Chapter 14
Joe read the line four times standing in the aspen.
Then he folded the paper back to the size of a stamp and handed it over, and Junie put it away without looking at it.
"You've carried that for two months," he said.
"Yes."
"Why show me now?"
"Because I've spent eleven days in your house," Junie said, "and you're the only person in it who will do the right thing with a piece of information he doesn't understand."
"Which is what?"
"Nothing," she said. "The right thing is nothing. You put it in a pocket and you carry it and you don't build anything on top of it."
They started down the slope.
"I've got a problem with that," Joe said.
"I know you do."
"It's about my wife."
"It's about a man who sold something in 1991 to somebody who might not be alive, in a state nine hundred miles away, with no roads and no phones," Junie said.
"Mister Henfry, there is no action available. There's no call to make, nobody to ask, nowhere to drive. There is only the thinking about it, and the thinking about it is free and it will eat you."
Joe put a snowshoe through the crust and caught himself on a sapling.
"You've done this before," he said.
"I have spent thirty years knowing things I couldn't do anything about." She did not slow down. "It's a skill. It's the actual skill, more than the shooting. You put it in a box and you set the box down and you pick it up in March when the roads open."
"And if it matters?"
"Then it'll still matter in March."
They came down into the yard and Joe stopped at the woodpile.
"I'm telling Imogen," he said.
Junie turned around.
"That's your marriage and not my business."
"I'm telling her because she'll know," Joe said. "She'll know inside of two days that I'm carrying something and then she'll spend a week deciding what it is, and the week is worse than the thing."
Junie considered him.
"That," she said, "is the first argument anybody's made to me in eleven years about that particular subject that I couldn't beat."
He told Imogen that night.
She read it in the mudroom with the door shut, exactly as she had read the list of names in October, and Joe watched her face.
She was quiet for a long time.
"Danny," she said.
"Yeah."
"My uncle Danny who ran the front counter and let me eat his lunch when I was nine."
"Yeah."
Imogen folded the paper.
"Do you know what I keep coming back to?" she said.
"Tell me."
"It's not what he sold. It's that he protected my father for thirty five years."
She handed it back. "Whatever came through that gate in 1991, my father took the weight of it. He hired two people and paid them eight hundred a month for eleven years, and he never told his own daughter, and the whole time it was his brother's doing."
"Is that better or worse?"
"It's the only version of my father that makes sense," Imogen said. "He was cheap and difficult and he kept nobody and he would absolutely have spent a hundred thousand dollars over eleven years to keep his brother out of a prison."
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, once, quickly.
"Put it in a pocket," she said.
"That's what Junie said."
"Junie's right. It's March or nothing." Imogen straightened. "And I have thirty one people to keep from getting lice."
December went by in a way that Joe would afterward have trouble describing.
It was the hardest month of his life and almost nothing happened in it.
They got up in the dark. They fed the stove. They melted snow, because the spring line froze on the eighth and Ivers and Pruitt spent two days digging it out and insulating it with straw and burlap, and after that they ran it at a trickle around the clock so it could not freeze again.
That trick cost them nothing and saved the winter.
They ground wheat. Four people on a two hundred and eleven dollar hand mill, in shifts, an hour and a half a day, for thirty one people's bread.
By the second week Joe's forearms had changed shape.
They ran the trapline. Three hares a day, then two, then four, then one, depending on weather and on how badly somebody had disturbed a run.
They sprouted. Eleven quart jars on a shelf near the stove, rinsed twice a day by Zachary Henfry and Merrit Crowe, who had turned the job into a competition with a scoring system that nobody else could follow.
They boiled sheets.
They checked heads. Hazel and Merrit did it every Sunday with a lamp and a fine comb, thirty one heads, and on the fourteenth of December they found lice on four people and the whole house went into a two day operation that Imogen had planned in October and executed like a military maneuver.
Nobody got sick. That was the thing. Through the whole month, in four rooms, with thirty one people, nobody got sick.
Imogen went to bed every night with her jaw tight and woke up every morning slightly amazed.
Christmas was strange and good.
They had no calendar agreement at first, because three different people had been counting days since October and had three different answers, and it turned into a two hour argument at the table that ended when Alta produced a co-op appointment book with the days crossed off since the fourth.
