Chapter 13 #3
"I don't know."
"That's not a plan."
"No," Joe agreed. "It isn't. So here's the plan. Every person who comes up this road gets one meal, hot, and one night in the shed, and a pound of wheat, and directions to the elevator with a note in my handwriting that says the scale is running and the board sits on the first of every month."
"And if they want to stay?"
"Then they work and they eat the same as everybody and we all go hungrier in April."
"And if there's forty of them?"
"Then there's forty of them and I'll stand here and say the same thing," Joe said. "And if I ever stop saying it, I want one of you to take me out to that woodpile and remind me what I said in November."
He looked around the room.
"Anybody want to argue?"
Nobody did.
Then Alta's voice, from the corner, where she had been sitting all morning wrapped in a quilt with the minute book on her lap:
"I'd like it in the minutes."
"Ma'am?"
"Somebody get me a pencil," said Alta. "This is a co-op matter now and I want it written down, because in February he's going to be tired and hungry and somebody's going to need to show him the page."
They worked.
That was the shape of the next eleven days, and it was the strangest, most crowded, most oddly happy stretch of the entire winter.
Thirty one people in four rooms and a shed, and every single one of them with a job.
Junie ran the snowshoe operation out of the shed with four teenagers and a steam pipe and a bending form she built in two hours. The first pair came off the form crooked and the second pair was perfect and by the sixth day there were eleven pairs hanging on the wall.
She did not talk much. She taught by putting her hands on top of somebody else's hands and moving them.
Hazel took to it immediately.
"She's good," Junie told Joe on the fourth day, not looking up from a lacing.
"She's eleven."
"She's eleven and she does the same motion the same way four hundred times without getting bored, which is the entire skill." Junie pulled a strand tight. "I'd have hired her."
Pruitt ran the trapline with Colby and Sylvie and they got their first hare on the third day and brought it into the kitchen like a trophy.
By the eleventh day they were getting three a day and had learned the hard way that a snare set on a trail with fresh tracks catches nothing, because the tracks are from the night you disturbed it.
Ivers rebuilt the mudroom window with two bolts and a piece of steel strap and then did every window in the house.
Delores made soap.
Bill Tandy, with two cracked ribs and a face like a bad sunset, sat in a chair by the stove and taught eleven adults the damper rule and then taught the children a second time in a way that made them laugh.
Crowe's men worked. All six of them, without complaint, and by the ninth day Joe had stopped thinking of them as Crowe's men and had started thinking of them by name.
And every night, the can string in the woodshed hung silent.
On the twelfth day, the first of December, Joe went up to the cache with Junie to check the shoring and the temperature and the seals.
They went on snowshoes. Joe's third time out, Junie's eleven hundredth, and he fell twice and she did not comment on either one.
The cache was perfect. Dry, cold, nothing moved, nothing found by anything with teeth.
They stood in the aspen afterward and Joe looked down at the bench and the house and the smoke going straight up in the still cold air.
"I want to ask you something," he said.
"All right."
"On the second of October you changed your mind about coming. What changed it?"
Junie was quiet for a long moment.
"You don't have to answer."
"No, I'll answer." She adjusted a strap. "I've been deciding whether to for eleven days."
She looked out at the valley.
"Sam called me in August and I said no because I didn't want the job," she said. "Then on the first of October I got a letter."
"From who?"
"Danny Marchetti."
Joe turned.
"Imogen's uncle."
"Imogen's uncle, seventy seven years old, who has never in his life had my address."
Junie's jaw worked. "It was four lines and it was written by a man who had clearly been sitting with it for a while, and it said, I hired Sam and Sam won't take money from you but you're the better one and I'm asking anyway."
"What else?"
"He said there was nobody left."
"Nobody left of what?"
Junie looked at him.
"Of the people who knew," she said. "That's the phrase he used. He said, Junie, there's nobody left who knows, and my niece doesn't know, and when I go there's nobody at all, and I can't die with it."
Joe felt the cold go through his coat.
"Knows what?"
"I don't know."
"Junie."
"Mister Henfry, I have read that letter about four hundred times and I do not know," she said. "He didn't say. He was seventy seven and frightened and he wrote four lines and mailed it and I got in a truck three days later."
"Did you write back?"
"There wasn't time. The lights went out on the ninth."
Joe stood in the snow and looked down at his own house.
"So somewhere in California," he said slowly, "there's a seventy seven year old man who knows something about my wife's family that he thought was worth forty one thousand dollars and two hired people."
"That's right."
"And now there's no mail and no phones and nine hundred miles."
"That's right."
Junie turned to go.
"And one more thing," she said.
"What?"
"He put a second page in that envelope," she said. "One line. And I've been carrying it since October and I did not show it to Sam and I'm not going to show it to your wife until I understand it."
"Show me."
She took off a glove and dug in an inside pocket and came out with a square of paper folded to the size of a stamp.
Joe opened it with cold fingers.
One line, in an old man's shaky hand:
IF ANYBODY EVER COMES ASKING ABOUT 1991, IT WASN'T MY brOTHER WHO SOLD IT. IT WAS ME.