Chapter 2 #2
"He has not been weighed," Davey said, "and he is lying on my Hall table with eighty-seven people in this valley wondering who he is, and in about nine days he is either going to be able to stand up in that room or he is not, and either way there is going to have to be a meeting."
"He'll lose the vote."
"He will lose it badly," Davey said. "I can count that room in my sleep and I am telling you he loses it eleven to seventy. And I want you to understand that I will run that meeting straight and I will not put my thumb anywhere near it, and if it goes against him I will carry it out."
"Davey."
"No. Hear it." The young man's jaw was set.
"I made that rule in June because I had run a vote in May that went wrong and I would not bend it in the middle. If I bend this one in the middle for a man you like, then the rule is nothing, and the next time somebody stands at that gate it will be nothing again."
Stuart was quiet for a while.
"That's the right answer," he said.
"It's a rotten answer."
"It's both," Stuart said. "That's what nobody tells you. A woman said that to me by a wheel in April and I have not been able to put it down since."
They went through his things at four o'clock because there was no arguing that they should not, and Davey did it himself at the long table with three people watching, and wrote down every item on a sheet as he took it out, and read each one aloud.
That was Davey. He had built that habit in a bad year and he had never once let go of it.
"One pack. Canvas, military, strap mended twice."
"One blanket, wool, gray."
"One knife."
"Nineteen silver and a brass button."
"One razor, no strop."
"One tin, and in the tin is a needle and thread and eleven matches."
Stuart stood with his arms folded and watched a young man's whole life come out of a bag onto a table, and it was not very much, and most of it had been chosen the way the four layers had been chosen.
"Food?"
"None," Davey said. "There is not one crumb in this bag. There is a fish line and a hook in the tin and that is the whole of his provision."
"How many days with no food."
"I would not like to guess."
Then Davey's hand stopped.
He drew out the last thing in the bag and set it on the table and did not read it aloud, and Stuart came around the table and looked down at it, and the room got very quiet.
It was a book.
It was canvas backed and about the size of a hand and a half, and the canvas had been a color once, and the corners were gone soft, and Stuart Redman had been told about a book exactly like it in a cold front room in Vinegar Hill in March by a man who had watched somebody write in one eight times.
"That's a ledger," he said.
"It's small for a ledger."
"They had a big one." Stuart did not touch it. "Ferrell said big, canvas backed, big enough to need a table. This is a pocket one."
"Then it isn't the same book."
"No," Stuart said. "It's a different book, and that is very much worse, because it means there was more than one."
Davey opened it.
The first forty pages were columns, and the columns were flour and salt and shot and silver, and the hand was a hand, unremarkable, a man's block letters going along at a steady clip.
Then the columns stopped.
The back third of the book was not columns.
It was writing, close and small and cramped, running the full width of the page with no margin, and the hand had changed halfway down the first page of it from block capitals to something faster and worse, the way a man's hand changes when he stops copying a form and starts saying a thing.
Davey turned it toward the lamp and read four lines and then shut the book.
"What," Stuart said.
"It's dated."
"So?"
"The last one's dated the second of January," Davey said. "This year. Nine days ago."
"Where."
"It doesn't say where." Davey pushed the book an inch across the table and took his hand off it. "It says who."
Nobody picked it up.
"Read it," Stuart said.
"I am not reading a man's book out loud while he's unconscious in the next room," Davey said. "That is not a thing I will do and I do not care how bad I want to."
"Davey."
"No. He gets to say it himself or it does not get said."
Davey put the book in the middle of the table where everyone could see it and nobody could claim it.
"It stays here. It does not go in a drawer and it does not go in your coat and it does not go anywhere at all, and when he can talk, he can talk."
Camille said, quietly, "That is a hard rule."
"It is the same rule," Davey said. "Whole. Worst and best. Out loud. From him."
Shawna came at dusk.
Stuart had wondered whether she would, and had decided she would not, and had been wrong, which he was finding was the general condition of knowing Shawna Hennefresy.
She stood in the door of the Hall with snow on her shoulders and looked down the length of the room at the shape on the table.
"They're saying he's off the Kiln," she said.
"They're saying it because it's true."
"You could have said no."
"I could have," Stuart agreed. "And then in four days it would have come out anyway and every person in this valley would have learned that the first thing I did was lie, and I would rather they learn what he is than what I am."
Shawna came down the room and stood over the table for a while.
She did not touch him.
"Is he the one," she said.
"The one what."
"You told me about a man who turned wagons around."
"That's him."
She looked at the burned face and the wrapped hands for a long moment.
"Then I want to say a thing to you and I want you to not make it a bigger thing than it is," she said.