Chapter 13 #2
"I thought I was looking at Arlan Crowe burning the wheat," she said, "and I have been up on that headhouse for six weeks deciding whether to kill you."
Crowe did not move.
"Well," he said. "That's honest."
"I decided no about eleven days ago."
"Why?"
"Because you sat at the bottom of this road all night on the ninth with eleven men and didn't come up it," Junie said, "and I was in the timber eighty yards from your truck and I watched you get out four times and stand there and get back in."
Crowe's jaw moved.
"You were eighty yards from me."
"I was eighty yards from you for six hours."
"And you didn't do anything."
"I didn't do anything," Junie said, "because a man who spends six hours deciding not to burn a house down is a different animal than one who does it, and I have made my whole life out of telling those two apart."
Joe went outside at seven, when the gray came, because he needed four minutes alone and could not get them inside.
The storm had blown itself out around five.
There was nineteen inches on the level and drifts to the eave on the north side of the shed, and the world was absolutely silent in the way that only happens after heavy snow.
He stood in it and breathed.
Crowe came out ten minutes later and stood next to him without saying anything for a while.
"Six three," Crowe said finally. "Heavy through the shoulders. Insulated coat."
"Yeah."
"Clipboard."
"Yeah."
"Degree in agricultural engineering from Utah State."
Joe turned.
"He said that to me in the parking lot," he said. "You weren't there."
"No," said Crowe. "But I know who he is now, and I've known since about four this morning when you said the word clipboard the second time, and I have been standing in your hallway for three hours trying to decide how to say this."
"Say it."
"His name is Dolan Teague."
"He told me Teague."
"He told you his last name and let you assume it was his only name," Crowe said. "That's the family habit. The one I put out on the fourth of October was Merrick Teague and he was twenty six years old and he was his little brother."
"And Dolan?"
Crowe put his hands in his coat pockets.
"Dolan Teague worked for me for four years," he said. "Two thousand nineteen to two thousand twenty three. He ran my yard."
Joe closed his eyes.
"Of course he did."
"He was the best man I ever had. He built the parts system. He built the invoice file, the one I gave you, the one with twenty two years in it. That was his."
"Why'd he leave?"
"He didn't leave. I fired him."
"For what?"
Crowe was quiet for a long moment.
"For being right," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the whole answer and you're not going to like it."
Crowe watched his own breath go up. "In 2023 Dolan came to me and said the towing business was going to be dead in ten years and that I ought to sell the yard and buy farm ground. And I said no. And he kept saying it. For eight months. In front of other men."
"So you fired him for insubordination."
"I fired him because he was undermining me in my own shop," Crowe said, "and because I was fifty two years old and he was thirty six and he was smarter than me, and because I did not like the way that felt."
Joe looked at him.
"You've thought about this a lot."
"I have thought about almost nothing else since eleven o'clock last night," Crowe said.
"Because here's the part that matters. I fired a man in 2023 for telling me the truth, and then in October I put his little brother out on a road for something the brother actually did, and that brother died in a culvert."
"And now he's got nineteen men."
"Eleven," said Crowe. "He's got eleven now. And Henfry, I want you to understand something about Dolan Teague, because I have spent six weeks assuming I was dealing with a man on a grudge and I was wrong."
"Go on."
"He's not on a grudge. He's executing a plan."
Crowe turned around. "He came to burn that wheat because he did the same calculation I did on the fourth day and he came out the other side of it. Whoever has food is in charge. He's not avenging his brother. He's building something, and his brother is the reason he's willing to do it ugly."
"And he's smarter than you."
"He's smarter than me," Crowe agreed. "That's the useful fact. You should hold onto it."
They came in and Joe called the whole house together at eight, which took eleven minutes and was the third time in three days.
He put the map on the table and he laid the entire situation out for thirty one people including the children, because he had stopped believing in carrying numbers alone.
"Here's what we know," he said.
He wrote it as he went.
"Six tons of wheat on this bench. Six months at a pound a person a day."
"Thirty one people, eleven of whom are under sixteen."
"Nineteen inches of snow and a road that will not open for a vehicle until March."
"Eleven men to the south under a man named Dolan Teague who wants the valley's food destroyed so that his is the only food."
"One man on a ridge with a hole in his side looking for a woman who is currently sitting at this table with her feet in a pot."
Somebody laughed. It broke something.
