Chapter 15
Alta wrote for eleven minutes while thirty one people waited.
Then she looked up over her glasses.
"I have entered a resolution," she said. "It reads that the board has received credible report of unauthorized removal of cooperative property, that a member inspection is authorized, and that any member in good standing may act as an inspector."
"Ma'am," said Joe, "that's a piece of paper."
"Yes."
"Against eleven men on snowshoes."
"Young man," said Alta, "I have sat on a board for thirty one years and I can tell you exactly what a piece of paper is worth. It is worth nothing at all right up until the moment somebody has to explain themselves, and then it is worth everything, and the trouble is you cannot write it afterward."
She closed the book.
"So somebody go look at my elevator," she said.
They argued about it for four hours and it was the worst argument that house ever had.
Crowe wanted eleven men and both machetes and a night approach.
Junie wanted one person, herself, alone, for four days, with orders to look and not touch.
Pruitt wanted nobody to go at all.
"Say your case," Joe told him.
"My case is that it's the twelfth of February," Pruitt said.
"My case is that whatever's down there has been going on for eleven weeks and will keep going on for four more, and that between here and there is three miles of river bottom, and anybody who goes down there and gets seen brings eleven men back up this road."
"And if we do nothing?"
"Then in April there's no wheat and everybody's angry and we're all still alive to be angry about it."
Bill Tandy said, "That's not nothing. That's a real argument."
"I know it is," said Joe.
"So answer it."
Joe stood at the map.
"There's four thousand people in this valley," he said.
"Sixty one households came to that scale in November and about eleven hundred families are members. If that bin is empty in April, a lot of those people die in the summer, and summer is when they'd have been fine, because summer is when you can grow something."
"You don't know it's empty."
"That's exactly the point. I don't know anything." He turned around. "And I'm not going to spend eleven weeks not knowing while a man walks it out one sled at a time."
"Then it's a look," said Junie. "Not a fight. A look."
"A look," Joe agreed.
"Then it's one person."
"It's two," said Joe.
"Mister Henfry."
"It's two, and I'm one of them, and that's not negotiable, and I'll tell you why in front of everybody." He put both hands on the table. "Because if it's you alone and you don't come back, nobody in this house knows what you saw, and then we've paid everything and learned nothing."
Junie looked at him for a long moment.
"That's correct," she said.
"So it's two."
"It's two. And if you slow me down I'll leave you."
"Agreed."
"I mean it. I'll put you in a tree well and go on."
"Agreed."
They left at two in the morning on the thirteenth of February.
Joe had not slept. He had spent the evening doing the thing he had learned to do, which was to write it all down for the people who would be left.
He wrote out the cellar count. He wrote out the cache location, which four people now knew, and added two more. He wrote out the ration math and the one ton line and why it was there.
Then he wrote a page for Imogen and put it in the pocket of her coat where she would find it in the morning and not before.
Then he went down and got dressed.
They went in layers, because Junie ran him through it at the door like an inspection.
"Wool next to the skin. What's this?"
"Cotton."
"Off."
"It's my only."
"It's cotton and it's four hours from killing you."
She pulled it over his head herself. "Sweat is the enemy. Not cold. You will do eleven miles on snowshoes and you will sweat through everything you own and then you will stop moving and it will freeze, and that is how men die a hundred yards from a house."
"So what do I do?"
"You dress cold," Junie said. "You start out cold and uncomfortable and you stay slightly cold the entire way, and when you feel yourself getting warm you take a layer off before you sweat, not after."
"That sounds miserable."
"It is miserable. That's why it works. Nobody does it."
She checked his pack.
"What's in the bottom?"
"Two candles, a lighter, a ferro rod, a foot of bicycle inner tube, four feet of birch bark, a pot, and a pound of lard."
Junie stopped.
"Who told you the inner tube?"
"Nobody. I read it. It burns wet and it burns for four minutes and it doesn't care about wind."
She looked at him with something new in her face.
"And the lard?"
"Because a candle out of lard and a boot lace burns all night in a snow shelter and it's four hundred calories if things go badly."
"Huh," said Junie.
"Is that a good huh?"
"It's the first time I've been surprised in eleven weeks."
Imogen did not come to the door.
She came to the top of the stairs and stood there in the dark and did not come down, and Joe understood exactly why and loved her for it.
