Chapter 12
Joe did not sleep more than two hours.
He came down at four in the morning and found Imogen already at the table with the lamp turned low and the note flattened out in front of her.
"You too," he said.
"I've been up since three."
"Reading that?"
"Reading the top half. The useful half." She turned the page toward him. "Joe, look at what he's actually given us."
Joe sat.
The first side of the page was not apology, or not only. It was a map in words.
Approaches to the bench, ranked. The rock shelf and how to get onto it without crossing open ground.
The one place on the north fence where a man could come out of the timber and be inside the goat pen in four seconds.
Three sight lines Joe had never considered, including one from a limestone knuckle two ridges over at eleven hundred yards that could see the whole back of the house.
"He's been solving my property for three months," Joe said.
"He has."
"This is better than anything I've got."
"I know."
Joe turned it over and read the bottom four lines again.
"And that," he said.
Imogen was quiet.
"I'm not telling Crowe," she said.
"That's what I was going to ask you."
"I decided at three fifteen and I've been sitting here trying to talk myself out of it."
She pulled her sweater closed. "And I can't. Because there are eleven people from that yard sleeping in our shed right now who I do not know, and Crowe is a man who moves information for a living, and if he knows there's a woman out there he'll use it, because that's all he does."
"Agreed."
"You agree that fast?"
"I've been agreeing since ten thirty last night," Joe said. "I just wanted you to say it first so I'd know I wasn't being paranoid alone."
"We're both being paranoid."
"Yes."
"Together, though."
"That's the whole marriage."
She almost laughed.
"Here's what bothers me," Joe said. "Marchetti wrote that line because he wanted us not to shoot her."
Imogen looked up.
"Say that again."
"Think about the phrasing." He tapped it. "She will not knock. She will be in your house and you will not know it until she speaks. That's not a warning about danger. That's an instruction about what to do in a specific second."
"You think he's telling us how not to kill her."
"I think a man who spent thirty years with that woman knows exactly how she enters a building, and he knows there are now thirty one people on this bench and eleven of them are armed strangers." Joe rubbed his eyes. "He's not warning us about her. He's warning her about us."
Imogen sat back.
"That's the most generous reading possible."
"It's also the one that fits the eleven days he's been putting rounds into headlights instead of people."
The elevator day started at six.
It was the biggest logistical operation any of them had ever attempted and it nearly came apart four separate times before noon.
Crowe brought the flatbed and a wrecker and his six men. Joe brought the diesel Ford and Pruitt and Colby and Ivers. Sylvie came, over Imogen's objection, and won the argument by pointing out that she was the only person on the mountain who had run a scale and a counter at the same time.
They put Harlan Batey in the cab of the wrecker with a blanket and a pencil.
Alta came at seven thirty in a horse drawn buckboard driven by her grandson, seventy nine years old and sitting up straight with the co-op minute book on her knees, and when she climbed down in that parking lot something happened to the mood of the whole operation.
"Where's the second board member?" Joe asked.
"Dead," said Alta. "October. And the fourth one's in Provo and might as well be on the moon."
"So it's two of you."
"It's two of us and a quorum is three." She looked at him over her glasses.
"So I have appointed Sylvie Kessick to the board of directors of this cooperative, pursuant to the bylaws provision for filling vacancies between annual meetings, and if anybody wants to argue about it they can take it up at the annual meeting in March."
Sylvie's mouth fell open.
"Ma'am," she said.
"Your granddad sat on this board for nine years before his heart went bad. Sit down and sign the page."
Sylvie Kessick, fifteen years old, signed the minute book with a pencil on the tailgate of a flatbed at seven forty in the morning on the twentieth of November.
They started the scale at eight.
It was a mechanical platform scale, a steel deck set into the concrete with a beam and poise weights in the scale house, and it did not need one watt of electricity,
which Joe had known intellectually and did not understand until he watched Ivers sweep four inches of dust off the beam and balance it with a screwdriver in eleven minutes.
"1957," Ivers said, patting the housing. "Fairbanks. This thing will outlive every person here."
The first family came at eight fifteen.
By nine there were eleven.
By eleven o'clock there were forty three people in that parking lot with wagons and garden carts and two horse drawn sleds and one man with a child's red wagon and eleven feed sacks, and the line went out past the scale house to the lane.
Joe stood at the base of bin two with a crank wheel in his hands and did not stop turning it for six hours.
