Chapter 19 #4
"I've got a question," she said. "And I've had it ten years and I'm going to ask it once and then I'm never going to talk to you about any of this again."
"Ask it."
"On the second of February," Nell said, "did you know we'd be gone?"
Wallace Wingman was quiet a long time.
"Yes," he said.
"How?"
"Because you told me in October that if you heard a noise in the dark you'd go up the hill and hide in the rocks," he said. "And I sat above that bench for four days in November and watched a man run a drill with five people, and it took them under two minutes."
"So you used me."
"I used you."
"And on the second of February you sent eleven men to a house you knew was empty and stood in the open yourself so twenty people would come out and look at you."
"Yes."
"Why did you stand in the open?"
"Because they'd come out for a man with his hands out and they wouldn't come out for anything else," Wingman said, "and because the four in the draw were going to be dead in about eleven minutes if nobody pulled the whole thing into the middle."
"You expected to die."
"I expected four of us to die," he said, "and I put my own name on the list, and I'd worked out it was the cheapest way to do it, and it was nine, and one of them was a boy of nineteen named Petey's brother that I'd told his mother I'd bring back."
Nell sat with that.
"That's the whole thing about you," she said. "Isn't it."
"What is?"
"You put yourself on the list." She was looking at the lamp. "That's why nobody can decide about you. If you'd kept yourself off it everybody would know exactly what you were."
"Nell."
"No, I'm not finished." Her voice was completely level. "You put yourself on the list and it didn't make any of it all right, and that's what I've worked out in ten years, and I want to say it to your face because nobody else is going to."
"Say it."
"You spent an entire winter deciding who was worth food," Nell said, "and the reason people forgive you is that you were willing to be one of the ones who wasn't. And it's not the same thing. Being willing to die doesn't buy you the right to sort people. It just means you were consistent."
Wallace Wingman lay on a litter on a road in Montana and looked at a woman of twenty.
"That's it," he said. "That's the sentence. I've been looking for that sentence for nine years."
"Don't be pleased about it."
"I'm not pleased. I'm relieved." His breath went ragged. "Do you know what it's like to do a thing for two years and not have the word for it? I've been calling it arithmetic and everybody nods, and it was never arithmetic, it was sorting, and there's a difference and you just said it out loud."
Nell stood up.
"One more thing," she said.
"Go ahead."
"I'm not going to forgive you and I want you to stop waiting for it."
"I never asked."
"You've been asking for nine years on rocks," Nell said.
"Every single line you ever cut was aimed at somebody reading it and deciding. And I'm telling you now so you can stop: I'm not going to, and nobody here is obligated to, and if you die in this valley in the next year you're going to die without it."
She picked up the lamp.
"But you'll die inside," she said, "and warm, and with somebody sitting up with you, and that's what this camp does, and it's got nothing to do with you at all."
She walked four steps and stopped.
"His name was Chip," she said. "The old man. That was a nickname and nobody ever asked him the real one and Tom's regretted it for ten years. Did you know it?"
"No."
"Then that's the thing you take with you," Nell said, and went back up the hill.
At six in the morning on the twentieth of September, twenty seven people came back from Camp Two.
They came up the creek in a long line with the children running ahead, and Tom stood on the rise and watched his own camp arrive and had a thought he could not put down for a week, which was that this was exactly what a settlement looked like from a ridge to a man with a clipboard.
Thirty eight of us. Twenty two under twenty.
That's what it says on the list.
At half past six, Cass Tunny walked up the road to the fence with his daughter on his hip and stood four feet from a litter and looked down at a man he had kept alive for five weeks in a cut bank in February.
The whole valley went quiet.
"You got old," Cass said.
Wallace Wingman started to laugh and it turned into something that took four people and eleven minutes to get under control, and at the end of it, when he could talk again, he said:
"Boy, you fed them."
"I fed them."
"For nine years?"
"Twenty six rock piles," Cass said. "Every week. Forever. It's a rule in a book."
And Wallace Wingman, who had not wept in the fifteen months on that litter, put his good arm across his eyes and did not move for a long time.
Tom looked away, and so did everybody else, because there are things you do not watch.
Then he looked west, down the road, at four hundred yards of cleared ground and a valley that could be driven in four days from a place with power.
"Kindra," he said.
"I know."
"We've got maybe a year."
"I know," she said. "Let him have this morning first."