Chapter 16 #2
"She's asking him to sign," he said.
"What?"
"She's not accusing him. She's asking him to record it." Joe's hands were shaking on the glasses. "Eleven tons out of bin two, hauled in winter, by Dolan Teague, for the maintenance of eleven households. She's asking him to put it in the book and make it a withdrawal instead of a theft."
Nobody on that bank breathed.
Dolan Teague stood in front of four hundred people with a book held out to him for what Joe later swore was a full minute.
Then he took it.
He took it, and somebody put a pencil in his hand, and he wrote in it standing up with the book braced against his forearm, and it took him a long time because his hand was not steady.
Then he handed it back.
And then he sat down on the bottom step of the scale house with his elbows on his knees and put his head in his hands, and he did not get up for a long time, and nobody made him.
They came down off the bank at ten.
They came down slow and in the open with their rifles slung on their backs, all fourteen of them, and they walked up that lane through four hundred people, and nobody stopped them and nobody cheered because nobody knew who they were.
Joe walked up to the scale house.
Alta was sitting on the step next to Dolan Teague with the book on her lap.
"You were told to stay home," Joe said.
"I was told a great many things in seventy nine years."
"Ma'am."
"Young man, I sit on this board," said Alta. "The first of the month is the first of the month."
Dolan Teague raised his head.
He looked at Joe for a long moment.
"Henfry," he said.
"Teague."
"You wrote the letters."
"The board wrote the letters. I copied them out."
"Forty one of them."
"A hundred and forty one by the end."
Teague almost laughed and it turned into a cough that went on too long.
"Four hundred people," he said, when it stopped. "I have been standing in this yard since November and I never once got four hundred people."
"You turned nine of them away in February."
"I turned about two hundred away between December and last week." He wiped his mouth. "Do you want to know why?"
"I know why."
"Say it, then."
"Because you couldn't open the gate," Joe said, "and you couldn't say so."
Dolan Teague closed his eyes.
"That's it," he said. "That's the whole thing. That's four months."
Crowe came up the steps.
The two men looked at each other for a long time and the whole parking lot went quiet around them.
"Arlan," said Teague.
"Dolan."
"Merrick's dead."
"I know it."
"In a culvert on the Kamas road."
"I know exactly where," said Crowe. "I went and looked on the nineteenth of October and I have been carrying it since, and I am not going to stand in front of four hundred people and tell you I did right, because I didn't."
Teague's jaw worked.
"That's not enough," he said.
"No," Crowe agreed. "It isn't. It's what there is."
They opened the bin at eleven forty in the morning.
Ivers did it. He and Harlan Batey and two of Teague's men, with a steam kettle and eleven feet of pipe and four hours of the most careful work Joe had ever watched, thawing the gate track a section at a time and then working the wheel in eighth turns.
The bridge went at eleven thirty eight.
It went with a sound like a building settling, a deep enormous grinding thump that came up through the concrete pad and through everybody's boots, and four hundred people stepped back at once.
And then six hundred tons of hard red winter wheat came out of that gate in a stream the thickness of a man's leg, dry and cold and clean, and it kept coming.
Somebody in that crowd started crying.
Then a lot of people did.
Joe Henfry stood at the base of bin two with his hand on a crank wheel and watched four hundred of his neighbors lose it completely in a parking lot, and he found that he could not see very well himself.
Sylvie Kessick ran the scale.
She ran it for nine hours with two people helping and the book open and every entry in her own handwriting, and by dark there were two hundred and eleven household entries in that ledger.
Harlan Batey sat beside her the entire day and signed each page.
Alta sat on the other side with the quilt over her shoulders and did nothing at all except be seventy nine years old in a chair, which was the most important job on the property.
They burned the pile on the second of March.
That was Batey's call and nobody argued.
Four hundred tons of moldy wheat, shoveled into a windrow away from the buildings with every shovel in the valley, and doused with the diesel that had been sitting in the collection hopper since November, and lit at four in the afternoon.
It burned for two days.
Joe stood and watched it with Dolan Teague on the second evening.
"That was nine hundred tons in October," Teague said.
"Six hundred's still enough."
"For how long?"
"Two hundred and eleven households at what they took yesterday? That's until next winter." Joe put his hands in his pockets. "And there's seed in that number. Batey pulled forty tons out and held it back and nobody's touching it, and it goes in the ground in April."
