Chapter 11 #5
"Twelve thousand pounds." Batey's voice was thin but it was steady. "Six tons. That's a pound a day for thirty one people for a hundred and ninety days, which gets you to the first week of June, which is two weeks past when that road opens in an ordinary year."
"And if it's not an ordinary year?"
"Then you're eleven miles from a bin with eight hundred and ninety tons in it and you've got a flatbed."
Joe nodded slowly.
"Six tons," he said.
"Six tons, weighed on the scale, written in the book, signed by me." Batey put a hand out. "Get me a pencil and don't let me write it while the room's moving."
"We'll do it in the morning."
"You'll do it in the morning," Batey agreed, "and Henfry."
"Yes sir."
"There's a hundred and eleven families on that road between here and there," the old man said. "And every one of them is going to see a flatbed go by five times in one day loaded with wheat."
The room got very quiet.
"Yeah," Joe said.
"So what are you going to do about that?"
Joe looked at Crowe.
Crowe looked back at him and said nothing at all, and Joe understood that this was deliberate, that Arlan Crowe had seen this problem hours ago and had decided to let another man solve it.
"We take eleven families with us," Joe said.
Batey's eyes came up.
"Say that again."
"Eleven families on that road. We stop at every single one of them on the first trip, and we tell them the board has convened, and that the scale is running, and that anybody who comes to the elevator tomorrow with a wagon or a sled or a wheelbarrow gets their share weighed and written in the book."
Crowe said, "That's a hundred people at that elevator tomorrow."
"Yes."
"With Teague eleven miles south."
"Yes."
"That is the single most dangerous thing anybody has proposed in six weeks."
"It's also the only version where we come home with six tons and still get to live in this valley," Joe said.
Harlan Batey started to laugh and then stopped because it hurt his head.
"Son," he said. "You've been out here nine months."
"I know."
"You've been out here nine months and you just solved it the way this valley would have solved it in 1936."
They ran until dark.
Joe took Pruitt and Colby and Sylvie and the flatbed down the canyon at five, in the last light, and they knocked on eleven doors.
Nine of them opened.
It was the strangest four hours of Joe's life. Standing on porch after porch in the dark, saying the same eleven sentences, watching people's faces move from fear to suspicion to something that was almost painful to look at.
One woman would not open the door and talked to them through it.
One man came out with a rifle and cried in his own driveway.
At the eighth house a woman of about sixty listened to the whole thing and then said, "Who's paying for it?"
"Nobody's paying for it. It's yours. You're members."
"I haven't got anything to trade."
"You don't need anything to trade."
She stood there in the doorway for a long moment.
"Mister, I have been eating boiled potatoes since the fourth of November," she said. "And I have four grandchildren in this house and I have been giving them my share and telling them I already ate."
Joe did not say anything.
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow. Bring anything that rolls."
They came home at ten thirty.
Joe came up the drive exhausted and lit up in a way he had not been in weeks, and he pulled into the yard and saw thirty one people's worth of lamplight in the windows and thought, we might actually do this.
Then he saw Imogen standing on the porch.
She had her coat on over her nightclothes and her arms wrapped around herself and she came down the steps before the truck had fully stopped.
"Joe."
"What. Who is it."
"Nobody's hurt."
"Imogen."
"Sam's gone," she said.
Joe got out.
"Gone."
"He got up at eight o'clock. He got dressed, he took his rifle, he took a pack, and he walked out the back door past Pruitt, and Pruitt saw him go and let him go because he's a grown man with a hole in his side."
"Where?"
"North. Up the ridge, toward the saddle." Imogen held out a folded piece of paper. "He left this on the cot. It's for both of us and he wrote it properly this time."
Joe unfolded it under the porch lamp.
It was a full page. Small, cramped writing, front and back, and Joe read the whole thing standing in the cold with his wife's hand on his arm.
Most of it was apology.
Some of it was instruction, about the ridge and the rock shelf and where the sight lines were and how a man could get above the second switchback without being seen, and it was the single most valuable document anybody had produced on that bench in six weeks.
The last four lines were separate, at the bottom, in different pencil.
Joe read them twice.
Then he sat down on the step.
"What," Imogen said. "What does it say."
He turned it so she could see.
I AM GOING TO FIND HER BEFORE SOMEBODY ELSE DOES.
TELL NOBODY THERE IS A WOMAN ON THAT SILO. NOT CROWE. NOT ANYONE.
IF SHE COMES HERE SHE WILL NOT KNOCK.
SHE WILL BE IN YOUR HOUSE AND YOU WILL NOT KNOW IT UNTIL SHE SPEAKS.