Chapter 16
They had eleven days.
Joe spent the first four of them doing something that nobody in that house expected, which was writing letters.
Not planning. Not building. Writing.
He sat at the kitchen table with the co-op minute book open beside him and a stack of paper cut out of the back of Alta's appointment ledger, and he wrote out the same page forty one times in his own handwriting.
It took him three days and it ruined his hand.
TO THE MEMBERSHIP.
THE BOARD OF THIS COOPERATIVE WILL SIT AT THE ELEVATOR ON THE FIRST OF MARCH AT NINE IN THE MORNING. TWO OF THE THREE SITTING DIRECTORS WILL BE PRESENT IN PERSON. THE SCALE WILL RUN. THE BOOK WILL BE OPEN.
THERE IS A PILE OF WHEAT ON THE GROUND OUTSIDE BIN TWO. IT HAS BEEN IN THE WEATHER SINCE DECEMBER. DO NOT EAT IT. DO NOT FEED IT TO ANIMALS. IT WILL MAKE YOU SICK IN A WAY THAT DOES NOT LOOK LIKE SPOILED FOOD AND COOKING WILL NOT FIX IT.
THERE ARE SIX HUNDRED TONS OF GOOD WHEAT STILL INSIDE THE BIN. IT IS YOURS. IT IS COMING OUT ON THE FIRST OF MARCH AND IT WILL BE WEIGHED AND WRITTEN IN THE BOOK.
brING SOMETHING TO CARRY IT IN.
SIGNED, HARLAN BATEY, DIRECTOR. ALTA WHITTAKER, DIRECTOR. SYLVIE KESSICK, DIRECTOR.
Harlan Batey signed all forty one.
Alta signed all forty one and then made Joe write her surname in for the first time, because she had never once used it in eleven weeks and Joe had never thought to ask.
Sylvie Kessick signed all forty one and her hand was shaking on the first eleven and steady by the last.
Then they walked them out.
That was the operation. Not a raid. A delivery.
Eleven people on snowshoes in pairs over four days, forty one households, up and down that valley in the last hard cold of the winter, and the only rule was that nobody went south of the beaver flat.
Pruitt and Colby took the upper road.
Ivers and one of Crowe's men took the river side.
Junie took the ones that were hard to reach and took them alone and came back each time without saying where she had been.
Joe took Hazel.
That was an argument that lasted eleven minutes and which he lost so completely that afterward he could not reconstruct how.
"You take somebody who can read a house," Hazel said. "You said that."
"I said that about adults."
"You said it about people. And I've been checking thirty one heads for lice every Sunday since November and I can tell you which four people in this house are lying about how they feel just from looking at them."
"That's not the same thing."
"Dad, it's exactly the same thing."
Imogen, from the stove, said, "She's going."
"Imogen."
"She's eleven and she's about to be twelve and she has been more useful than four adults in this house since October, and if you take her out with you she learns the valley, and if you don't she learns that you don't think she can."
So Joe Henfry walked nine households of the Wasatch back country with his daughter in February.
It was the best four days of the whole winter.
They talked the entire time. About nothing, mostly. About the trees and the snow and how to read a slope, and about the crooked pair of snowshoes she had made in November that she still refused to throw away.
At the fourth house a woman of about sixty read the letter twice and then looked up at Hazel instead of at Joe.
"Is this true?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Why should I believe a piece of paper?"
Hazel thought about it.
"Because if we were lying," she said, "we'd have promised more."
The woman laughed for the first time in a long while, and Joe watched his daughter register that, and file it, and understand what she had done.
On the last night, in a cold camp in a spruce blowdown four miles from home, Hazel said:
"Dad."
"Yeah."
"Is there going to be shooting on the first?"
Joe watched the little lard candle burn.
"I don't know," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I've got." He fed a twig into the fire.
"Here's what I think. I think there's eleven men in that building who have spent four months eating something that's made them sick and standing in front of a bin they can't open,
and I think that on the first of March about two hundred people are going to walk up that lane with a piece of paper in their hands."
"And?"
"And I don't think eleven sick men shoot two hundred neighbors in daylight."
"What if they do?"
"Then I was wrong," Joe said, "and you'll be four hundred yards away on the east bank with Junie, and you will not come down that hill for any reason, including me."
Hazel was quiet.
"Okay," she said.
"Say it back."
"I don't come down the hill."
"Even if."
"Even if," said Hazel.
The twenty eighth of February came in warm.
That was the thing nobody had planned for and everybody should have.
