Chapter 8
Stuart stood in the cold ash with the page in his hand and did not move for a long time.
The wind came up the creek brush behind him and took the bedsheet on the pole and cracked it once like a sail, and the meltwater ran under his boots in four little channels where fifteen days of dead air had been holding the world still, and none of that reached him at all.
He was looking at one word.
Weighed.
"What is it," Kestrel said, from the sledge.
Stuart did not answer.
"Mister Redman."
"Give me a minute, son."
"That is not a minute face. That is a face I have seen once before and it was on a man at a cut in April."
Stuart turned around and came back up out of the pit with the page held down at his side.
"What does weighed mean," he said. "You told me held was too hard and left was too big. You never told me weighed."
Kestrel's face did something.
"No."
"Tell me now."
"I did not tell you because I did not want to say it in a room with eight people in it and a woman at the wall who has children in this valley," Kestrel said. "And I am not proud of that either."
"Say it out here, then. There's nobody but me and a dog."
"Weighed means it has been decided," Kestrel said. "It means the book is done with the place. It means somebody has sat at a table and read the number and read the notes and said yes, and after that it is not a question anymore, it is a date."
"A date for what."
Kestrel looked at him.
"Cottonwood was forty people," he said. "It says weighed. There is no Cottonwood."
The wind came through the brush.
"Say that plainly."
"I walked past it on the sixth day," Kestrel said.
"There is a road and there are eleven chimneys standing up out of nothing and there is no roof on any of them, and there is a fence with a gate in it and the gate is open, and there is not one thing in that place, not a pot, not a nail, not a dog, not a body. It is not burned. Nothing is broken.
It is empty."
"Forty people."
"Forty people, and it says weighed, and the date at the head of that block is two summers ago."
Stuart stood in the wind with the page in his hand.
"They take them," he said.
"They take them."
"Not the food. Not the stock."
"They take the people," Kestrel said. "That is the whole of it and I have known it since October and I wrote it in that book twice and neither time could I make myself write it plainly, and you have both my books and you will not find a sentence that says it, and that is a thing I will answer for."
"How many."
"Between Cottonwood and Reubens, sixty-two," Kestrel said. "That is in the front of the ledger as a column of stock and it is written like stock, and the man who writes it is not the man on the horse, and I copied that page in October and my hand shook so badly I had to do it twice."
Stuart looked down at the paper.
"And this says us."
"That says you."
"And somebody wrote it in the last two weeks," Stuart said, "and then folded it and put it under a stone in a fire pit for me to find."
"Yes."
"Which means the people who left it are not the people who wrote it."
"Which means," Kestrel said, "that the man on the horse lost a page out of his book somewhere between here and wherever he went, and somebody who is not him put it under that stone."
Stuart folded the page into four and put it inside his coat against his chest.
"Then we have got an ally out there," he said, "and I have just missed him by nine hours."
They got back to the south gate at half past nine and the whole town was on the fence.
Stuart did not stop to talk. He put the page in Davey's hand at the gate and said, "Read it and then ring the bell four times," and kept walking up the lane with the rope over his good shoulder.
Davey read it.
Then he went up the platform ladder himself and rang the bell four times, which he had never once done in his life, and eighty-seven people came out of twenty-six houses into a warm wind and standing water.
He read it out from the Hall step.
He read the whole page, every town and every number and every word beside it, and then he read the last line twice, and then he told them what Kestrel had told Stuart in the ash about Cottonwood, and he did not soften one syllable of it.
The lane made a sound Stuart had heard twice in his life and did not want to hear again.
"I am going to say four things," Davey said, over it, "and then this town is going to work, and it is going to work until it is dark and then it is going to work with lanterns."
"Say them!"
"One. Nobody is leaving this valley. There has been talk in this lane since Thursday and I have heard it and I have not stamped on it and I am stamping on it now. There is nowhere to go. Cottonwood is what happens to people who scatter."
"Two!"
"Two. The gap gets closed today. Not in five days. Today, by dark, and the ground is soft for the first time in a month and every man and woman over fourteen who can lift is going to be on that line at ten o'clock."
"Three."
