Chapter 2
The bell was Sorenson.
He had gone up the corner post when Stuart went over the rail and he had watched two men in a field through a long glass for six minutes, and when the one on his feet went down on his knees and did not get up, Sorenson made a decision that was the right one and rang the bell twice and then stopped.
Twice was hurt. Four was men on the road. He rang it twice and that was the difference between eleven people coming out with a sledge and eighty-seven people coming out with whatever they had.
Stuart thought about that later and made a point of saying so.
They came out with the long sledge and four ropes because that was what you did, and the crust took them the same way it had taken Kestrel, ninety steps of walking on top of a field like walking on a floor, and Davey went through once at the ditch and came out swearing and did not go through again.
"Don't lift him," Maddie said, before anybody had said anything about lifting him. She had come out in her house shoes and was standing in the snow in them. "Nobody lifts him. Roll him onto the board and the board goes on the sledge and nobody bends one thing on that man."
"Maddie."
"Nobody bends one thing on him, Stuart Redman, if you are so much as thinking about picking him up by the arms I will put you on the sledge next to him."
They rolled him onto the board.
The coat came with him in one piece, which is what a coat does when it has been frozen nineteen days and has a man inside it, and the sound it made as it came off the snow was a sound Stuart did not enjoy.
Juno walked alongside the sledge the whole four hundred yards with her shoulder against the rail of it.
They took him into the Hall because the Hall had the fire that never went out, and they took the tables down off the trestles to get the width, and Maddie ran everyone out of the room with a flat of her hand except three people she named.
"You," she said to Camille. "You, because you have hands and you do not faint and you do not talk. You," to a woman from the east side named Thora Sorenson, who had come in March and had been a veterinary assistant in Coeur d'Alene for eleven years.
"And you," to Stuart. "Because he came for you and if he opens his eyes he ought to see you."
"What do you want done."
"I want nobody rubbing anything," Maddie said. "That is the whole of it. I am going to say it once to this room and then I am going to say it again outside, because somebody out there is going to want to rub his hands and it is the single stupidest thing a person can do to a frozen man."
"Why," said Thora, who had not known.
"Because the ice is in the meat," Maddie said. "You rub it and you drag it through and you cut the man up from the inside with his own water. You do not rub. You do not put him by that fire. You do not give him a drink of anything hot."
"Then what do you do."
"You go slow," Maddie said, "and you go slow for about six hours, and you accept ahead of time that you are going to lose whatever you are going to lose."
They cut the coat off.
It took forty minutes and two knives and the last of it had to be done with shears, and the thing under it was not what Stuart had been expecting at all.
The young man had been dressed for it.
That was the first thing. Four layers, and every one of them chosen, and a wool shirt under everything that had been a good one in the old world, and newspaper packed between the last two layers across the chest and back the way a man does when he understands exactly what he is doing.
"He knew," Camille said.
"He knew," Stuart agreed.
"Then how is he like this."
"Because he went nineteen days," Maddie said, "and there is not a coat on this earth that goes nineteen days."
The boots came off last and Maddie made everybody stop talking while she did it.
Stuart had seen feet before. He had seen his own in May, after four days of April melt off a nine thousand foot divide, and he had thought at the time that he had seen the worst version of it there was.
He had not.
Maddie looked at them for a long moment.
"Right," she said. "Thora, water at body warm. Not hot. Put your wrist in it and if you can feel it at all it is too hot. Camille, get the lamp down here."
"What is it," Stuart said.
"It is what you think it is."
"Say it out loud."
"He is going to lose toes," Maddie said. "I do not know how many and I will not guess and I will not know for nine days, and anybody who tells you they can tell on the first day is lying to you or to themselves. The hands I do not know about either. The hands might be all right."
"Might."
"Might," Maddie said. "That is the word and it is going to be the word for a week and you are all going to have to live in it."
The town came anyway.
They came in ones and twos the way a town does, and stood in the lane outside the Hall in the still gray light with nothing to see, and by three in the afternoon there were forty people out there and no reason for any of them to be.
Davey went out and stood on the step.
