Chapter 7
Stuart did not move.
He knelt in eleven below on the packed snow of the south road with his hands flat in front of him and a dog standing over a boy twelve feet away, and behind him forty people were watching from the gate and could not hear one word of it.
"Say it again," he said.
"You heard me."
"Say it again anyway."
"Pierre Aubert," Kestrel said.
Stuart shut his eyes.
Away off to his left, up on the fence line, Camille Aubert did not make a sound, and Stuart knew she had heard it because he heard her stop breathing, which is a thing you can hear in dead air at forty feet.
"That man is dead," Stuart said.
"I am telling you what they told me to tell you."
"That man has been dead four years. He died at a gate with a rifle in his hands and I was there and I buried him and I wrote it down and I have carried it since."
"I know."
"Then what in God's name are you saying to me."
Kestrel's head turned on the sledge.
"I am saying they gave me a name to say to you," he said, "and they made me repeat it back four times, and the man who made me repeat it back four times said, tell him that name and then tell him that it is not the dead one."
Stuart opened his eyes.
"Not the dead one."
"That is what he said. Word for word. Tell Stuart Redman the name and then tell him it is not the dead one, he will know what to do with it, and if he does not, tell him to go and ask the Frenchwoman."
Up on the fence line Camille came down off the rail.
She came down and started out into the road and Stuart put his hand out flat behind him without turning around and said, "Camille. No."
She stopped.
"There is a dog in this road," Stuart said, "and it has got a job and it is doing it, and if you come out here fast it will make a decision and then we will all have to live with it."
"Stuart."
"I know," he said. "Stand still. I am asking you to stand still for one minute and then I will come to you and we will do this properly, and I am asking because I know exactly what I am asking."
Camille stood still.
He turned back.
"Son, I am going to get you inside this gate. That is the only thing happening for the next ten minutes. Everything else in the world can wait."
"She won't let you."
"Then talk to her."
"I don't know her," Kestrel said. "Mister Redman, I have never seen that animal before in my life. She was pulling the sledge when I woke up."
Stuart looked at the dog.
She was gray through the whole muzzle and up into the eyebrows and she was old, older than Juno, eleven or twelve, and she was standing with her weight back on her hocks the way an old dog stands when it has decided to hold a thing and knows it will hurt.
She had a collar on.
It was leather and the buckle was green and the seam had been split the whole length and sewn shut with crooked quarter inch stitches.
"Oh," Stuart said.
He sat all the way back on his heels in the road.
"All right," he said, to the dog, in an ordinary voice. "All right, old girl. I know who sewed that."
The dog's ears moved.
"I am going to tell you something and I have no earthly idea whether it does you any good," Stuart said, "but I have got a shepherd in a house up this lane who came out of a box in a ravine with one of those on her neck, and I walked her two hundred miles,
and if I have got to sit in this road until daylight I will."
He did not move toward her.
That was the whole of it and it was the only card he had. He sat in the snow at twelve feet with his hands on his knees and his head a little down and he waited, and the town waited behind him, and nobody said one word.
It took nine minutes.
At nine minutes the old dog sat down.
She did not come to him and she did not look away from him, but she sat down beside the sledge and put her weight off her front legs, and Stuart let out a breath he had been holding a good while.
"Davey," he said, without turning. "Two men. Slow. Hands empty. Take the sledge by the rope and do not touch him and do not touch her and if she gets up, you stop where you are."
They got him in at twenty past four.
Maddie had the Hall table cleared before they were up the lane and she went at him the way she went at everything, cursing quietly and steadily, and the old dog came into the Hall behind the sledge and lay down against the wall by the door and did not take her eyes off the table.
Nobody tried to put her out.
"Coat's good," Maddie said, cutting it away. "That is a good coat. That is a better coat than anything in this valley."
"Is he warm."
"He is warm. Somebody kept this boy warm for twenty hours and did it properly." She had his wrappings off. "And somebody redressed these hands. Look at that. That is not my work and it is not bad work."
"Better than yours?"
"Different than mine," Maddie said, "which is worse, because it means they have got somebody who knows how, and I would rather they had nobody."
"The feet."
