Chapter 15 #2
"Which is that he can't close it."
Joe turned his head.
"The wheel," he said.
"You cranked that wheel for six hours in November," Junie said. "What happens to a steel slide gate that sits open in a bin at minus eleven with moisture coming out of nine hundred tons of grain?"
"It freezes."
"It freezes. And then the pile keeps coming out on its own, slow, all winter, and there's nothing anybody can do about it until the thaw."
Joe got the binoculars back and looked at the pile.
Eleven feet high. Forty across. Snowed on, thawed, snowed on again, and the bottom two feet of it dark with wet.
"That's spoiled," he said.
"Most of it."
"How much?"
"I don't know grain," Junie said. "You tell me."
Joe looked at it for a long time.
"It's been sitting in the weather since December," he said. "It's taken snow and it's had four thaws and it's been on bare concrete the whole time. That's not eleven percent moisture anymore, that's twenty, twenty five at the bottom."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning it's molding. Meaning it's heating in the middle of the pile right now. Meaning that's not food, that's a compost heap that's still shaped like wheat."
He lowered the glasses.
"And the bin?"
"That's the question, isn't it."
They went closer at dusk.
Junie did it and Joe did not argue, because there were four hundred yards of open flat at the end and only one of them was going to cross it, and it was not going to be the man who had learned to snowshoe in December.
She was gone for two hours and eleven minutes.
Joe lay in the willows in the dark at minus fourteen and did the thing he had learned in the quiet room, which was to think about one problem at a time instead of all of them.
She came back at eight fifteen and did not startle him, which he was proud of for about a second until he realized she had made a noise on purpose from forty yards out.
"Well," she said.
"Tell me."
"The bin's about a third gone."
Joe breathed out.
"A third."
"Six hundred tons still in there, near enough. The gate's frozen at about eight inches open and the flow's bridged."
"Bridged?"
"There's a crust over the draw. The grain's compacted and formed an arch over the opening and nothing's coming out." Junie wiped her face. "That's why they're shoveling off the pile instead of taking it fresh. They can't get any more out."
"So the bin's sealed by accident."
"The bin is sealed by accident and there's six hundred tons of good dry wheat inside it and a mountain of rotting wheat on the ground outside it, and eleven men are living off the rotten pile because they can't get at the good part."
Joe put both hands over his face.
"Are they sick?" he said.
Junie was quiet for a beat.
"That's the other thing," she said.
"Say it."
"There's a lean to on the north side of the office with four people in it and they're not there for the view," she said. "I got to eleven yards of it. There's buckets. There's a smell. There's somebody in there who's been in there a while."
"Dysentery."
"Or worse. I'm not your wife. I don't know the difference and I didn't go in."
Joe lay in the snow and thought about mold and about thirty one people in his own kitchen eating bread.
"Mycotoxins," he said.
"What?"
"Moldy grain. It's not just spoiled, it's poisonous. There's molds that grow on wet wheat that put out things that make people sick in ways that look like the flu and then don't stop."
"Can you cook it out?"
"No. That's the whole problem with it. Heat doesn't touch it."
Junie sat back on her heels.
"Then they've been poisoning themselves since January," she said.
They went back on the fourteenth and the fifteenth.
Joe made that call and it was the hardest one of the trip, because every additional hour on that bank was an hour of risk for nothing, and because he had promised four days.
But on the morning of the fifteenth they saw the thing that made it worth it.
A group came up the lane from the south at nine in the morning.
Not Teague's men. Nine people on foot in bad clothes with two children, coming up the road from the direction of the valley, and they stopped at the scale house and one of them shouted.
And a man came out of the office and shouted back, and even at eleven hundred yards Joe could see the shape of it.
The nine people stood there for four minutes.
Then they turned around and walked back down the road.
"He turned them away," Joe said.
"He turned them away."
"From a pile of rotting wheat he can't even use."
"That's right."
Junie put the glasses down.
"And now you know the whole thing," she said.
Joe rolled onto his back and looked at the gray sky.
"He's lost," he said.
"Say it properly."
"Dolan Teague came up that lane in November with nineteen men and a fuel truck and a plan," Joe said slowly. "And a woman shot out his lights and four of his men walked off, and then he took the elevator anyway, because it was the only thing left to take."
"And then?"
"And then he got a frozen gate and eleven families and a pile of grain that's making everybody sick, and no way out, and no way to admit it."
"And every person he turns away goes back down that road and tells eleven people that the elevator is closed."
Joe sat up.
"He's not a warlord," he said. "He's a man standing on a pile of rotten wheat telling people to go away because the alternative is telling them he made a mistake."
Junie started packing.
"That," she said, "is the most dangerous kind of man there is."
They came home on the evening of the sixteenth.
Eleven miles in eleven hours, with the last four in the dark, and Joe fell four times in the last mile and Junie pulled him up every time and did not say one word about it.
The can string rang when they came through the wire at the switchback, because Joe walked into it on purpose.
The house came awake like a struck match.
Imogen met him at the mudroom door and did not touch him for the first three seconds, which is how he knew how bad it had been.
Then she did.
"Four days," she said into his coat.
"Four days."
"It's the sixteenth."
"It's four days."
"It is not four days, Joe Henfry, it is four days and eleven hours and I have been standing at this door since dark."
He put his face in her hair and stayed there for a while.
They told the house at midnight.
Everyone. All thirty one, children included, because that had become the way things were done.
Joe told it in order, without editorializing, and when he got to the pile and the frozen gate and the lean to on the north side of the office, the room made a sound.
When he finished, nobody spoke for a long moment.
Then Crowe said, "Six hundred tons."
"Six hundred, near enough."
"Still good."
"Still good, still dry, still in the bin, sealed behind a bridge and a frozen gate."
"And he can't get at it."
"He can't get at it and he's been eating the part that killed itself."
Alta said, "How long until the thaw?"
Everyone looked at Harlan Batey.
The old man had been silent through the whole thing with his hands in his lap.
"Middle of March," he said. "That gate will free up the first week it gets above freezing in the daytime."
"And then?"
"And then that bin starts running again and whoever's standing at it gets six hundred tons."
The room went very quiet.
"So it's a date," said Crowe.
"It's a date," Joe agreed.
"And he knows it."
"He knows it better than we do. He's a grain man. He's known since December exactly what day that gate frees up and he has been sitting in that office all winter waiting for it."
Junie spoke from the corner, where she had been eating her second bowl of anything.
"There's one more thing," she said.
Everybody turned.
"On the fifteenth I went in closer than I told you," she said to Joe.
"How close?"
"I read the sign on the scale house door."
"There's a sign?"
"There's a sign that somebody wrote in grease pencil on a piece of plywood and hung on the door," Junie said, "and it's been there a while, because the edges are weathered."
"What does it say?"
Junie put her bowl down.
"It says, CLOSED UNTIL MARCH FIRST," she said. "COOPERATIVE MEMBERS WITH VALID BOOK ENTRIES WILL BE SERVED IN ORDER OF REGISTRATION."
Nobody moved.
"He's running a scale," Joe said.
"He's running your scale," said Junie. "With your book. Or a copy of it. And he's been telling every family that walks up that lane to come back on the first of March and get in line."
Crowe stood up.
"That's not a man who's lost," he said.
"No," said Junie. "It isn't."
Joe looked around at thirty one faces.
"Then here's what the first of March is," he said. "That's the day every hungry family in this valley walks to the elevator with a piece of paper, and finds eleven men, six hundred tons they can't reach, and a mountain of poison in the yard."
"And us?" said Sylvie.
Joe looked at the map.
"We'll be there," he said.