"Three. Everything comes in. Stock in the shed, dogs in the houses, wood stacked against the north walls and not out in the lots, and every drop of water in this valley in a barrel behind a door by tomorrow night."
"Four."
Davey stopped.
"Four," he said. "We are going to fight."
He let that sit.
"I want to say it out loud on this step in daylight so that nobody has to wonder and nobody has to guess and nobody has to lie awake working out what the plan is. There is no negotiating with a book that has already written the word down. They have weighed us. The weighing is done.
The only thing left is a date, and we do not know the date, and so the date is today."
Somebody in the middle said, "How many are they?"
"I do not know."
"Davey."
"I do not know and I am not going to invent a number to make you feel better or to make you afraid," Davey said. "What I know is that they moved sixty-two people out of two towns and they did it without burning one roof, and a thing that does that does not do it with nine men."
"Then how do we fight it?"
"The same way anybody has ever fought anything," Davey said. "From behind something, with our people fed, on ground we know, at a time we have chosen. Ten o'clock. The gap. Go."
They closed the gap in eleven hours.
It was the hardest day's work the Crossing ever did and there were people in that valley who talked about it for the rest of their lives, and Stuart Redman was on the bar for nine of the eleven hours with a hip that had stopped talking to him and started shouting.
The ground had thawed to eleven inches and no further.
That was the gift of the warm wind and it was the only gift it gave. Below eleven inches it was still iron, and so they did not dig. They built.
They took down the old cattle fence for two hundred feet either side of the gap and they laid the rails flat in two courses and pinned them with wagon iron, and behind that they stacked green fir rounds three deep off the cutting,
and behind that they filled the whole of it with everything the valley had.
Stones out of the creek. Sod cut in slabs out of the soft top. Two wagons that had not rolled since the second year, run in at an angle and their wheels knocked off and the boxes filled with dirt.
Old Hal Brewer sat on a stool at the end of it for six hours with a maul and sharpened stakes.
"You want a ditch," he said, to nobody. "That's what you want. Ditch in front of it. Can't have one."
"Ground's froze, Hal."
"I know the ground's froze. I am saying what you want."
"What do we do instead?"
"You do what my father did in the Ardennes," Hal said, "which is you make them come slow and you make them come where you want them."
He was seventy-nine and he sharpened four hundred stakes and would not be moved off the stool.
They left one way in.
That was Camille's, and she argued it on the wall at two in the afternoon with mud to her knees, and she argued it against Davey and against Stuart and won it against both of them.
"You cannot close a hole," she said. "You can only move it."
"We are closing it."
"You are closing this one and then there are four more that you have not thought of, because a wall that has no door makes men go and find the place where there is no wall at all, and then you are fighting in the dark in a place you did not choose."
"So what."
"So leave a door," Camille said. "Leave a door that is obvious and easy and wide enough for two men to come through at once, and put it exactly where you want them, and then build the whole of everything else so that nobody would ever try anything else."
"That's a trap."
"That is a door," Camille said. "It becomes a trap when you put four people behind it, and that is not my department, that is his."
She pointed at Stuart with a shovel.
They put the door in the northeast corner where the ground came up in a little throat between the ditch line and the fir, and Stuart stood in it at four in the afternoon and looked back up the throat at the town.
"There," he said.
"There what."
"Hal. Bring your stakes."
The Pruitt party came back on the nineteenth.
They came back eleven days early and they came back at a run and there were four of them, not three.
Stuart was on the wall when Sorenson called it down and he got to the north gate at the same time Davey did, and the Pruitt boy came in with his face burned raw and his coat torn under one arm and he could not get the words out for a minute.
"Say the worst of it first," Stuart said.
"Nobody's dead."
"All right."
"Nobody in this party is dead, Mr. Redman, and I do not know about Vinegar Hill and that is the thing I have got to say."
Davey said, "You did not get there."
"We got to nine miles out," the Pruitt boy said. "We got to the Hartung cut and the north trace and we came up onto the bench above the post at about four in the afternoon on the seventeenth, and there was no smoke."
The gate went quiet.
"Say it again."
"There was no smoke," he said. "Forty-one people and no smoke on a January afternoon. And we lay on that bench for two hours and we watched it and there was nobody in that town."
"Nobody."