Maddie went down the table and was quiet for a while.
"They took the three toes," she said.
Stuart put his hand on the back of a chair.
"Clean?"
"Clean as I would have done it. Cleaner."
She straightened up and her face had gone hard in a way that Stuart did not like at all.
"Stuart, they did that in the last twenty hours with a hot instrument and a clean cloth and they did it right, and the right foot they have got poulticed and wrapped and it is going to keep."
"Then they saved it."
"They saved it," Maddie said. "I have been fighting for that foot since the ninth and I was going to lose it on Sunday, and somebody out there in the dark won it in a day, and I want everybody in this building to understand that I am grateful and that I have never been so frightened in my life."
They did not talk to him until eleven in the morning.
Maddie would not allow it and Davey backed her and Stuart did not argue, and for six hours Stuart Redman sat on the step of the Hall in the cold with his back against the door and did not go home.
Camille came at seven.
She sat down beside him on the step and put her elbows on her knees and neither of them said anything for about ten minutes, which was a long time even for them.
"He said your father's name," Stuart said finally.
"I heard him."
"Camille."
"I heard him, Stuart. I was on the fence."
"I need to ask you a thing and I do not want to."
"Then ask it badly," Camille said, "and I will answer it badly, and we will get through it."
Stuart put his hands together.
"Was there another one," he said.
Camille did not answer for a while.
"Yes," she said.
The cold went straight through him.
"Say it."
"My father had a brother," Camille said. "He was two years older. His name was Pierre also, because my grandmother buried a first Pierre in nineteen fifty-one and did the thing that people did then, and there were two Pierre Auberts in one house and everybody in that village thought it was funny."
"You have never said one word about this."
"No."
"In four years."
"In four years," Camille agreed, "and I am not going to apologize for it and I am not going to pretend there was no reason."
"Then tell me the reason."
Camille looked out at the lane.
"Because he was not a good man," she said, "and because my father crossed an ocean to get away from him, and because when my father talked about him, which was perhaps six times in my whole life, he did it in the kitchen at night with the radio on."
Stuart sat with that.
"Where was he."
"Canada," Camille said. "That is what I knew as a girl. He went to Canada in nineteen ninety-four and there was a thing about money and there was a thing about a woman and my father paid for something and never said what, and they did not speak after."
"Canada is a long way from a creek in the Ninemile."
"Canada is six hundred miles," Camille said. "It is a long way if you have got a car and a job and a life. It is not a long way at all if you have got thirty years."
"Camille, he would be what."
"Seventy-one," she said. "Seventy-two in May."
Stuart got up off the step and walked out into the middle of the lane and stood there in the gray with his hands in his pockets, and then he came back and sat down again.
"That is a very old man to be running anything."
"My grandmother buried her husband at ninety-one and she ran that farm until the week she died," Camille said. "Do not do that. Do not comfort yourself with a number. I have watched you do it twice this week."
"That's fair."
"It is not fair, it is correct, which is different." She pulled her coat in. "And you are missing the thing that matters."
"Which is what."
"Which is that whoever gave that boy that name," Camille said, "did not give him a name out of a book. They gave him a name that is only a name to four people who are alive, and one of them is on a bench in the Clearwater and two of them are sitting on this step."
Stuart went very cold.
"Who's the fourth."
"I do not know," Camille said. "That is the whole of it, Stuart. That is why I have been sitting here for forty minutes not talking to you. I have gone through every person my father ever mentioned and every person I ever met in this country and I cannot find a fourth, and there has to be one."
They put it to him at eleven.
Davey ran it, in the Hall, with the doors shut, and eight people in the room because Davey had decided eight was the number and had written down who and why on a sheet the night before in case anyone ever asked him.
Kestrel could sit up. That was new.
"I want to start with something," Davey said, "before you say one word, and I want it said in front of witnesses."
"Go on."
"You got off that table on Thursday morning and you crossed my floor on your knees and you went out my wood door in eleven below with no coat," Davey said. "Why."
"To put the book where you would find it."
"You could have put the book where we would find it and then gone back to the table."
Kestrel looked at him.
"Yes," he said.
"So why did you keep going."