Chapter 6 #3
"How does anybody outside that wall have one of those."
"That's the question."
"Delphine sewed nineteen," Camille said. "One came to your town in the third year in a box on a horse. One came to you in a ravine in April on a dog called Juno. Seventeen are somewhere."
"Seventeen are somewhere," Stuart said, "and Delphine told me at a wheel in April that she knew perfectly well most of them came to nothing, and I have held that in my head since June as eighteen dogs I would never see."
"And now one has been on a bench two and a half miles from this house."
"Now one has been on a bench two and a half miles from this house," Stuart said, "and somebody cut it open on one knee with a knife and took out what was inside it and left the leather where we would find it."
"Why leave it."
"Because they wanted me to know they had it."
He said that and then he sat with it, and then he said the rest of it, which he had been working around all afternoon and had not wanted to put into words in front of other people.
"Camille, there is something worse."
"There is always something worse."
"The boy put that book in the snow at six o'clock this morning," Stuart said. "He did it because he had worked out he would never stand in that room and he wanted the town to have what was in his head. That is a man making his last arrangement, and he made it well, and he made it alone."
"Yes."
"And then he went eight hundred yards south in the dark with no coat and lay down."
"Yes."
"And somebody was already in the creek brush."
Camille did not answer.
"He did not walk south by accident," Stuart said.
"A man who goes out to die goes anywhere. He goes to the woodpile. He goes out the north road because it is the road he came in on. That boy went eight hundred yards south across open ground on feet he did not have, past a ditch where he sat down and looked back at the lights of this town,
and he went in a line."
"He was going to them."
"He was going to them," Stuart said, "and I do not know one single reason on this earth why."
They put him on the Hall table at four in the morning.
Stuart was not there when they found him, because Stuart was asleep for the first time in three days, and he came awake to Sorenson hammering on his door and Camille already up with the Lebel in her hands.
"South gate," Sorenson said. His face was the color of a sheet. "Mr. Redman. South gate."
"Say it."
"They brought him back."
Stuart got his boots on with his hands shaking and did not manage the laces.
"Alive?"
"Alive," Sorenson said, "and warm, and wrapped in a coat that is not his, and there is a dog sitting next to him in the middle of the road and it will not let anybody within twenty feet of him."
They came down the lane at a run with lanterns going.
The south gate was open and the watch was standing well back with their hands off their guns because Davey had come down and made them, and forty people were in the lane behind them in whatever they had slept in.
And in the road, ten feet outside the gate, in the lantern light, a young man lay on a narrow hand made sledge in a good wool coat with a blanket over him and his wrapped hands folded on his chest.
There was a dog sitting upright at his shoulder.
It was a big raw boned thing, gray through the muzzle, and it did not growl and it did not bark and it did not move one inch when Stuart came through the gate.
It simply watched him.
"Nobody comes past me," Stuart said, over his shoulder. "Nobody. Camille, get on that fence and stay there."
He went out slow with his hands where the animal could see them.
At twenty feet the dog stood up.
Stuart stopped.
"All right," he said. "All right. That is your job and you are doing it."
The dog did not sit back down, but it did not come on either, and Stuart stood in the road in eleven below and looked past it at the boy on the sledge, and saw that his eyes were open and that they were tracking.
"Kestrel."
The young man's mouth moved.
Stuart could not hear it. He went down onto his knees in the snow and went forward that way, slow, a foot at a time, and the dog let him come to twelve feet and no further and he stopped there and put his hands flat on the road.
"Say it again."
"Don't," Kestrel said. "Don't shoot her."
"Nobody is shooting anything."
"She carried me."
"I know it."
"Mister Redman." The boy's head came around and his eyes were terrible. "They sent me back."
"I can see that, son."
"No." Kestrel's breath went in and out twice.
"Listen to me. They sent me back and they sent me back on purpose and they gave me a coat and they fed me and they put me on a sledge, and they told me exactly what to say to you, and I have been lying here in the road for an hour trying to decide whether to say it."
Stuart knelt in the snow twelve feet away.
"Then say it."
"They know you," Kestrel said. "They have known you a long time. Longer than the Kiln. Longer than any of it."
"Who does."
And the young man on the sledge said a name, and Stuart Redman felt the whole of five years go out from under him like river ice.