Chapter 16 #3
The shoots were four inches high and so thick you could not see soil between them, and Joe put his hand down flat on top of it and felt it push back.
"How much is that?" Imogen asked.
"If the summer's ordinary? Thirty bushels an acre. Twelve thousand bushels. Seven hundred and twenty thousand pounds."
"Say it in people."
"That's four thousand people eating a pound a day for a hundred and eighty days," Joe said. "That's the whole valley through next winter, out of one planting, on ground that did it every year for eighty years before anybody noticed."
Imogen was quiet for a while.
"Do you know what I keep thinking about?" she said.
"Tell me."
"That every single person who made that happen was over sixty or under sixteen."
Joe looked out at the green.
She was not wrong.
Harlan Batey had picked the ground and set the seeding rate. Alta had held the board together. Delores Tandy had taught eleven women to make soap and four to render lard and had run a kitchen for thirty one people for five months without once losing her temper in front of a child.
And the drills had been driven, for four weeks, by teenagers.
Sylvie Kessick was on the board of directors of a cooperative and would be sixteen in August.
Hazel Henfry, twelve years old as of the ninth of April, had checked two hundred and eleven heads for lice over the winter and had personally identified the first case of what turned out to be whooping cough in the elevator families, eleven hours before her mother would have seen it.
"They grew up," Joe said.
"They didn't grow up. They just got used."
"Is that bad?"
Imogen bent and pulled a single shoot and looked at the root on it.
"I've decided it isn't," she said. "I spent February deciding it was, and then I watched Zachary teach a six year old to sprout a jar, and I changed my mind."
They walked back up the road in the afternoon.
The valley had eleven hundred people in it now by Batey's count, which was down from four thousand and up from the eight hundred who had been left standing in March.
They were coming back. Slowly. On foot, mostly, from Provo and Heber and one family from as far as Price, walking home to houses that had been empty since October.
Some of the houses had people in them already, and that was going to be the next four years of the county's business, and Alta had opened a second ledger for it.
The Tandy place had been put back together in April by fourteen people in three days.
Delores got her kitchen back. Bill never told her about the china and Joe never told her either, and in June a woman from down the road turned up with two boxes of plates that she said she had taken in October to keep safe, and everybody agreed that this was exactly what had happened.
Arlan Crowe went back to the gravel pit in April with his six men and eleven families.
He did not go back to towing.
He went back to a shop full of mechanical trucks and lathes and a reloading bench, and by the middle of May he was the only functioning machine shop between Heber and the Nevada line, and there was a line of horse drawn wagons outside it every morning with broken things in them.
He did not charge anybody money. Money had stopped meaning anything in November and had not started again.
He kept a ledger.
"You're keeping a book," Joe said, the first time he saw it.
"Everybody's keeping a book."
"You hated books."
"I had a filing cabinet full of them," said Crowe. "The difference is that this one's got my name at the top of every page instead of at the bottom."
Merrit Crowe came up the mountain twice a week all spring.
She came on a horse with one of her father's men and she stayed four hours and she argued with Zachary Henfry the entire time about jar rotation, canning lids, and whether a sprouting schedule counted as a chore or a hobby.
She was still alive.
That was the thing nobody said out loud and everybody counted.
Imogen had gotten her through the winter on a basal bolus regimen built out of eleven vials and a hole in the ground and thirty one pages of a man's handwritten log, and by May there were six vials left and a set of rules written on a card in Imogen's handwriting that Crowe carried in his coat.
They both knew what the arc of it was.
Neither of them said so in front of the girl, and Merrit, who was nine and not stupid, did not make them.
"I'm going to teach her to test herself with no strips," Imogen said, in May, on the porch.
"You said that was impossible."
"It is impossible. I'm going to teach her anyway, because a sixty percent guess made by somebody who knows her own body is better than nothing, and because in two years she's going to be eleven and she is going to have to be the one who knows."
Joe put his hand over hers.
"That's a hard thing to teach a child."
"Everything I have taught anyone in the last seven months has been a hard thing to teach a child," Imogen said.
Dolan Teague lived.
Four of the eleven families in that elevator got very sick in February and two of them lost somebody, and Teague himself was gray and thin until the middle of April.
But he lived, and in May he was running the elevator.
Not owning it. Running it. Batey had put him on as operations manager at the March board meeting by a vote of two to one, with Sylvie voting against and saying so in the minutes.
"Explain it to me," Joe had said, afterward.
"He's the only man in this valley with a degree in grain handling," Batey said. "I've got a board full of old people and a fifteen year old and eight hundred people who need somebody who knows what a bridged bin is."
"He tried to burn it."
"He did."
"And you're going to hand him the keys."
"I'm going to hand him a job with three people watching him and a book he signs every night," Batey said, "which is exactly what I'd do with any man, and he happens to be the best one available."
Joe had thought about that for four days.
He had decided, eventually, that it was either the wisest thing he had ever seen a person do or the thing that would get them all killed in two years, and that Harlan Batey was seventy four and had probably made that same bet eleven times before.
The letter came in July.
A man Joe had never seen rode up the drive on a mule at four in the afternoon and handed him an envelope and said it had come up from Cedar City through four sets of hands, and then he accepted a meal and a night in the shed and left in the morning and never gave his name.
Joe waited until Imogen was done with her afternoon clinic.
They read it on the porch together.
It was four pages, in small cramped handwriting, and it was from Sam Marchetti.
Most of it was road conditions, which was the most valuable thing in it and which Joe copied out and sent down to Batey the next day. Which passes were open. Which towns had authority and which did not. Where fuel could be had and at what price in what commodity.
Las Vegas, he wrote, was gone. Not destroyed. Emptied. He and Junie had driven through it in daylight in March and had seen perhaps two hundred people in a city of two million.
The Central Valley was farming. That was the headline, buried on page three in a single sentence. The Central Valley was farming, because the water is gravity out of the Sierra in the spring, and eleven thousand people had figured that out by February.
Page four was about Danny.
Joe read it aloud because Imogen asked him to and then could not.
Danny Marchetti had died in his own house on Cypress Avenue sometime in the first week of December.
Sam had found the house in April with the door closed and the curtains drawn and a neighbor who had been keeping an eye on it for five months because Danny had asked her to.
He had left everything in order.
He had left four boxes in the front room, labeled, and a letter on top of them with Imogen's name on it, and he had written her address on it eleven times in different amounts of detail because he had not known exactly where she was.
Junie is bringing the boxes, Sam wrote. I am staying in California for a while. There is work here and I have been paid through eleven years of a man's life and I would like to spend some of it on strangers.
The last paragraph said:
I asked Junie whether she was going to read the letter before she brought it and she said no, and I believe her, which surprised me.
Tell your wife her uncle was frightened of exactly one thing his whole life and it was not the law and it was not the man with the stake bed truck.
It was that she would find out from somebody else.
He hired two people so that she would not have to.
Junie came up the drive on the nineteenth of August.