Chapter 2 #3
"You are going to have to weigh him in that room in nine days, and this town is going to look at what he did and it is going to be worse than anything I ever did, and I am going to have to sit in that room."
"Shawna."
"I lit a lamp for twenty years and forty-one people are in a field," she said.
"I know exactly what the arguing sounds like from the inside. I do not know yet which way I will vote and I want you to know that I am not promising you anything, and I would be lying to you if I did, and you have never once lied to me in a doorway."
"That's fair."
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true," Stuart said.
She went home and lit the lamp in the window the way she did every night now, in the middle of the afternoon dark, because nobody had ever asked her to put it out.
He woke at twenty past two in the morning.
Stuart was the only one on the bench. Maddie had gone at midnight after eight hours and had said she would come back at four and had meant it, and Camille was asleep sitting up against the wall with the Lebel across her knees,
and the fire was banked and the Hall was the temperature of a room in which nobody would lose anything else that night.
There was no wind.
Eleven days now. Stuart had stopped marking the door.
Kestrel's eyes opened and went across the ceiling and found the beam and stayed there a long while, and Stuart did not say anything at all, because a man coming up out of that has a certain amount of work to do first.
"Am I in a house," Kestrel said.
"You're in a hall. There's a fire about nine feet from you and you cannot have it."
"Can't feel my feet."
"No."
"How bad."
"Maddie says nine days before anybody knows," Stuart said, "and Maddie does not soften things, so when she says nine days she means nine days and not that it is already decided."
Kestrel closed his eyes and opened them again.
"You got me off that field."
"The dog got you off that field. I carried the rope."
Something moved in the burned face.
"The dog," he said. "She came out of the gate at noon and put a woman down in the road."
"She did."
"I have thought about that about four hundred times."
Stuart leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
"I am going to ask you four things," he said, "and then you are going to sleep, and I am not going to ask you a fifth no matter what you say. That's the arrangement and I am telling you what it is so you can spend the four."
"All right."
"One. Is there another one."
"Yes."
"Two. South of here."
"South and east," Kestrel said. "Eleven, twelve days for a man who is not me."
"Three. How long."
"Since about August."
Stuart sat with that.
Five months. It had been going five months, while he walked the mail and shot grouse and stood in a lane in the first snow and thought about spring.
"Four," he said, and his voice did not do what he wanted it to. "Who is running it."
Kestrel did not answer.
"Son."
"I know you're going to make me say it."
"I am."
The young man on the table looked at the beam.
"Ammon," he said.
Stuart Redman sat very still on that bench in the dark of the Hall.
He saw a road in April, and a rider coming up the column at a trot, and a piece of paper with a nail hole in the top of it changing hands at a stirrup, and a young man's face he had not looked at properly because he had been busy looking at the man in charge.
"He was one of the nine," Stuart said.
"He was one of the nine."
"I let him walk."
"You let all of us walk. That was the trade." Kestrel's breath went in and out twice. "He went south in June with two of them and he was gone four months, and in October he sent for me."
"Sent for you."
"He knows what I can do with a ledger," Kestrel said. "He knows what I did at that cut, too, and he has decided it does not count, because he has decided a man who quit once is a man who can be brought back."
Stuart got up off the bench.
"That's five questions," Kestrel said. "You said four."
"I'm not asking a fifth. I'm telling you a thing." Stuart stood over him. "There are eighty-seven people in this valley and in nine days you are going to have to stand in this room and tell them what you were, and they are going to vote, and I am not going to be able to fix it for you."
"I know what I am."
"Then you'll do fine."
"No," Kestrel said. "You don't understand what I'm telling you. I'm not worried about your room."
"Then what."
The young man turned his head on the table and looked at him, and for the first time since the field there was something in his face that was not pain.
It was fear, and it was the kind that has been carried a long way.
"I came nineteen days on the crust and I did not build one fire and I did not eat," Kestrel said, "because a fire is a mark and a snare line is a mark and a man who eats leaves a mark, and I have known since the fourth day that I am not walking alone."
Stuart went cold all the way down.
"Somebody's behind you."
"Somebody has been behind me since the Camas," Kestrel said, "and he is better at this than I am, and I came here anyway, and that is the worst thing I have ever done to anybody in my life."
Outside, in eleven days of dead air, the dog at the door of the Hall got up off the floor.