Chapter 8 #2
They did it one at a time. That's the part I didn't expect to be moved by. Twelve people, saying yes out loud, on purpose, in a brick room, with a hand on an anvil.
Wolf went first, because of course he did.
"Yes."
Then Gunnar, who took eleven seconds and said, "Yes, and I want it noted I said what I said," and Wolf said "It's noted," and that was the end of the only argument Gunnar Sloat has ever won in that room.
Then Sunny, who said "Yes" and nothing else, and who has been the club's accountant for twenty-two years and has never once needed to be persuasive, and who I would like to formally note is now marginally more persuasive.
Then Deke, who said "Yes, absolutely, hundred percent, whatever he needs," which is four consents and probably counts as extra.
Then Ozzy, who said, "Yes — quick question, does this work on—" and then, seeing Wolf's face, "yes. Just yes. Yes."
Then Crash, who put his whole hand flat on the anvil and said "Yes" in a voice like a door closing, and then looked at me for a second longer than he needed to, which I didn't think about until July.
Then the rest. Then Wren, who is not a member and does not get a chair and said hers anyway, and nobody objected, and I watched Gunnar decide not to object and grow about an inch.
Then the empty chair, which Wolf answered for, with one hand on the anvil and his face doing nothing at all.
"Yes," he said. "For Bram."
Deke cried. Obviously.
And then it went out of me.
I don't have a poetic description. It wasn't light and there wasn't a wind. It was like putting down a bag you've been carrying so long that your arms have shaped themselves around it, and the terrible part isn't the weight leaving, it's how wrong your arms feel afterward.
I sat down on the coal bin.
"Silas." Nadia was in front of me. "Say something."
"What."
"Anything. I need to hear it."
And here's what I hadn't planned for, and I'd had eight hours in a tow truck to plan.
I had to say a true thing, out loud, with nothing behind it. No gift. No pressure. Just a man with a known record standing in a room full of people who had every historical reason to discount him.
I opened my mouth and it came out badly.
"I'm — okay, I had this. I had a whole thing.
" I dragged a hand down my face. "You're — I don't have — Nadia, I've been talking my whole life and I've got nothing, I've got, I love you, which is the most used sentence in the English language, and I hate that it's the only one I've got, because you deserve—"
"Trick."
"— because you deserve a custom one, and I build custom ones, that's my entire—"
"Trick."
I stopped.
"It worked," she said.
"...It did?"
"Yeah," she said, and her face was wrecked. "It worked fine."
Behind her, against the wall, Wren Halliday-Kane was writing it all down. Every word. She's got it in a notebook somewhere with the date on it. She told me later she'd stopped taking notes on the god about four minutes in and started taking notes on the room.
I asked her why.
"Because he feeds on being remembered," she said, "and I'd rather remember you."
Gunnar came over while everyone was filing out.
He stood there a while, not saying anything, which for Gunnar is a whole speech.
"I meant it," he said finally. "About the mark."
"I know."
"I'm going to keep saying it. At church. Probably for years."
"I'd expect nothing less."
"That's not — " He worked his jaw. "I'm not saying it at you. I'm saying somebody's got to be the one writing down what we agreed to, or in ten years there'll be eleven different versions of tonight and the one everybody remembers will be the one that's easiest to live with."
I looked at him.
"Gunnar," I said, "your wife told me you'd be good at this in two years."
"She's not my—" He stopped. "She said that?"
"In the hallway at the courthouse. Ask her."
Gunnar Sloat nodded twice, and did not smile, and went out into the yard, and I found out four months later that he'd started keeping a second minute-book that nobody voted on and that has since saved this charter twice.
The suit was gone by then. Nobody saw him leave. There was a smell of coal and a door standing open onto the yard, and out past it the county road going off north with nothing on it.
And on the anvil, under the tote from 1948, he'd left a work glove.
Just the one. Neatly folded.
I've still got it.
Nadia asked me later that night why I'd kept it.
We were sitting on the steps outside the forge room at three in the morning, and the coals were still going in there, and I was learning what my own hands felt like.
"Because he left it on purpose," I said.
"Obviously he left it on purpose."
"No — I mean he left it as a receipt." I turned it over.
Good leather. Worn in the palm, which is a detail nobody needed and he'd done anyway.
"It's proof he was here. It's the only proof there is.
In about a year everybody in that room is going to start remembering tonight as a story, because that's what people do with things they can't hold, and there's going to be a version where he was never real and I just burned out. "
"And you don't want that version."
"I want the version where twelve people said yes out loud," I said, "and knew exactly what they were saying it to."
She leaned against my shoulder.
"Then keep the glove," she said.