Chapter Twenty-five · Sienna
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SIENNA
The first class at the Wilkes Ford fire hall was the fourth of September and thirty-one people came.
And eleven Copperheads with their cuts hung on a coat rack by the door, because Bobby Sowder had put a coat rack up. He had gone and bought it. He said, when I asked him, “Well, they’ve got to go somewhere,” and that was the whole of the discussion that a volunteer fire chief ever had about it.
I taught for two hours. Rae ran station two. Amos ran station three, his first time teaching anything, and got flustered on the chest seal and recovered, and I let him have the entire thing without stepping in, which cost me something and was the correct call.
And I watched a room sort itself out the way rooms do.
The man from Ammons Creek who had written to the newspaper in 2019 ended up paired with Mater for the tourniquet drill, because that is who was standing there when I said find a partner, and by the second rotation Mater was correcting his windlass and he was letting him, and at the break they were talking about a transmission.
That is the entire content of rule two, and I did not have to say one word about it. Six weeks of a barn and it had gotten loose in the county on its own.
Dutch Voyles sat in the front row in a proper chair with the stopwatch on its lanyard and ran the clock and, at the break, told thirty-one people the swimming pool story.
Nobody had asked him to. He just stood up during the coffee and told it, the whole of it, the coal company and the finest pool in three counties and his daddy’s lungs and the fourteen dead and the lawyer from Charleston, and then he said, “So when a fella builds you something nice, don’t say no.
Say thank you, and then go count something.
” And he sat down, and thirty-one people in a fire hall were extremely quiet, and then somebody started the coffee urn again.
I taught the second hour better than I have ever taught anything, and I have been doing this for eleven years, and I understood while I was doing it that the county had taken a station and a barn away from me and handed me a fire hall with thirty-one people in it, and that I was, at that particular hour on that particular Thursday, the most useful I have ever been in my life.
Cutter drove me home. My truck was at the station and Rae had my keys and it had been arranged in the way things get arranged, without discussion.
We stopped at the top of my driveway.
“Thirty-one,” he said.
“Thirty-one.”
“They took the station and the barn and gave you a fire hall and thirty-one people.” He had both hands on the wheel. “I want you to notice that. In about four days you’re going to be back to counting what you lost, and I’d like it on the record that a man watched you do the other thing tonight.”
“Don’t be sweet, it’s disorienting.”
“I’m being accurate.”
“That’s worse.” I sat there a minute with the porch light on up ahead of us. “Say the thing about Hollis again. The last part.”
He had told me about Buchanan on the second, in my kitchen, all of it, and I had made him say the last line twice then too.
“He said, tell the tall fella the seal at one seventy-six was mine and it was true, and everything he’s going to find for the next four months will be true.”
“Four months,” I said. “That’s the part I keep going back to. Why would a man say four months.”
“Grace thinks it’s a taunt. Teal thinks it’s a mistake, and he’s had two analysts on it.”
“And what do you think?”
Cutter was quiet for a second.
“I think he told the truth,” he said. “I think he tells the truth almost all the time, and that’s the whole trick, and I think he said four months because in four months something changes that he already knows about and we don’t.”
“February,” I said. “Renner’s trial is in February. That’s five months.”
“That’s five months,” he agreed. “Four months is January. I don’t know what’s in January.”
We sat there in the dark with the engine running.
“Come up,” I said.
“I’ve got the yard at six.”
“I know what you’ve got. Come up anyway.”
He was gone before I woke. He always is. The two cups were in the drainer and the porch light was off and the coffee was set up with the switch not flipped, which is a thing he started doing in August without ever mentioning it and which I have never once thanked him for.
That was the fifth of September.
On the sixth I worked a double. Nothing happened on the sixth of September, and I did laundry, and I called my aunt, and I remember exactly none of it, and I have gone back over that day about four hundred times looking for the piece of it I ought to have noticed.
There isn’t one. This is the thing nobody tells you about the day before.
The call came at 5:52 on the morning of the seventh of September.
I was on shift. I want that noted, because it is the one piece of luck in the entire thing and it is not much of a piece. I was in the station at Wilkes Ford doing the truck check on Medic 1 with a cup of coffee on the bumper when the tones dropped.
The address was the Harrow Salvage yard.
I will say plainly that I did not know. Dispatch had it as a sixty-one-year-old male, unresponsive, possible industrial. It is the entire information I had going up that grade, and I ran it the way I run everything, which is on the assumption that I am about to meet a stranger.
Amos drove. It took us eleven minutes from Wilkes Ford, which is four minutes better than the county’s number, and every one of those minutes is on a form somewhere.
It is a bad grade in a heavy truck and I have run it maybe nine times on this job, and every time I do I think the same thing, which is that this county built its industry at the top of a hill and its ambulance service at the bottom of one.
The gate was open. The yard lights were still on because it was not full light yet.