Teague was quiet.
"You planned that."
"Batey planned that. In November. On the day we ran the scale the first time." Joe watched the fire. "He wrote it in the book and put it in the safe and never mentioned it to anybody, including me, until Tuesday."
"Why?"
"Because he's seventy four years old and he's seen people do stupid things with seed grain in a hungry year," Joe said, "and he figured the fewer people who knew where it was, the more likely it'd still be there in the spring."
Teague let out a long breath.
"That's the difference," he said.
"Between what?"
"Between him and me." Teague looked at the fire. "I did the same calculation he did, in November, on the same day. Whoever has food is in charge. And I came out of it wanting to be the one in charge, and he came out of it wanting there to be a crop."
Joe did not say anything.
"Are you going to kill me?" Teague said.
"No."
"Is Arlan?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Joe thought about it for a long moment.
"Because you've got eleven families in that office," he said, "and four of them are sick, and my wife is coming down here on Thursday to look at them, and she's going to need somebody who knows their names."
They went home on the fourth of March.
It took nine hours and they came up the bench at dusk with three sleds and two horses and four thousand pounds of wheat, and the house came out into the yard.
Thirty one people.
Imogen came down off the porch and Joe got off the sled and they stood in the middle of the yard and neither one of them said anything at all for about eleven seconds.
"It's the fourth," she said finally.
"It's the fourth."
"You said the second."
"I said the second and it was the fourth and I am never going to hear the end of it."
"You are not," Imogen agreed.
That night the house ate.
Delores made something enormous out of hare and lard and the first of the sprouted wheat and eleven other things, and thirty one people ate it in four rooms in shifts, and Bill Tandy told the hog story again and got it wrong in four places and nobody corrected him.
Joe went out on the porch at ten.
The snow was going. You could hear it going, a hundred small sounds in the dark, water finding its way down the slope toward a creek that had run all winter under the ice.
Mack came out and leaned against his leg.
After a while the door opened and Junie came out and stood at the far end of the porch with her hands in her pockets.
"You're leaving," Joe said.
"In the morning."
"Where?"
"Kamas first. Then California."
Joe turned.
"The road's not open."
"The road's open enough for a 1984 diesel Land Cruiser with chains and a man who knows where the drifts are," Junie said. "It'll take eleven days instead of two."
"Sam's going with you."
"Sam's been sitting on a ridge for four months with a hole in his side waiting for me to say that sentence."
Joe leaned on the rail.
"You're going to find Danny."
"I'm going to find out if there's a Danny to find," Junie said. "He was seventy seven in October."
"And 1991?"
"And 1991."
"And if there's nothing?"
"Then there's nothing, and I'll come back and tell your wife so, and she can stop carrying it."
Joe looked out at the dark.
"You'll come back?"
Junie was quiet for a moment.
"I've been in that house eleven weeks," she said. "I have never in my life been in one place eleven weeks."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's the closest thing to one I've got."
She went down the steps.
At the bottom she stopped.
"Mister Henfry."
"Yeah."
"Fix Colby's habit," she said. "He still checks the north window every four minutes."
And then she was gone into the dark, and Joe Henfry stood on his porch and listened to a mountain full of water coming down off the high country in the first week of March, doing what it had done every spring for ten thousand years, whether anybody was there to count it or not.
Epilogue
The wheat came up on the eleventh of May.
Joe found out about it from a nine year old boy who ran a mile and a half up the bench to tell him, and who was so out of breath when he got there that he had to say it twice.
Forty tons of seed grain, drilled into four hundred acres of river bottom in the third week of April by two horse drawn drills and eleven hundred hours of human labor, and on the eleventh of May the whole flat went green at once.
Joe walked down to look at it with Imogen.
They stood on the bank above the state road crossing, in the same willows where he had lain on his belly in February with a pair of binoculars and a woman who had taken her rifle apart before entering his house.
It was a completely different place.
"That's a crop," Imogen said.
"That's a crop."
"You cried on the porch about this in March."
"I did not cry on the porch."
"Joe, Hazel told me. She watched you through the window and she came upstairs and reported it like a field observation."
"That child is going to run something someday and it's going to be terrifying."
They went down and walked out into it.