It went above freezing at eleven in the morning for the first time since December, and the snow on the south facing slopes went from dry to heavy in about four hours, and water started running off the shed roof in a way that sounded like a completely different world.
Harlan Batey stood in the yard and listened to it.
"That gate's freeing up," he said.
"Today?"
"Not today. But that bin's warming from the outside and the bridge is going to go, and when it goes it goes all at once."
They went down on the last night of February.
Thirty one people did not go. Fourteen went.
Joe, Crowe, Junie, Pruitt, Ivers, Sylvie, Hazel, and seven of Crowe's people.
Bill Tandy came as far as the beaver flat on a sled and then refused to go further because his ribs would not take it, and stayed there with a fire and a rifle to hold the way home, which was a job he invented for himself and which turned out to matter.
Imogen stayed on the bench with seventeen people and eleven children and a house.
Joe said goodbye to her in the mudroom with the door shut.
"Say the thing," she said.
"Which thing?"
"The one you've been not saying for three days."
Joe leaned against the wall.
"If it goes wrong," he said, "the cache holds seventeen people until May. Six people know where it is. The route's marked on the paper in the flour bucket."
"That's not the thing."
"No."
"Say it."
Joe looked at his wife.
"I don't want to go," he said. "That's the thing. I've wanted to do almost everything I've done since October and I do not want to do this one, and I've been trying to work out whether that means it's wrong."
Imogen took his face in both hands.
"It means you've stopped enjoying it," she said. "That's all it means. And that's the only reason I'm letting you go."
The first of March came up clear and cold and bright.
They were on the east bank above the state road crossing at six in the morning, in the willows, eleven hundred yards out.
At seven the sky went pink.
At seven forty the first family came up the lane.
Joe saw them through the glasses and had to put them down for a second.
Four people with a garden cart.
At eight there were eleven.
At eight thirty there were forty.
By nine o'clock there were more than two hundred people standing in the parking lot of that elevator and they were still coming up the road in a line that went out of sight.
They had sleds. They had wheelbarrows and children's wagons and a hay wagon pulled by two horses and one man with a canoe on a rope.
They had paper.
Joe watched through the binoculars as two hundred people stood in the cold holding forty one letters that had been copied by hand in the night in eleven different houses, because forty one had become a hundred and forty one somewhere in the last eleven days without anybody organizing it.
"My God," said Sylvie.
"Yeah."
"There's more than two hundred."
"There's four hundred by ten o'clock at that rate."
Crowe said, quietly, "Where's Teague?"
Nothing moved in the office.
At nine oh eight, the door opened.
Four men came out.
They were carrying rifles and they were carrying them badly, at the port, the way men carry things they are hoping not to use, and they walked to the edge of that crowd and stopped.
And then Dolan Teague came out.
Joe got the glasses on him and did not recognize him for two full seconds.
He had lost forty pounds.
The coat that had fit him in November hung off him. His face was gray. He came down the steps holding the rail and he stopped at the bottom and stood there, and even at eleven hundred yards Joe could see him breathing.
"He's sick," said Junie.
"He's been sick since January," said Joe.
Teague walked out in front of two hundred people and raised one hand.
They could not hear a word of it.
That was the worst part of the whole morning, lying on that bank and watching a man's mouth move for four minutes in front of four hundred people with no sound at all.
Then Joe saw something change in the crowd.
It moved. Not toward him. Sideways, opening, the way a crowd opens for someone.
A single figure walked out of it toward Dolan Teague.
Joe swung the glasses.
It was an old woman.
She was seventy nine years old and she was wearing a quilt over her coat and she was carrying a book under one arm, and she had come eleven miles on a buckboard in the dark with her grandson because Joe Henfry had told her on the twenty sixth of February that she was not to come and she had waited
until he left.
"Alta," Joe said.
Sylvie made a sound.
"How did she."
"She's been planning it for four days," said Junie. "Her grandson asked me about the road on Tuesday and I told him and I didn't ask why."
"You knew?"
"I knew she'd go," Junie said. "She's on the board. It's the first of the month."
Alta Whittaker walked up to Dolan Teague and stopped four feet in front of him and opened the minute book.
And began to read.
They could not hear it.
But two hundred people could, and Joe watched the sound of it move backward through that crowd like wind across a field, and he watched the four men with rifles look at each other, and he watched one of them lower his.
It went on for eleven minutes.
Then Alta closed the book and held it out.
She held it out to Dolan Teague with both hands.
"What's she doing?" Sylvie whispered.
Joe understood it about a second before it happened and his whole chest went tight.