"And here's what we don't know," Joe said, "and I want all of you to hear this part."
He put the pencil down.
"We don't know if Teague can move in nineteen inches of snow. We don't know if he's got sleds, skis, snowshoes, or horses. We don't know if he's got food for eleven men through February, and if he doesn't, then in about six weeks he has to do something."
"He's got food," said Crowe.
"How much?"
"He hit three places on the river in October and he's got a stock trailer full of somebody's beef. Call it February. March if he's careful."
"So he's got the same clock we do."
"He's got a worse one. We've got wheat and he's got meat, and meat runs out and can't be stretched."
Joe looked around the room.
"Then here's what we do," he said. "And this is the part that nobody's going to like, because it is deeply boring."
"Boring," said Colby.
"We spend the winter getting good at four things and we do not fight anybody."
He held up a hand.
"One. Moving. Everybody in this house learns to travel on snow, and I mean everybody over twelve, and we build the gear ourselves starting today."
"With what?" said Ivers.
"Green willow and rawhide," said Junie, from the table. "There's willow in the creek bottom and you've got two hog hides in a barrel of lime in that shed that nobody's dealt with."
Everyone turned.
"I looked in the shed," she said.
"She looks in things," said Joe.
"Bentwood snowshoes," Junie said. "A pair takes a day and a half and they'll carry two hundred pounds on this snow. The Alaskan pattern. You steam the willow in a pipe over the stove and bend it in a form, and you lace it with babiche cut off a green hide in a spiral."
"You know how to do that?"
"I've made eleven pairs."
"Where?"
"That's not relevant."
Joe wrote SNOWSHOES on the board.
"Two," he said. "Seeing. We've got eleven weeks until the days get long enough to do anything, and in that time I want this bench to have eyes on both approaches without anybody standing outside in the cold at two in the morning."
"That's not possible," said Pruitt.
"It's completely possible," said Junie. "It's just tedious."
"How?"
"Tripwire and tin."
Junie set her cup down.
"You've got forty feet of picture wire and a box of screws in that shed and eleven hundred empty cans under the snow behind the goat pen," she said.
"You run a wire at ankle height across every approach a man can use, and on the house end you hang a string of cans in a place where somebody sleeping will hear it,
and you make it so that the wire is under the snow and the can string is in a woodshed and the two are connected by forty feet of line that runs over a nail."
"And the wind?"
"You put a stick in the middle of the run so wind loads don't carry. It takes a day to learn and then it works every night for five months for free."
Joe wrote ALARMS.
"Three," he said. "Food that isn't wheat."
"What's wrong with wheat?" said Colby.
Imogen answered.
"Nothing, for about eight weeks," she said. "Then everybody in this house gets constipated, then they get scurvy, then they get so tired of it they stop eating enough, which is the real danger nobody talks about."
"Appetite fatigue," said Delores.
"Appetite fatigue. People starve with food in front of them because they cannot make themselves eat one more bowl of the same thing." Imogen looked around. "So we sprout, and we render, and we trap, and we vary it, and we use every single spice in this house one at a time like they're money."
"What do we trap?" said Sylvie.
"Snowshoe hare," said Pruitt. "There's hundreds of them in that willow bottom and they're stupid and they run the same trails every night."
"With what?"
"Wire snares. Picture wire, twenty two gauge, a loop four inches across set four inches off the ground in a run."
"How many can we get?"
Pruitt thought.
"Eleven snares checked daily in good country? Two or three hares a day."
"That's protein every day forever," said Joe.
"That's protein with no fat on it at all," said Imogen. "Rabbit starvation is a real thing and it killed more trappers than bears did. You eat hare with lard or you don't eat it."
"We've got sixty two pounds of lard."
"Then we eat hare with lard."
Joe wrote TRAPLINE.
"And four," he said.
He stopped.
"Four is the one I want to say carefully," he said.
The room waited.
"Four is that we do not become Teague," Joe said. "That's the whole thing. That's the fourth job and it's the hardest one and it lasts all winter."
Nobody said anything.
"Somewhere in February," he said, "some family down that canyon is going to come up this road on foot because they've heard there's food up here. And they'll be right. And we'll have six tons of wheat and thirty one people and I am telling all of you right now, in November,
while everybody's warm and fed and nobody's scared, exactly what I intend to do."
"What?" said one of Crowe's men.
"Feed them," said Joe.
The kitchen stirred.
"How many?" the man said.