Chapter 4 #2
"That is going to cost us about a third of the cutting," Davey said, "and we will make it up by working longer and being colder, and if any person in this room would rather have the wood than the rule, stand up now and say so with your face where I can see it, and I will listen and I will mean it."
Nobody stood up.
"Four," Davey said. "We send word north."
Stuart came off the wall.
"Say that one carefully."
"I am going to." Davey put both hands on the table.
"There are five places on that page besides us. Four of them are north and one of them is Vinegar Hill and it says forty-one and held, and there are six women in that town who came out of a gate in April, and Ferrell is a man who walked out a mile every morning for six days."
"It's January."
"It is January."
"It is eleven days to Vinegar Hill in June," Stuart said. "In this it's twenty. It's twenty if the crust holds and twenty-six if it doesn't and it is sixty miles of it with nothing to sleep in."
"I know."
"And the man on the horse went north."
"I know that too," Davey said. "That is the fifth thing and I am coming to it. But I want the fourth one voted on its own, because it is the one that is going to get somebody killed and I will not bundle it."
The room argued about it for forty minutes.
It was a good argument. Stuart stood at the back and listened to it and thought, not for the first time, that there was something in that long room that had gotten better every year while everything outside it got worse.
A woman from the east side stood up. Not the one who had walked eleven days. A different one, a small hard woman named Bettine Kleiss who had come in March and had not said one word in a meeting since.
"I want to say a thing about being warned," she said.
Davey nodded at her.
"We were not warned," she said. "In the place we came from. There were people who knew and they had their reasons and their reasons were not bad ones, and thirty-one of us walked out of a valley in March with what we could carry, and eleven did not."
The room was quiet.
"I am not accusing anybody," she said. "I am saying that I know exactly what it is worth to be told, and I would walk it myself if I had the legs, and I do not, and so I am going to vote yes and then I am going to be ashamed of it for a month."
It went sixty-one to nine.
"Five," Davey said, when it was over. "And this is the last one."
"Say it."
"The man on the table."
The room changed shape.
Stuart felt it happen, the way a room does, seventy people shifting about an inch and every one of them toward the east side.
"He has not been weighed," Davey said. "He cannot stand up and he cannot walk and Maddie says Sunday at the earliest for the one and February for the other, and I am not putting a man to a vote when he cannot get on his feet to answer for himself. That is not a favor to him. That is the rule."
"He's a Kiln man."
"He is."
"He ran them."
"He did," Davey said. "And every single thing we have learned in three days came out of his bag and his mouth, and there is not one person in this room who would know the word held from the word weighed without him, and I want both of those things standing up in the same sentence,
because they are both true and neither one cancels the other."
Somebody said, from the middle, "What's the vote then."
"The vote is this," Davey said. "Until he can stand, he stays in this Hall. He is fed and he is doctored and he is not restrained, and he does not go outside that door, and there are two people in this room with him at all hours and one of them is never Stuart Redman."
Stuart's head came up.
"Say that again."
"One of them is never you," Davey said, and he did not look away when he said it.
"And that is not because I distrust you. It is because every person in this valley knows that you let him walk in April, and if you sit alone with him for three weeks and he tells you a thing, then when he stands up in this room the whole of what he says will be a thing a man told his friend,
and it will not hold."
Stuart stood at the back of a long room full of people he had known for four years.
"That's the right answer," he said.
It went fifty-eight to fourteen, with the fourteen wanting him under a lock.
He went to see Maddie afterward and she was sitting on the step of the Hall in the cold with her sleeves down for once.
"Sunday," she said.
"That's what you keep saying."
"Sunday is when I stop fighting for the right foot." She had her hands wrapped around a cup. "I want you to know something and I want you to not repeat it in that room, because it is not the room's business and it is barely mine."
"Go on."
"He has not asked me once," Maddie said.
"Asked you what."
"Anything. Not one question in three days. Not how bad, not how many, not will I walk."
She looked out at the lane. "I have had forty men on a table in five years and every one of them asked me inside the first hour, and some of them asked me every hour after that, and it is the most normal thing a person does."
"And he hasn't."
"He asked me one time and that was at noon on the first day when I told him without being asked, and he said thank you, and he has not brought it up since." Maddie turned the cup. "Stuart, a man who does not ask about his own feet has already decided he is not going to need them for very long."
Stuart stood on the step in the flat gray light.
"You think he means to go back."
"I think he means to go somewhere," Maddie said, "and I think he has thought about it a great deal, and I think he did his deciding somewhere around the fourth day of nineteen and he has not moved off it since."
The party for the north was picked on the thirteenth.
It was three. That was the argument that took the longest, and it went two against four and landed on three, and the three were the Pruitt boy, who had already done two hundred miles in a May and knew the north road better than anybody under thirty,
and a man named Cobb Ferrar who had trapped that country since before the lights, and a girl of nineteen from the east side named Odile Sorenson who was Sorenson's eldest and who had walked out of a bad valley in March and could go all day.
Stuart argued for himself and lost.
He lost it to Camille, in the lane, in about ninety seconds.
"You are fifty-one."
"I've walked worse."
"You have walked worse in April," Camille said. "You came off that divide in May with feet you have never once let Maddie look at properly, and you think I do not know that, and I have known it since the third day."
"Camille."
"And there is a man on a horse north of here," she said, "who is looking for exactly one thing, which is the man who came off that field. And you are the man everybody in four valleys knows by name. If you walk north, you are not carrying a warning. You are carrying a target,
and you will put it down in Ferrell's town."
Stuart stood in the snow for a while.
"That's the right answer," he said.
"You say that too much."
"It keeps being the right answer."
They went out at first light on the fourteenth.
The whole town came to the gate, which the Pruitt boy hated, and Davey read out the message twice in front of everybody so that all three of them had it the same way and could not improve on it between here and there.
Then he gave the boy the paper.
"Read it back."
"Word for word?"
"Word for word, son, and then I am going to make you do it again in eleven days when you are tired, and that is exactly why."
They went up the north road on the crust and Stuart stood at the gate and watched them until the timber took them, and the still gray hours came down over the valley at about ten, the same as they had come down for thirteen days, no wind, no shadow, nothing moving anywhere.
He turned around and went back up the lane.
And Thora Sorenson was standing in the door of the Hall with her hand still on the frame and her face wrong.
"Mr. Redman."
"What."
"Come here," she said. "Please come here now."
He came.
The Hall was empty.
That was the first thing and it was the only thing, and it took Stuart about a second and a half to understand it and then a great deal longer to believe it.
The table was there. The blanket was there, folded back, not thrown. The lamp was there and it had been put out and not knocked over. The bench was where Stuart had left it three nights ago.
The book was gone off the table.
And on the boards by the wood door, in a line going out, were the marks of a man who had crossed forty feet of floor on his hands and his knees and the sides of his feet, and had stopped twice, and had gone out into the snow.
"Two of us," Thora said. "There were two of us in here at all hours, that is the rule, that is the vote, and Hal went out to the woodpile and I went to the gate for four minutes to watch them go and I was gone four minutes."
Stuart was already at the wood door.
"How long."
"Four minutes. Five."
He got it open.
The track went straight out across the yard behind the Hall, through the snow, not to the gate and not to the north road, and the marks in it were the marks of a man who had gotten up onto his feet somewhere around the woodpile and had fallen down twice and had gotten up both times.
It went south.
And forty yards out, in the middle of the flat white, sitting on the snow all by itself where anybody would find it, was the canvas backed book.