Chapter 12 #3
"What can you even do?" asked one of Crowe's men.
"With an early one? Clove oil, saltwater, and keeping it clean, and about half of them settle down."
"And a late one?"
Imogen did not look away from him.
"With a late one I drain it," she said, "with what I've got, in this kitchen, with somebody holding your shoulders."
Nobody said anything for a while.
"Five," she said.
Five fingers.
"Smoke."
She pointed at the stove.
"That stove is going to run twenty four hours a day for five months with eleven children in this house, and the two things that kill people in winter shelters are carbon monoxide and fire. There is a rule about the damper and Bill Tandy is going to teach it to every adult here tomorrow,
and there will be a bucket of sand at that stove at all times."
"Six."
Six fingers.
"Feet," said Imogen.
"Feet?"
"Wet feet in a cold house for five months is trench foot, and trench foot is how you lose toes, and it is completely preventable and completely relentless."
She looked around the room. "Everybody gets two pairs of socks. One on and one drying. When you come inside, the wet ones go on the line, every single time, even when you're tired. Especially when you're tired."
She put her hand down.
"Last thing," she said.
The room waited.
"Nineteen of you came here from a gravel pit with nothing," Imogen said. "Twelve of us have been here since the beginning. That is going to matter in this house whether anybody says it out loud or not, and it is going to come out in February over something stupid like a dropped cup."
Somebody shifted.
"So I'm saying it out loud now, in November, while everybody's still polite," she said.
"There is no guest in this house. There are thirty one members of one household and every one of them works and every one of them eats the same amount, and the day I hear somebody say your food or our house is the day we have a problem that will be much harder to fix than lice."
She stepped down off the chair.
Nobody applauded. It was not that kind of speech.
But Joe watched a woman he had never spoken to walk over to Delores Tandy and ask what time the soap making started, and he watched two of Crowe's men go straight out to the mudroom and look at the bucket situation,
and he understood that his wife had just done something he could not have done in a year.
Crowe came and stood next to him.
"That was extraordinary," he said.
"I know."
"She's been thinking about that for days."
"She's been thinking about it since the first night," Joe said. "She told me in October that the thing that would kill us wasn't going to be a man with a rifle."
"She's right."
"She's usually right."
Crowe watched the room for a moment.
"Henfry."
"Yeah."
"Six tons of wheat and thirty one people and a closed road," he said. "You understand what happened today."
"We ate."
"No." Crowe shook his head slowly. "Sixty one households came to that elevator and got weighed out and signed a book. In a valley where nineteen men tried to burn it two nights ago."
"So?"
"So by tomorrow night every single person on that road knows there's a scale running and a board sitting and a Californian turning the wheel," Crowe said. "And by Christmas, so does Teague."
Joe turned.
"Say the rest."
"There is no rest. I'm telling you that you did a good thing today and that good things have consequences, and that the consequence of today is that you are now a person in this valley instead of a man on a hill."
"That was always going to happen."
"Yes," Crowe said. "But it happened today, and you should know the date."
The house went down at eleven.
It took an hour to get eleven children asleep and another twenty minutes to get the watch schedule sorted, and Joe went around the whole place himself at midnight with a candle.
Four rooms. Thirty one people. Bodies on the floor in rows, wrapped in everything the house owned.
The stove ticking.
Mack lying across the doorway of the front room with his chin on his paws and his eyes open.
Joe stood in his own kitchen at half past midnight and looked at all of it and felt, for the first time since the ninth of October, something that was not fear.
Then the storm gusted and the house shuddered and he went up to bed.
He woke at four because the dog was standing up.
Mack was not barking. He was not growling. He was standing in the middle of the front room, absolutely rigid, facing the mudroom door, with the ridge up along his spine.
Joe came down the stairs without a light, stepping over three sleeping people, and got to the kitchen doorway and stopped.
The mudroom door was closed.
There was snow on the floor in front of it. A wet fan of it, melting, eleven inches across.
The bar was still across the door on the inside.
Joe stood there in the dark with his heart going and did the only thing he could think of, which was to put his hand flat on the dog's head and say nothing at all.
And a woman's voice, from somewhere behind him in his own kitchen, said:
"Don't reach for it, Mister Henfry. I'm the one who's been shooting the lights out."