Chapter 5 #2
Josiah Tarp. He is one of them. He is twenty-two and he has been one of them since he was seventeen and he has not got the stomach for it and he cries in the woodshed and I am putting his name down here so that whoever reads this knows there is one who can be turned.
"He is building us a map," Maddie said.
"He's building us a town," Stuart said.
"What?"
Stuart put his hand flat on the table.
"That's what this is," he said. "This is not a list of victims. Look at what he wrote beside each one. He has given us who can walk and who cannot. Who can read. Who is sick. Who has a child and which child. Who has been counting the gate. Who among the men can be turned and which one is the worst."
Davey went very still.
"He wrote a plan."
"He wrote the hardest part of a plan," Stuart said.
"The part nobody can get from a ridge with a glass. Anybody with a horse and a week can tell you where the walls are. There is not one man alive who could tell you that the old woman in the drying shed has a bad hip and will need carrying,
and he has written it down beside her name in October in a room with a candle."
The place had a name and the name was in the book.
It was on the second page of the back third and it was written once and never again, and Davey read it and put his finger next to it and looked up.
The Ninemile.
"That's a creek," Stuart said.
"It's a lot of creeks."
"It is a great many creeks," Camille agreed, "and that is the point of the name. There is a Ninemile in three counties that I know of."
"There's one south of Grangeville," Stuart said slowly. "And there's one out east past the breaks that comes down off the Seven Devils side, and I have walked past the mouth of it twice and never gone up it, because there is nothing up it."
"Is that true?"
"It was true in the third year. There was a road and it went eleven miles and it ended at a mill."
Maddie said, "A mill."
"A mill," Stuart said, and something went cold in him.
"And I have been standing in this valley for three days telling people that a place like that needs a wall four hundred yards long, and there has not been one single day in five years when I could not have found a wall like that inside a week if I had bothered to look for one."
"Because a mill already has one."
"Because a mill already has one," Stuart said.
"And a kiln already has one. And a grain elevator and a gravel pit and a state prison farm and the yard of a sawmill on a creek where the road ends, and there is one of them in every valley in this country,
and they were all built by people who wanted to keep something in or keep something out and they are all still standing, because the lights went out and the walls did not."
Nobody said anything.
"That is what he's been trying to tell us since Tuesday," Stuart said. "That is the actual thing. It is not that there is another one. It is that there was never anything hard about it."
The distances were in the book too.
Not written as distances. Written as days, and written as a man writes them when he has gone them himself, and this was the part that took Stuart the longest and where he stopped Davey four times and made him go back.
Nineteen days on the crust, north and west, from the Ninemile to the crossing south of the Camas.
But the entries did not go in a line.
Kestrel had not walked nineteen days in a straight line and Stuart could see it about halfway through and it took him another twenty minutes to work out why.
"He went the wrong way first," he said.
"Say it."
"Look at the eleventh through the fifteenth."
Stuart put his finger on the page and moved it down.
"He is going east. He is going east for four days and then he turns and he goes north and west for fifteen, and he ate nothing and he built no fire, and he had four days in him at the start that he did not need."
"Why would a man do that?"
"Because he was not walking to us," Camille said.
Stuart looked up at her.
"Say that again."
"He went east for four days because he was going somewhere east," Camille said, "and then something happened on the fifteenth and he turned around."
Davey turned the page.
The entry for the fifteenth of December was nine words long and it was the only entry in sixty pages that was that short.
The east road is watched. I cannot get to her.
Stuart sat back in the chair.
"Her," Davey said.
"Her."
"There's one hundred and eleven names in this book."
"There is one hundred and twelve," Stuart said, "and he did not write hers down either."
They went out at noon and followed the track south.
Camille did it, mostly, and Stuart walked behind her and read what she read and did not once get ahead of her, and the Sorenson girl's father came, and a man named Gil Pruitt who was the boy's uncle and could go all day in snow.
It went four hundred yards to the ditch line.
It got there in a way that Stuart did not enjoy watching, because by the ditch the stride had gone from ugly to something else, and there were four falls in the last hundred yards, and at the third one the man had lain in the snow long enough to melt a shape into it.
He had gotten up.
At the ditch he had sat down on the bank for a while, and there was a place where he had put both hands down flat on either side of himself, and Camille crouched over it for two minutes without saying anything.
"He rested," she said.
"That's not resting."
"No. He was deciding."
"How do you know."
"Because a man who rests puts his hands behind him," Camille said. "A man who is deciding puts them down at his sides and looks at something. He was looking at something."