Chapter 10 #2
"You are extremely hungry," James Wilford said. "You have the look. I have been feeding hungry people for thirty-one years and I promise you that you cannot hide it from me, and you would be doing me a very great kindness if you would sit down and let me put something in a bowl and hand it to you."
He looked at the fire.
"I have not been able to give anybody anything since Tuesday," he said.
They sat down.
He ladled clam broth into three cracked bowls and gave them out and then sat down himself and did not eat, and Liam noticed that, and filed it.
"Ask," James said.
"What?"
"You have been holding a question in your mouth for five minutes and it is making your face do a thing." A ghost of something crossed the old man's face. "Ask it. I would rather answer it than sit here and watch you not ask it."
Liam set down the bowl.
"What happened," he said.
James Wilford looked into the fire.
"We were forty-two," he said. "That's what's left of a congregation of three hundred and nine. Two years ago we were three hundred and nine, and I could give you every name, and I have, every night, since the lights went out."
He was quiet a moment.
"We had a farm," he said. "Up the creek. Good ground, and a spring, and we were very careful about who knew we were there, and for two years we grew potatoes and beans and we fished the creek and we did not trade with anybody, and we survived."
"Somebody found you," Nell said.
"Somebody found us."
"Who."
James Wilford turned the Bible over in his hands.
"They wore gray coats," he said.
Nell's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
"Ballard," she said.
"I don't know what they called themselves. They didn't say. They came up the creek on Monday afternoon, about twenty of them, and they were very businesslike about it."
His voice did not change at all. It stayed level and hoarse and calm, and that was somehow the worst part.
"They wanted the food. All of it. Every seed potato in the cellar, which was our whole spring planting, and I said no."
Liam looked at him.
"You said no," he said.
"I did."
"To twenty armed men."
"I was sixty-three years old and I had three hundred people in the ground behind me," James Wilford said, "and I had watched every single one of them die of things I could not stop, and here at last was a thing I could stop, and I said no."
He looked up.
His eyes were dry.
"And they shot Dale Amberson in the head in front of me," he said, "and asked me again."
Nobody moved.
"And I said no again," James said. "God forgive me. I said no again."
The fire popped.
"They killed them all," he said. "It took about eleven minutes. They started at the north end of the yard and they worked down it and they did not hurry, and when it was over they went into the cellar and they took the potatoes, and one of them apologized to me. He said, and I remember this exactly,
he said, you should have just handed it over, old man."
He set the Bible down on the rock beside him.
"And then they left," he said. "And I have been burying my church for six days."
Nell Rook put her face in her hands.
"Forty-one," she said. "You said forty-one graves."
"Yes."
"And you were forty-two."
"Yes."
"So they left you alive."
"They did." James Wilford's mouth twisted, and for the first time something came up through the calm, and it was not grief.
It was something far uglier and far more human.
"They left me alive on purpose. So that I would tell it. That's what the man said. He said, you'll want to tell people about this, and he was right, and I hate him for being right, because here I am telling you."
Liam stood up.
He walked away from the fire, down to the water, and stood there with his back to all of them and his fists closed at his sides.
He thought about Uebert Murray saying cut the useless ones loose.
He thought about Calder in Ashford saying everybody's useful, or everybody's gone.
He thought about Rennick, sitting on a crate on a gray beach, saying I am a hard man, and being one, and being buried above the tide line anyway.
The world made these men. It made them over and over, everywhere, out of whatever it had lying around, and it never seemed to run short.
He came back to the fire.
"Pastor," he said. "You're coming with us."
James Wilford blinked at him.
"I beg your pardon?"
"You heard me."
"Son, I have forty-one people in that meadow."
"They're not going anywhere," Liam said, and it came out harder than he meant, and he did not take it back. "And you are going to sit on this rock until you starve or until the gray coats come back through, and neither of those things is going to help one single person in this world."
"Liam," Nell said quietly.
"No." Liam crouched down in front of the old man.
"Pastor. Look at me. Those men have a barge coming north with enough powder to blow a hillside into the sea. They are going to fight a war on that waterfront in the next four weeks and whoever wins it is going to run this entire coast for the next twenty years."
James Wilford said nothing.
"And under that waterfront," Liam said, "there is a sealed door with a code on it and a room behind it full of medicine for a plague that is eating my camp two thousand miles east, and I have the code,
and there are three thousand people in that city who are going to die of that plague inside of five years and not one of them knows it yet."
The old man's eyes moved to his face and stayed there.
"You have the code," he said.
"Yes."
"And you're going to open it."
"I'm going to try."
"And then?"
Liam stopped.
"What?"
"And then what, son?" James Wilford leaned forward, and there was something suddenly very sharp behind the exhaustion, something that had spent thirty-one years standing in front of rooms full of people and knowing exactly which question to ask.
"Suppose you get in. Suppose it's all there. A room full of medicine in a dead city, and you are the only man alive who can open the door."
He tapped the Bible with one finger.
"What do you imagine happens next?"
The fire cracked.
Nell Rook had gone very still.
"I take it home," Liam said.
"To your camp."
"Yes."
"Two thousand miles east."
"Yes."
"And the three thousand people standing on top of it?"
James Wilford's voice did not rise. "The Ballard men, and the Pike men, and the ones with the powder, and the women in the ruins with their children, who have all been staring at a green light for two years? Do they get any? Or do they watch you row away with it?"
Nobody spoke.
"Because I will tell you what I have learned in six days of digging," James Wilford said quietly. "Men will do anything for potatoes. Potatoes, son. They put forty-one people in the ground for a cellar full of potatoes."
He picked up the Bible and stood.
"And you are proposing to walk into the middle of a war," he said, "carrying the only key to the only locked door in the world."
He looked out at the wrecks, and at the five boats hidden in them, and at the smoke of the city on the northern horizon.
"Yes," he said. "I'll come."
"Why?" Nell said.
James Wilford smiled, and it was the saddest thing Liam had ever seen.
"Because he is going to need somebody standing next to him," he said, "on the day he finds out what's actually behind that door."
They rowed back at dusk.
The old man sat in the bow of the skiff with his Bible on his knees and did not look back at the beach, not once, not even when Petyr told him he could.
And when they came in under the shadow of the grounded ferry, and Cully caught the skiff's line, and Liam looked up at the deck of the sailboat, Isaiah was standing at the rail.
His face was wrong.
"Isaiah?"
"She's gone," Isaiah said.
Liam was up the side before the skiff had stopped moving.
"What do you mean gone—"
"I was watching her." Isaiah was shaking all over.
"Liam, I swear to God, I did not close my eyes, I sat with her for four hours and she was talking to me, she was herself, we were talking about Wynnie, and then Cully called down that you were coming back and I stood up and I looked out for ten seconds—"
"Isaiah, where is she?"
"The crabber's gone," Cully said.
Liam turned.
The stern rope hung slack in the water.
The two rowboats were there. The skiff was under his hand. The sailboat was under his feet.
The old leaking crabber, pitched that morning by Isaiah's own hands, was not.
And out on the black water, half a mile north, running fast on the flood tide toward the smoke and the towers and the green light burning under the market, a small dark hull was pulling away from them into the dusk.
With one figure at the oars.