There were three trucks in that lot and a bike, and men standing outside the fab bay in a way that told me everything before we stopped moving, because men stand in a particular way when it is already over and they know it and are waiting for somebody official to say so.
Scout Carlisle was standing at the corner of the office with his phone in his hand and he was not calling anybody with it. Cinder Sullivan was out by the scale, alone, facing the road. Mater was at the mouth of the bay with his arms hanging.
Rook Walsh was at the bay door. He did not move out of the way for me. He put his hand out flat and said, in a voice I have never heard from that man before or since, “Sienna. Don’t.”
“Rook, move.”
“He’s been gone since about two in the morning, and there’s nothing in there for you, and I am asking you as a man who has never asked you for a thing...”
“Rook,” I said. “That’s my job. Move.”
And Rook Walsh moved, and I went into that bay with my kit in my hand and Amos behind me, and I did my job, and I will not be writing down what I found.
I worked him anyway. I want that written down too, because people think we make a judgment at the door and we do not, and because Hollis Teague had put his welds under every school bus and I was not going to be the one who decided in a doorway.
I called it at 6:07. I said the time, because that is what you do, and Amos wrote it down, and then he went outside and was sick behind the truck and came back in ninety seconds and stood beside me, and he is going to be a very good medic.
The friction saw was still on the bench with a piece of sheet stock in it, half cut.
His tape measure was hooked on the edge of the horse.
His coffee thermos was on the bench with the cup screwed on it and it was cold, and there was a radio playing somewhere in the back of that bay the whole time I worked, on the country station out of Roanoke, and nobody turned it off for nineteen minutes because nobody could think of who was allowed to.
The bay lights had been on all night.
And leaned against the rack, still in the mill wrapper, were four sheets of new plate stock that had not been in that building on the eighteenth of August.
He had gone and bought the four sheets he was short.
I want somebody to understand what that means, because it took me two days to be able to say it to anybody.
A man in a canvas coat walked that rack in August and told Hollis Teague he was four sheets short of what the job would take.
Hollis said no to the job. And then sometime in the last three weeks of his life, that old man drove somewhere and bought four sheets of aluminum with his own money and leaned them against his own rack in his own bay, where he could see them.
Not to do the work. He had already told the government he would not do the work.
To not be short.
Sturgill got there at 6:14 and took one look and called the state, and then he went and stood out in the gravel with his hat off, in the middle of the yard, where anybody could see him do it.
He was the second person in that yard to understand what he was looking at and the first one who was allowed to say so.
He came back in about a minute later and said, quietly, to me and to nobody else, “Ma’am, don’t let anybody touch anything, and don’t let anybody in this yard tell you what happened before the state gets here, including me.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it so it’s said.” He put his hat back on. “There’s going to be about forty men with a theory by supper. You and me are going to be the two that wrote down what was actually in this room.”
Deputy Sturgill is twenty-nine years old and grew up on the Ruritan road, and I have thought a great deal since about what it cost him to say that in that particular yard.
Cutter came through that gate at 6:31.
I know the time because I was looking at my watch when the bike came up the grade, and I stepped out of that bay and put myself in the middle of the doorway, and when he got off that bike and started across the gravel with his face doing something I have never seen a human face do, I did the hardest thing I have ever done in all my years on this job.
I put my hand flat on his chest and I stopped him.
“You don’t go in there,” I said.
“Sienna...”
“You do not go in there.” I had both hands on him.
“Look at me. Cutter. Look at my face. There is nothing in that bay that you can do anything about and there is a great deal in there that you will be looking at for the rest of your life, and I have already got to carry it and I am not going to stand here and let you pick it up too.”
He stood there in the gravel of his own yard with the sun coming up behind the ridge and eleven men watching, and I felt it go through him under my hands, all of it, from the boots up.
I have put my hands on a lot of people at the worst moment of their lives. There is a specific thing that happens in a body when a man decides to go through you, and it happens about a half second before he moves, and I have felt it maybe six times and I have not once been able to stop it.
It happened. And then it stopped.
I watched him fight it, and I watched him lose, and then win, which in a man like that are the same thing about two seconds apart.
“Is it him,” he said.
“It’s him.”
“When.”
“Around two.” I did not take my hands off him. “Cutter, listen to me, because you’re going to need this in about four minutes when Diesel gets here and everybody in this yard starts deciding things. It was fast. Whatever else is true, it was fast, and he did not spend one minute of it afraid.”
That was true. I will put that down plainly. Of all the things I said in that gravel lot, that one was true.
And then Cutter Reeves put his forehead down on my shoulder, in front of his club, in his own yard, in the gravel, with a state trooper’s car coming up the grade.
I put my hand on the back of his neck and held on.
Neither one of us said one word a long time, and behind us in that bay a radio out of Roanoke played to nobody, and out on the corridor a mile and a half down the mountain the trucks went north the way they do every morning of the world.
It was the seventh of September. Four months, that man had said, and everything he told us would be true.
We were in the second week of it.