Chapter Twenty-one · Sienna
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SIENNA
The announcement was set for the twenty-second at six in the evening at the ballfield, which is where this county does everything, and I found out about the date from a flyer at the Gap store before anybody told me officially.
The twenty-second. The first day of the window.
I stood in that store with a gallon of milk in my hand and looked at a flyer with a blue and white logo on it and understood that the man had scheduled a hundred and fifty people, two rigs, nine paramedics, sixteen Copperheads, a sheriff’s deputy, and the entire attention of Blackthorn County into one gravel lot on the exact evening his trucks came up the corridor.
Charlene was at the register and Charlene misses nothing.
“You seen it,” she said.
“I’ve seen it.”
“They’re doing barbecue.” Charlene rang up somebody’s gas.
“Dorene says there’s going to be a stage.
An actual stage, Sienna, trucked in from Roanoke, at our ballfield.
” She looked at me over her glasses. “Now I ain’t got an opinion.
But my mother used to say you can tell exactly how much a man took by how big a party he throws about giving some back. ”
I put the milk down on the counter and then picked it up and put it back in the cooler, because I had come in for a newspaper and had bought a gallon of milk for no reason except that my hands wanted something to do, which is a thing I have started noticing about myself since June.
I called Cutter from the store parking lot.
“The twenty-second,” I said.
“I know. Diesel saw it at the ballfield this morning.”
“He’s clearing the road.”
“He’s clearing the road,” Cutter said, and there was no surprise in his voice, only a kind of tiredness that I had not heard in him before. “Six to eight in the evening, every set of eyes in one lot, and a lot of them mine.”
“What’s the club doing?”
“Vote’s at noon. Rook wants the whole charter on the corridor and to hell with the announcement. Cinder wants half and half. Grace wants us at the ballfield, all sixteen, in the front two rows, in cuts, being photographed.”
“Grace wants you *at* it?”
“Grace says a club under a federal look that skips a community event to sit on a dark road is a club that has handed a prosecutor a slide,” he said. “She says the corridor gets cameras on tripods and two men, legally parked, and everybody else stands in the light where the county can see them.”
I leaned against my truck in that gravel lot and shut my eyes.
“She’s right,” I said.
“She’s right, and Rook knows she’s right, and it’s going to be an ugly hour in that chapel anyway.
” A pause. “Cinder said a thing at breakfast that’s been sitting on me.
He said, a man who can move the whole county into one lot on a night of his choosing don’t need us to be anywhere in particular.
He said we’ve been thinking of it as him clearing the road.
Cinder thinks he’s showing us he can set the table. ”
“Cutter.” I opened my eyes. “They asked me to speak.”
He was quiet.
“When?”
“Wanda’s office. Yesterday. Four minutes at the podium, about the station and what it means for response times on the north end.
” I said it flat. “Every word of which is true. That’s the part I keep having to say.
I’d be standing up in front of my own county telling them the truth about a building I want. ”
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d let them know by Friday.” I watched a truck go by on the corridor, northbound, empty. “What would you do?”
There was a long pause on that line, long enough that I understood exactly what was happening in it, and then he did the thing that I am fairly sure is the reason I am still standing in this story at all.
“I’m not going to answer that,” he said.
“Not because I don’t have an answer. I’ve got a whole answer, I’ve been building it since Tuesday, and it’s a good one, and I’d like to give it to you very much.
” A breath. “And the last time I decided what you should do about something dangerous, I was right, and it cost us ten years. So I’m going to sit here with my mouth shut and be useful in whatever way you tell me to be useful. ”
“That’s a very annoying kind of growth, Cutter.”
“I’ve been told.”
“Say the answer anyway,” I said. “I’m asking. That’s different from you offering, and I want it on the record that I asked.”
“All right,” he said. “Speak.”
“Speak.”
“Speak, and say true things, and say all of them.” His voice came up a little.
“Because he has built a whole machine out of people not being able to say a bad word about a good building, and the one thing he has never had to survive is somebody standing at that podium and saying both halves at the same time. Sienna, everybody in that county already knows both halves. They just have not heard anybody say them in the same sentence, in public, sober, without a lawsuit attached. You are the only person in this valley with the standing to do that.”
I stood in the gravel a long time after he said it.
“That’s a hell of a thing to hand somebody,” I said.
“You asked.”
“I did.” I got in my truck. “And now I’ve got to decide whether I’ve got the guts for it, and I’d appreciate it if you did not call me until Friday.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, and did not call me until Friday.
I told Wanda’s office on Friday morning that I would speak.
Then I spent three days writing four minutes.
I have written grant applications, I have written a death notification protocol that the state adopted, and I had never worked as hard on anything as I worked on those four minutes, and by Monday night I had it down to one page in my own handwriting and I could say it without the page.
Rae read it on Tuesday at the station with her boots up on the desk and did not answer.
“You know what happens to you after you say this,” she said.
“I know exactly what happens to me after I say this.”
“All right, then.” She handed it back. “Say it slower than you want to. You talk fast when you’re scared and I’m the only one who knows it.”
The twenty-second came up hot with weather building over the ridge all afternoon, the kind that stacks and does not break.
They had a stage. An actual stage, trucked in, with a skirt on it and a PA and two speakers on stands, and a banner across the outfield fence in blue and white, and a tent with catering from a barbecue place in Roanoke that this county has heard of and has never eaten.
