to say," he said. "And I want you to hear it from me before you hear it from your own head at three in the morning."
"Say it."
"You should send us down the hill."
Joe did not answer.
"Nineteen mouths," Crowe said. "Mine. Six men and eleven women and children. That's the difference between your family making it to May and your family making it to Christmas."
"And where would you go?"
"Back to the yard. It's still standing. The shop's got a stove and there's food in the cellar under the floor and I've got fuel."
"And eleven men under Teague who know exactly where it is and who just found out they can walk into it."
Crowe was quiet.
"Yes," he said.
"So you'd be dead in a week."
"Probably."
"And your daughter?"
Arlan Crowe looked down at the blade across his knees.
"Say the rest," Joe said.
"There is no rest. That's the whole calculation. I know what it is, I've run it eleven times, and it comes out the same every time." Crowe's voice did not change. "And I'm still sitting on your stump, which tells you exactly what kind of man I am, and I'd like it on the record that I offered."
Joe stood up.
"Come here," he said. "I want to show you something."
He walked Crowe out past the shed and up the slope forty yards, to the edge of the timber where the ground opened up and you could see the whole thing at once.
The bench. The creek bottom. The ridge going up behind, timber to the tree line and white rock above it. And to the west, across eleven miles of empty air, the Wasatch standing up in the afternoon light like a wall at the edge of the world.
"You know why we're alive?" Joe said.
"Your cellar."
"No."
"Your gun."
"No." Joe pointed. "That."
Crowe looked.
"Snow," he said.
"Five hundred inches a year on the high country," Joe said.
"That mountain catches every storm that comes off the lake and squeezes it dry and stacks the water up in a form that doesn't evaporate and doesn't run off in a week. It releases it. All summer. Every summer. Whether anybody's tending it or not."
"That's a lot of feeling about weather."
"I have a speech about this."
"I've heard about the speech."
"Everyone has heard about the speech." Joe put his hands in his pockets.
"Crowe, I looked at four states. Wyoming's got no timber and wind that'll take the roof off a barn. Montana's got a ninety day growing season and every good valley bought up by people who've never rendered a hog.
Idaho's best ground is a desert that only farms because of electric pumps and those pumps died on the first night."
"And Utah."
"Utah has snowpack, elevation, and timber, all stacked on top of each other."
Joe pointed up. "I can walk from that porch to alpine timber in forty minutes and down to a river bottom in an hour. That's three different food environments in one morning. Elk high, deer middle, fish and willow low. And a spring that ran three gallons a minute in the worst August in nine years."
"And a religion with a food storage doctrine," Crowe said.
Joe turned.
"You know about that?"
"Mister Henfry, I was born in this valley. My mother had four hundred pounds of wheat in a crawlspace my entire childhood and she rotated it every year and I thought everybody's mother did that."
"That's the fourth reason and it's the biggest one. There are grandmothers down that canyon with three years of food in a basement because a bishop told them to do it in 1978 and they never stopped."
Joe looked out at the mountains. "I didn't pick a place. I picked a place full of people who already knew this could happen."
Crowe was quiet for a while.
"That's why you're not sending me down the hill," he said.
"That's why I'm not sending you down the hill."
"Because of a doctrine you don't believe in."
"Because of what it built," Joe said. "There's nine hundred tons of wheat in a bin at the bottom of this canyon that nobody has touched in six weeks in a valley of four thousand hungry people, and last night nineteen men tried to burn it and one man on a silo stopped them without killing anybody."
He turned around.