Chapter 3 #3
"He was one of the nine men in the Clearwater country in April. He was the one running them. And on the twenty-first of April he turned six wagons around and six women walked out of a gate at noon, and Stuart Redman let him walk, and he has come nineteen days in January to tell us a thing,
and we have not weighed him yet."
The east side started to move and Davey put his hand flat on the table.
"Not tonight," he said. "This is a report. Nobody votes on a man who cannot stand up. When he can stand in this room he will stand in this room and he will say the whole of it, worst and best, out loud, the way every single person in this valley has had to,
and then you will vote and I will carry it."
"And until then?"
"Until then he is on a table under Maddie's hands and he is not going anywhere and neither are his feet," Davey said. "And I will tell you what I want from this room instead."
"Say it."
"There is a man on that bench with a ledger and a rifle who has been counting the chimneys in this town since the last week of December," Davey said, "and I do not care one bit tonight about what anybody did in April."
Old Hal Brewer stood up at the back.
"How many are we," he said.
"Eighty-seven."
"No," Hal said. "How many are we that can shoot."
Nobody answered that for a moment.
"Nineteen," Davey said. "Nineteen that I would put on a wall. Eleven more that can hold one."
"And how many was the Kiln."
"Nine men and a wall four hundred yards long," Stuart said, from the back of the room, "and a hundred and something people behind it, and that is the number I want everybody in here to sit with, because nine men held that for eleven years and they did not do it with guns."
"Then how."
"They did it with a story," Stuart said. "And the story was that there was nowhere else."
He went to the Hall at ten.
Maddie had a lamp turned low and she was working on the left hand and she did not look up.
"Tell me," Stuart said.
"The hands are coming back," she said. "Both of them. He will not thank me for the next four days because coming back hurts worse than going, but they are coming."
"The feet."
"Three toes on the left," Maddie said. "Maybe four. The right I am still fighting for and I am going to keep fighting for it until Sunday and then I am going to stop and do what needs doing."
"Does he know."
"He asked me at noon and I told him," she said. "I do not lie to people about their own feet."
Kestrel was awake.
His eyes came around and he had more in them than he had the night before, which was not saying a great deal, but it was something.
"You got your bell rung," he said.
"Somebody did."
"Did you get him."
"No."
"Then he's gone south."
Stuart pulled the bench over and sat down on it.
"He went north," he said.
Kestrel's face did not change for about two seconds, and then it did, and it was the second time in two days that Stuart had watched fear arrive in a young man's face and it was worse the second time.
"Say that again."
"He went north out of that gap at a gallop with a big canvas backed ledger tied down on his cantle," Stuart said, "and we tracked him four miles and lost him on blown rock, and before that he had been sitting on a bench a mile and a half from my north gate for eleven days, watching this town,
and he was there before you were."
"Before me."
"Before you."
Kestrel lay there and looked at the beam.
"Then he was never following me," he said.
"No."
"I have spent nineteen days," Kestrel said, "being very careful, and eating nothing, and building no fire, and he has been sitting on a hill in front of me the whole time."
"Yes."
"Mister Redman, you have to listen to me now."
"I'm listening."
"If he was already here in December," Kestrel said, "then this place was on the list before I ever opened my mouth."
Stuart went very still.
"What list."
Kestrel turned his head.
"The book on your table," he said. "Go get it."
Davey brought it himself and would not hand it over, and set it on the bench beside the table and opened it, and turned it so the lamp fell on the pages, and Kestrel could not hold it because his hands were wrapped and so Davey turned the pages for him one at a time.
"Back," Kestrel said. "Further. Past the columns."
Davey went past the columns.
"There," Kestrel said.
It was a page of names.
Not people. Places. Written in the small cramped hand that had started as block capitals and gone worse, a column of them running down the page with a number beside each one and a word beside the number.
Cottonwood. 40. Weighed.
Reubens. 22. Weighed.
Greer. 60. Held.
Kamiah. 200 plus. Left.
Vinegar Hill. 41. Held.
Stuart put his finger on the page and did not touch the paper.
"What does held mean."
"It means too hard for now," Kestrel said.
"And left."
"It means too big."
"And weighed."
Kestrel did not answer.
Davey turned the page.
There were eleven more entries on the next one and the hand got tighter and faster as it went down, and the last four had been written with a different pencil, and the very last line on the page had been written by somebody in a hurry in a cold room.
Davey read it and his face changed.
"Stuart," he said.
Stuart leaned over the lamp.
The crossing south of the Camas. 53.
And under it, in the same hand, in fresher pencil, added later:
Correction. 87.