A hundred and fifty folding chairs filled by five-forty and then ran out, so people stood along the fence line, and by six there were closer to three hundred in that lot, because free barbecue in Blackthorn County is a civic event and always has been.
I got there at five-fifteen with Rae, in uniform, because both rigs were posted on standby for it, which somebody had thought to arrange three weeks ago through the county, on a form, in the ordinary way.
The Copperheads came at ten till, all sixteen, in cuts, and sat in the front two rows exactly as Grace had said, and I watched three hundred people watch them do it.
Dutch Voyles sat on the aisle with his cane between his knees and his hat off, because he takes his hat off for a flag, a hymn, or a woman, and there was a flag on that stage.
Trip sat next to Del Danner and got up twice to get her a plate.
Diesel and Evelyn sat in the middle of the row like a married couple at a school concert, which is what they were.
And Cutter sat on the end of the second row and did not look for me in the crowd, which meant he knew exactly where I was.
It was the strangest thing I have ever watched this county do.
Three hundred people eating barbecue off paper plates in a ballfield lot, kids in the creek behind the outfield fence, the Ruritans running the drink table, a stage with a skirt on it, and every one of them there for the same two reasons, which were that a company was giving this county an ambulance station and that the food was free.
And out on the corridor a mile and a half away, on the first evening of the window, two Copperheads sat legally parked at a pull-off with cameras on tripods, and I knew their names, and so did everybody in that lot.
Denise was there from Charlotte in a good jacket with the site plan on an easel. Preston Vogel had a speech in his shirt pocket that he had clearly rewritten four times. Wanda Prather stood at the side of the stage with a clipboard.
And the man in the canvas coat was standing at the back by the horseshoe pits.
I saw him at six-fifteen, in the middle of Preston’s remarks, and my whole body went cold in ninety-one-degree heat.
He was fifty-some. Ball cap. Canvas coat over a work shirt, in August, at a barbecue, standing back where the light from the pole did not quite reach, with a paper plate in one hand that he was not eating from and had not eaten from.
He was not looking at the stage. He was not looking at Denise or at the easel or at Preston Vogel, who was at that moment thanking the Ruritan Club.
He was looking at the front two rows.
He looked at them the way I look at a patient across a room before I touch them. Top to bottom, unhurried, taking an inventory. Sixteen men in a row in cuts, and he was going down the line.
And while I watched, he reached out with his free hand and tapped his knuckle twice on the top rail of the horseshoe pit fence.
Not fidgeting. Testing. The way you knock a panel to hear whether it is hollow.
Hollis Teague had told Cutter about that on the eighteenth, in an office over a salvage yard, and Cutter had told me on the phone from a gravel lot that same night, and I had thought at the time that it was a small useless detail of the kind that never matters.
I was thirty feet from him.
I will be exact about the next four minutes, because they are the four minutes I will answer for.
I did not point. I did not move toward him.
I did not get out my phone and call Cutter Reeves, and God knows every part of me wanted to, and if I had done it that man would have been in a truck and gone before anybody crossed forty feet of gravel, and sixteen Copperheads would have come out of two rows of folding chairs in front of three hundred people and a county newspaper photographer.
That is what he was there for. I understood it standing in a barbecue tent with a plastic cup in my hand, and I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
He did not come to that ballfield to see a stage.
He came to be seen by one person who would react, in front of three hundred witnesses and a newspaper photographer, and the reaction would have been sixteen men in cuts coming up out of folding chairs and crossing a lot toward an unarmed man in a canvas coat who had committed no crime and was standing at a public event eating barbecue.
That photograph runs in the Fincastle paper on Thursday. It runs on the internet by Wednesday night. And in February, at a table in Roanoke, somebody holds it up.
He was not there to threaten anybody. He was there to collect a photograph he had not been able to get any other way, and he had built a three-hundred-person party to get it.
So I did the only useful thing I have ever done in my life while shaking.
I turned around, slow, and walked to the back of the tent like a woman going for a sweet tea, and I found Sturgill’s deputy at the drink table, and I said, quietly, “Don’t look up.
There’s a man at the horseshoe pits in a canvas coat.
I need a photograph of him and I need a plate off whatever he came in, and I need it done by somebody in a uniform who is walking to his car for a reason that has nothing to do with him. ”
I have never in eleven years been more grateful for the fact that this county is small enough that a young deputy knows exactly who I am.
He was twenty-six years old and he did not ask me one question.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “There’s a fella parked crooked out by the road I’ve been meaning to speak to about it.”
And he set his cup down and walked out of that tent at the pace of a bored young man with a parking issue, and I stood at the drink table with my back to the horseshoe pits and my hands on the edge of the table and counted my own breathing the way I make patients do it.
When I finally let myself look back, three minutes later, the man in the canvas coat was gone from the horseshoe pits. The paper plate was sitting on the fence rail with the food still on it.
Then Preston Vogel said my name into a microphone.
Three hundred people in a gravel lot turned around, and the weather that had been stacking over the ridge all afternoon finally started moving.
My knees were three days out from the gravel at 174 and had gone from purple to a color I had been dressing around, and I put my hand on the rail of a trucked-in stage and went up the three steps with one page in my pocket that I did not need.
At the top I looked out and found the front two rows, and Cutter Reeves was already looking straight at me, and he did not look away, and neither did I.