Chapter 14 #2
"It's a schedule," she said. "Every adult in this house gets an hour a week in that room alone and nobody knocks, and the children get it in pairs because a child alone for an hour is a punishment, and I'll take my hour like everybody else."
"That's thirty one hours a week."
"That's four and a half hours a day and the room sits empty at night."
"And if somebody doesn't want theirs?"
"Then they trade it," Imogen said. "And within about two weeks it's going to become the most valuable currency on this mountain and I want everybody to have the same amount of it to start."
She was right.
By the end of January, an hour in the quiet room bought a week of latrine duty, and Colby had traded four of his hours for a knife.
The house came back together.
Not all at once. But by the twentieth of January the silence had lifted and people were talking again, and Joe sat down one night and tried to work out how much of that was the room and how much was the cold breaking, and could not separate them.
The first family came up the road on the twenty fourth of January.
It was four in the afternoon and they came on foot up the drive from the county road, and the can string in the woodshed rang because they came through the tripwire at the second switchback instead of going around it.
Six people. A man, a woman, and four children, and the youngest was three and was being carried.
They had walked eleven miles from a place down the river.
Joe met them at the woodpile with his hands empty and the Ruger leaning against the shed forty feet behind him, which was a decision he made in about half a second and did not regret.
The man could barely talk.
"They said up the canyon," he said. "A fella on the road said there was people up the canyon."
"Come inside," Joe said.
"I've got no money."
"Come inside."
They fed them. Hot wheat porridge with lard and a hare in it and bread, and the three year old fell asleep eating and had to be carried to a blanket by the stove.
They put them in the shed with the barrel stove, all six of them, in the quiet room, which Imogen unilaterally suspended for the night and nobody objected to.
In the morning Joe gave the man six pounds of wheat and a note in his own handwriting.
The note said: THE CO-OP SCALE IS RUNNING. THE BOARD SITS THE FIRST OF EVERY MONTH AT THE ELEVATOR. MEMBERS GET WEIGHED OUT AND WRITTEN IN THE BOOK. NO CHARGE. ASK FOR HARLAN BATEY OR ALTA OR SYLVIE KESSICK. SIGNED JOE HENFRY, COUNTY ROAD ELEVEN.
The man read it four times.
"Is this real?"
"It's real."
"Mister, I've been eleven miles and everything anybody's told me since November has been a lie."
"Then go down there on the first and find out," Joe said. "And if it's a lie, come back up here and tell me and I'll do something about it."
They watched the family go down the drive at eight in the morning.
Nobody said anything for a while.
Then Crowe, standing at the window with his coffee, said:
"Six pounds."
"Six pounds."
"That's six days of one person's ration."
"That's right."
"How many are coming behind them?"
"I don't know."
"You know it's not one."
"I know it's not one," Joe said.
It was not one.
Eleven more came in the first week of February.
Then nine. Then a group of fourteen on the ninth that was three families traveling together, and that one nearly broke the system, because fourteen people is a hundred and forty pounds of food for one night and eighty four pounds of wheat out the door in the morning.
Joe stood in the cellar afterward and ran the numbers with a candle.
They had come out of December with four tons.
They were going to come out of February with two.
"That's still May," he said out loud.
"That's still May if nobody else comes," said Imogen from the stairs.
"Yes."
"And they're going to keep coming, because the man we sent down the hill in January told nine people, and every one of those nine will tell nine."
"Yes."
Imogen sat down on the step.
"So say the number," she said.
"What number?"
"The number where you stop. You've been carrying it since the twenty fourth of January and I've watched you carry it and I want it said out loud in this cellar where nobody else can hear it."
Joe put the candle on a shelf.
"One ton," he said.
"One ton."
"When this cellar hits one ton, the road closes. Nobody else gets fed, because at one ton I've got thirty one people and sixty days and no way to get to the elevator until the melt."
"And when's that?"
"At the current rate? The middle of March."
"And the melt?"
"The middle of March."
Imogen laughed. It was not a good sound.
"That's not a margin," she said. "That's a coincidence."
"Yes."
"Joe."
"I know."
"That's not a plan, that's a hope."
"I know it is." He rubbed his face. "And the alternative is that I stand at that woodpile on the eleventh of March and tell a man with four children that we're full, and I have thought about that for about a hundred hours and I cannot make myself do it,
and I do not know if that's conviction or cowardice."
Imogen was quiet.
"It's both," she said. "That's what it always is."
They came down out of the cellar and the house was loud and warm and smelled like bread and thirty one people.
Bill Tandy was at the table with three of Crowe's men and a checkerboard made out of a piece of plywood and forty eight carved wooden discs.
Hazel and Junie were lacing a snowshoe by the window.
Merrit Crowe was arguing with Zachary about jar rotation.
And Pruitt came through the mudroom door with snow to his thighs and a face that stopped every conversation in the room.
"Mister Henfry."
Joe was already moving.
"What."
"Trapline." Pruitt was breathing hard. "I was up the willow bottom at the far end, past the beaver flat."
"And?"
"There's a track."
"Whose?"
"Not one man." Pruitt got his glove off with his teeth. "Joe, it's a trail. Packed. Eleven or twelve men on snowshoes in single file, coming up the river bottom from the south, and they've been using it more than once because it's set up hard."
The room was absolutely silent.
"How fresh?"
"Two days on the newest layer."
"How far out?"
"Three miles."
Crowe set his cup down very slowly.
"He can move," he said.
"He can move," Joe agreed.
"In February. On snowshoes. Eleven men."
Junie stood up from the window.
"That's not an approach," she said.
Everyone turned.
"Say that again," said Joe.
"Eleven men in single file on a packed trail three miles out that they've used more than once is not an attack route," Junie said. "That's a supply road. That's men going somewhere and coming back."
"Going where?"
"That's the question."
Joe went to the map.
He put his finger on the river bottom and traced it south, past the beaver flat, past the place where they had broken the ice in November, down toward the state road.
And stopped.
"The elevator," he said.
The whole room came off the walls.
"He's not coming here," Joe said. "He's been going to the elevator all winter. On foot. On snowshoes. Eleven men hauling wheat out of a bin nobody's been able to watch since the storm."
"For eleven weeks," said Crowe.
"For eleven weeks."
"How much can eleven men carry on snowshoes?"
Pruitt said, "Sixty pounds a man, if they're hard. Six hundred and sixty pounds a trip."
"And if they've got sleds?"
"Then it's four times that."
Joe stood over the map with his hands flat on the table.
"So while we've been sitting up here feeding refugees six pounds at a time," he said, "he's been walking eleven tons of wheat out of that elevator one sled at a time and nobody in this valley knows it."
"And when the melt comes," said Crowe.
"When the melt comes he's got the only food in the valley and a hundred families walk down that road to an empty bin."
Nobody spoke.
Then Alta's voice, from her chair by the stove, old and dry and absolutely furious:
"Get me the minute book," she said.