It worked exactly the way Pruitt had said it would.
You cranked the slide gate open a few inches and nine hundred tons of wheat pushed down through the center draw under its own weight and came out in a stream the thickness of a man's leg, and it kept coming as long as the gate was open, and it stopped the instant you closed it.
No power. No pump. No motor. Just gravity and a steel gate and a wheel.
"It's beautiful," Joe said, about the fourth hour.
"It's a hole in the bottom of a can," said Ivers.
"It's beautiful."
They screened it.
That was Harlan Batey's contribution from the cab of the wrecker, shouted through the window, and it was the single most important technical instruction of the day.
"You cannot eat it out of the bin," he yelled. "There's dockage in there. Chaff, weed seed, dirt, broken kernels, and mouse."
"How do we screen it without power?"
"Cloth and wind, same as 1936. Gravity screen on a slope."
They built four of them in an hour out of hardware cloth and scrap two by four, angled at about thirty degrees, and a family would dump a bucket at the top and the wheat would run down and through while the chaff and the big trash rode over the edge.
Then they winnowed.
That was Delores Tandy's, sent down the mountain in Joe's head that morning.
You poured the screened wheat from one bucket into another from shoulder height in a steady wind, and the light material blew sideways and the heavy kernels dropped straight, and you did it three times.
By noon there were nine winnowing stations in that parking lot, all of them run by women over sixty, and a haze of chaff drifting east across the alfalfa.
"How do they all know how to do this?" Joe said.
Alta looked at him like he had asked why water was wet.
"Because somebody's mother showed them," she said.
The moisture question nearly broke him.
It came up at ten, from a man named Ferris who had hauled for a seed company for thirty years, and he asked it in the middle of the line in a voice that carried.
"What's the moisture on this?"
Joe did not know what he meant.
Harlan Batey did, and Harlan Batey went gray.
"Get me to the bin," he said.
They walked him to the bin. He put his hand in the stream and let it run through his fingers and then he took a handful and bit a kernel and listened to the sound it made.
"Eleven percent," he said. "Maybe twelve."
"Is that good?"
"That's dry. That's the driest it could be." He let out a breath. "We put that in at eleven point four in September because the fall was dry, and it has been sitting in a steel can at eleven percent in cold weather for six weeks, which is why that bin is not on fire right now."
"And for the families?"
"It means if they keep it cool and dry it'll hold for years." Batey turned to the line and raised his voice. "Anything above thirteen and a half percent will mold in a sealed bucket and kill you! This is under twelve! Keep it under twelve!"
"How do we know it stays under twelve?"
"Salt," Batey said. "Put a spoon of salt in a jar with a handful of wheat and shake it. If the salt clumps on the glass, your wheat's too wet. If it stays loose, you're fine."
Joe wrote it down on the back of his hand.
Within an hour every person in that parking lot had it written down somewhere, and Joe watched a woman of about thirty repeat it to a woman of about seventy, who nodded and said she'd always done it with rice.
The grinding question came at noon and had no good answer.
"What do we do with it?" a young man asked. "I've got two hundred pounds of wheat berries and no mill."
Joe had a mill. A hand crank grain mill that had cost him two hundred and eleven dollars and had sat unused in a cabinet for eighteen months.
There were four other mills in that entire valley that anybody knew of.
"You don't have to grind it," Alta said.
"You don't?"
"You can boil it whole. Simmer it two hours, it comes out like rice, and it will keep a man alive all winter."
She pointed at the line. "Or sprout it. Three days in a jar with a rinse twice a day, and you get greens in February, and greens in February is the difference between your teeth staying in your head and not."
"Sprouting," said Joe.
"Sprouting," Alta agreed. "Vitamin C. Nobody dies of scurvy in a house that sprouts."
Joe went and stood by the wrecker for a minute with his hand over his mouth.
"What?" said Batey.
"I've got forty three laminated cards," Joe said, "and not one of them says sprout the wheat."
"Well," said Batey, "now you know."
They loaded the six tons last.
That was Joe's decision and Crowe did not like it and said so once and then did not say it again.
"Everybody who came gets weighed out first," Joe said. "Every one of them, down to the last wheelbarrow. Then we load."
"And if the storm comes at three?"
"Then we take four tons instead of six."
They finished the public line at two forty in the afternoon.