"Four days," she said.
"Four days."
"On the fifth I send Crowe."
"On the fifth you send nobody," Joe said, "because on the fifth we're either walking home or we're not, and Crowe is the only reason this house survives if we're not."
Imogen's hands were white on the railing.
"Come back," she said.
"That's the plan."
"Joe."
"I'll come back."
The river bottom at three in the morning at minus nine was the most beautiful place Joe had ever been in his life.
He had not expected that.
The moon was three days off full and the snow took the light and gave it back, and the willows stood up out of it in black clumps, and the whole flat ran south between the banks like a road paved in something that was not quite silver.
Junie went ahead and broke trail and he followed in her tracks, and for the first hour neither of them said a word.
It was eleven degrees below zero and he was cold and he stayed cold and he did not sweat.
At five they were past the beaver flat.
At six they found the trail.
Junie went down on one knee beside it for a long time with her hand held four inches above the surface, not touching it.
"Read it for me," Joe whispered.
"Eleven men."
"You can count them?"
"I can count where they stopped." She pointed at a place where the packed line widened. "Single file breaks down when men rest. That's eleven sets of boots standing around."
"How often are they using it?"
"Every two days. Maybe three." She stood. "And look at the edges."
Joe looked and saw nothing.
"Runner marks," Junie said. "Two sleds. Narrow, maybe eighteen inches, and they're loaded going north and empty going south, because the north-bound track is deeper."
Joe stared at her.
"You can see the direction."
"Anybody can see the direction. You just have to decide to look at it for four minutes instead of one."
They followed the trail south for two miles, staying off it, breaking their own line through deep snow in the willows forty yards to the east, which cost them three hours and every ounce of energy Joe had.
At nine in the morning they came up onto a bank above the state road crossing and lay down in the willows and looked at the elevator.
It was eleven hundred yards out.
Junie got out a small pair of binoculars and looked for a long time without saying anything.
Then she handed them to Joe.
"Tell me what you see," she said.
Joe looked.
The elevator stood up out of the white flat, six concrete silos and the steel bins behind, and the headhouse on top, and the scale house, and the office.
There was a path.
That was the first thing. A hard packed trail from the base of bin two running north up the lane toward the road, and it was not one man's width. It was four feet wide and it had been used all winter.
There was smoke.
"There's smoke in the office," he said.
"Keep looking."
He kept looking.
"There's a man on the headhouse catwalk."
"Yes there is."
"He's been there the whole time. He hasn't moved."
"He's moved twice in twenty minutes," Junie said. "He's cold and he's bored and he's been up there since before dawn, which tells you they change him out at first light."
Joe swung the glasses to the base of the bin.
And stopped.
"Junie."
"Yes."
"The draw gate's open."
"Yes it is."
"It's been open."
"Since sometime in December, at a guess."
Joe lowered the glasses.
"There's a pile," he said.
"There's a pile."
"There's a pile of wheat on the ground eleven feet high and forty feet across sitting in the open under a tarp that's half blown off."
Junie took the binoculars back.
"That's what I wanted you to see," she said.
They lay in the willows for four hours and watched, and what they saw did not match anything Joe had brought with him.
At ten thirty a sled came out of the lane from the north and eleven men were not pulling it.
Two were.
They pulled it up to the pile and shoveled it full and pulled it back north and it took them forty minutes.
At noon four men came out of the office and stood around and smoked something and went back in.
At one thirty a woman came out of the office.
Joe went completely still.
"That's a woman," he said.
"That's three women," said Junie. "There's been three in and out of that building since eleven and two of them are carrying laundry."
"There's families in that elevator."
"There's families in that elevator."
Joe put his forehead down on his forearm.
"He's not stealing it," he said.
"Say the whole thing."
"He's living in it." Joe lifted his head. "He's got eleven men and their families camped in a concrete building with a fire and a bin full of wheat, and he's hauling it out a sled at a time to somewhere north, and he opened the draw gate in December and never closed it."
"Why does the open gate matter?"
Joe sat up on his elbows.
"Because that's not a man stealing wheat," he said. "A man stealing wheat closes the gate. He takes what he wants and he shuts it because he wants it there tomorrow."
"And an open gate?"
"An open gate means he doesn't care what happens to what's left."
Junie was quiet.
"There's another reason for an open gate," she said.
"Which is?"