"He's alive," he said. "That's the whole of what anybody knows. He came in from the north on the crust, he walked a long way, and Maddie has got him, and there is nothing any one of you can do for him by standing in the cold."
"Who is he."
Davey did not answer that fast, and Stuart, standing inside the door, noticed that he did not.
"He asked for Stuart Redman by name," Davey said. "Past that, nobody knows a thing, and I am not going to stand on this step and make something up for you."
"Is he off the Kiln?"
That came from the back and Stuart could not see who said it.
The lane went quiet the way a lane does.
"That's a fine question," Davey said, "and the man who can answer it has got a rag in his mouth and no feeling in his feet, and we are going to let him thaw before we ask it. Go home. Bank your fires. It is the tenth day and we have got a watch to stand."
They went, mostly.
Stuart stayed in the door and watched them go and felt the thing sitting in his chest get heavier, because he was going to have to say it in about an hour and he had been trying for two hours to find a way to say it that was not the way it was.
There was not one.
He told them in the back room of the Hall with the door shut. Davey, Camille, and Maddie, who came in with her sleeves rolled and blood on her forearm from something and would not sit down.
"I know him," Stuart said.
"We had worked that out," Camille said.
"You haven't. Let me say the whole of it and do not stop me in the middle, because if I stop I will start choosing my words and you will get a better version than the true one."
Davey sat down.
"His name is Kestrel," Stuart said. "That's all I have ever had. On the twenty-first of April I stood at the mouth of a cut in the Clearwater country with a rifle across a creek and a bluff in my hand, and there were nine men in front of me with six wagons,
and that young man on the table out there was running them."
Nobody said anything at all.
"He was one of the nine," Stuart said. "He was the one in charge of the nine. Those six women walked out of that gate at noon because he turned the column around, and he turned it around because I handed him a piece of paper with his own hanging on it,
and I gave him four days and a name and I let him walk, and I have thought about it every day since June."
Maddie put her hand flat on the table.
"He was a Kiln man."
"He was a Kiln man."
"You brought a Kiln man into my Hall."
"I brought a man off a field," Stuart said. "That's the only thing I did in that field and it is the only thing I would have done if I had seen his face through the glass first, and I want that understood before anybody starts."
"Stuart."
"Maddie, I would have gone out for him if he had been the man in the timber. I have thought about that too and I am telling you the honest answer, and you can think what you like of me for it."
Maddie looked at him a long moment.
"I do not think anything of you for it," she said. "I would have gone too. That is what is making me sick."
Davey had not moved.
"Say the rest," he said.
"There isn't much. He got out four sentences in the snow and then he went under." Stuart put his hands on the back of a chair. "He said he walked nineteen days. He said there is another one. He said it is not over the divide, and he said it is south."
"Another one," Davey said.
"Another Kiln."
"That's what he said."
"That's the word he used," Stuart said. "He used the word and he used it like a thing that had a shape to it, and then he went out."
Camille was standing against the wall with her arms folded.
"He could be lying," she said.
"He could."
"A man who ran that column could walk nineteen days to sit in a warm hall and say a thing that gets you to walk somewhere."
"He could," Stuart said again. "And I have gone around that four times in two hours and I keep coming back to the same place, which is that you do not do nineteen days in January for a lie. Not that one. A man who wants to draw me out of this valley writes a letter.
It is cheaper and it works better and he does not lose his feet doing it."
"Unless the feet are the proof."
The room was quiet.
"That is a genuinely terrible thought," Stuart said, "and I am going to have to carry it now, so thank you."
"You are welcome," Camille said.
Davey stood up.
"Here is the problem," he said, "and I want to put it on this table before anybody gets attached to a plan."
"Say it."
"We passed a rule in June," Davey said. "I wrote it and I put it to the room and it went sixty-eight to four. Weighed once is weighed. When this town takes a person in, whole, worst and best, out loud, in this room, that is done."
"I remember."
"You remember the second half," Davey said. "Nobody ever remembers the first half. The first half is that they get weighed. Whole. Worst and best. Out loud. In this room."
Stuart looked at the floor.
"He has not been weighed," he said.