"The book wins," said Joe.
"The book always wins," said Alta.
They put the day at the twenty fifth and made it a holiday.
Delores baked with white flour for the first time since November, from twenty pounds she had been hiding, and produced something she called a fruit pudding out of dried apples and pork fat and eleven other things nobody asked about.
Bill Tandy, whose ribs had finally knit enough to let him laugh, told a forty minute story about a hog that got loose in a church parking lot in 1971.
The children made presents. That was the part Joe was not ready for.
Eleven children with no store and no money made things out of wood scraps and wire and bone, and Hazel gave her father a set of range cards she had rewritten in ink on stiff paper from the office at the elevator, laminated with pine pitch and waxed paper, with the distances corrected for snow.
"Snow changes it?" Joe said.
"It changes how it looks," Hazel said. "You said that. In October. You said everything looks like the same distance in the dark and now it all looks the same because it's white."
Joe looked at the cards for a long time.
"These are better than mine," he said.
"I know."
Zachary gave Merrit Crowe a wooden box with a sliding lid, made by hand, with four compartments in it.
"For your strips," he said. "So they don't roll around."
Merrit turned it over twice.
"There's a hole in the bottom," she said.
"That's so if it gets wet it drains."
"Huh," said Merrit Crowe, and put it in her coat, and kept it there for the rest of the winter.
Arlan Crowe watched that whole exchange from the doorway with his hat in his hands and then went outside for four minutes.
Junie gave nobody anything and on the twenty sixth of December there was a new hasp on the spring house door with four carriage bolts through the frame and washers on the inside, and nobody had seen her do it.
January was worse.
That was the month Joe had read about and had not believed.
The cold set in on the third and did not break for nineteen days. Minus eleven, then minus eighteen, then a week where the thermometer on the north wall of the shed did not come above zero at any point, day or night.
The house went strange.
Nobody fought, exactly. It was worse than fighting. People stopped talking.
Thirty one people in four rooms with no privacy and no daylight and the same food, and by the second week of January Joe could feel it in the house the way you feel weather in a joint.
It came apart on the eleventh over a dropped cup.
It was one of Crowe's men, a heavyset quiet man named Gilliam, and one of Bill's, and the cup was tin and it was empty and it hit the floor and made a noise, and Gilliam said something and the other man said something back,
and inside of eleven seconds two grown men were standing chest to chest in a kitchen with eleven children in it.
Imogen got between them.
She did not raise her voice.
"Gilliam," she said. "Sit down. Ferris, out to the shed, count something."
"He said."
"I heard exactly what he said and I am telling you that in three days neither of you will remember it and in three days I will still be the person who sets your arm."
They stood there.
"Now," said Imogen.
They went.
That night Joe found her sitting on the cellar stairs in the dark with the hatch pulled down over her head.
"Hi," he said.
"Go away."
"No."
"Joe, I need eleven minutes where nobody can see me."
He sat down on the step above her.
"Then I'll be a wall," he said. "Nobody gets past me and I won't look at you."
She cried for about four minutes.
"It's the noise," she said afterward. "It's not the work. It's that there is never one second in that house where somebody isn't making a sound."
"I know."
"I have not been alone since the ninth of October."
"I know."
"And I'm the one who told everybody there's no guests in this house, so I can't say any of this to anyone."
"You can say it to me."
"You're the worst possible person to say it to. You brought them."
Joe absorbed that.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
Imogen put her head against his knee.
"That wasn't fair," she said.
"It was a little fair."
"It was a little fair and I'm not sorry about the little part."
They sat in the dark on the cellar stairs.
"I need something," she said.
"Name it."
"I need a room with a door."
Joe thought about it for one second.
"Okay," he said.
"Joe, there is no room."
"Then I'll build one."
He built it in three days.
He and Ivers and two of Crowe's men framed a partition across the back eleven feet of the shed, insulated it with straw between double walls, cut a hole for a stovepipe, and put in a barrel stove Crowe's people had hauled up from the yard in November and never unpacked.
It was eleven feet by nine.
It had a door.
They called it the quiet room, and Imogen cried again when she saw it and then immediately made a rule about it that surprised everyone.
"It's not mine," she said.
"Imogen, I built it for you."