Chapter 8 #2
"There was a horse in the road," the Pruitt boy said. "One horse, loose, in the middle of the road, standing there, and nothing else moving anywhere. And the gate was open."
"The gate."
"Both wagons pulled back and the gap open and nobody on it."
Stuart put his hand flat on the gatepost.
"Did you go in."
"No sir," the boy said. "And I have been sick about it for two days and Cobb says I did right and Odile says I did right and I am still sick about it."
"You did right."
"Mr. Redman."
"You were sent to carry a warning and not to look at a thing," Stuart said. "If you had gone down into that town and there had been somebody in it, nobody in this valley would know what you know right now, and what you know right now is worth every mile you walked."
The Pruitt boy sat down on the wet ground.
"There's a fourth," Davey said.
The fourth was a woman.
She was standing eleven feet back from the gate where Cobb Ferrar had put her, and she had been standing there through the whole of it without saying one word, and Stuart looked at her properly for the first time and had to make himself not react.
She was nineteen or twenty.
She was small and wrecked and filthy and her hair had been cut off close with a knife and not recently, and she had a man's coat on over two other coats and boots that had been cut open down the side to get her feet into them.
And she had a rifle.
She had it slung across her front on a piece of cord, muzzle down, the way a person carries a thing they intend to keep, and she had one hand on it the whole time she was standing there.
It was a Ruger 10/22.
It was a plain one, the old carbine, beat to death and scratched down to the white in four places, and it had a walnut stock that somebody had wrapped in wire at the wrist where it had cracked.
And hanging out of the bottom of it, curved forward, was a twenty-five round magazine.
Stuart looked at that magazine for about four seconds.
"Where'd you find her," he said.
"We didn't," Cobb Ferrar said. "She found us. She came off the bench at us at about nine o'clock that night in the dark and she came from downwind and she was eleven feet away before Odile ever knew she was there, and she said one sentence and then she sat down and would not say another."
"What was the sentence."
Cobb looked uncomfortable.
"She said, you are walking to a place that is not there anymore."
The woman had not moved.
Stuart went eleven feet and stopped at a distance he had learned in a road four days ago and crouched down on his heels in the mud so his eyes were below hers.
"My name's Stuart Redman."
She looked at him.
"I'm not going to ask you anything," he said. "I have done that to people and it is the wrong end of the stick. So I am going to tell you some things instead and you can take whichever ones you want."
Nothing.
"This is the Crossing. There's eighty-seven people in it. There's a woman named Maddie in that Hall who will look at your feet whether you want her to or not and she curses the whole time and she is the best there is."
Nothing.
"Nobody in this valley is going to touch that rifle," Stuart said. "Not today, not tomorrow, not when you are asleep. If somebody tries it, you come and find me, and I will deal with it, and if I cannot deal with it I will get out of your way."
Something moved in her face.
"I'll tell you my last thing," Stuart said, "and then I'll leave you alone. Fourteen days ago a man came off a field out there with no coat and no food and he had walked nineteen days. He is on a table in that Hall right now and he is going to keep his foot.
We do not ask people where they come from until they have eaten."
He got up, which cost him, and turned to go.
"Ninemile," she said.
Stuart stopped.
He did not turn around fast. He turned around the way you turn around when a thing has landed and you do not want to knock it off the table.
"Say that again."
"You have got a page in your coat," she said. Her voice was wrecked too. "Cobb Ferrar told me on the road that a man in this town had a page out of the book. I have been walking toward a rumor for six weeks and I would like to see it."
Stuart took the page out of his coat and held it out.
She did not take it. She looked at it in his hand for a long moment and then she looked up at him and her face came apart very slightly at one corner and then went back.
"That's his hand," she said.
"Whose."
"My brother's."
They put her by the Hall fire and Maddie went at her boots and swore for eleven minutes straight.
She ate three bowls and then stopped herself with a hand on the table and would not have a fourth, which told Stuart more about the last six weeks than anything she said.
Her name was Nell Fairweather.
"That's a hell of a name for this world," Maddie said.
"It has not helped."
She was twenty. She came out of Greer, which was on the page and had the word held beside it, and she had left it in the first week of December with her brother, and she was the only one of the two of them still walking.
"Your brother wrote in that book," Stuart said.
"My brother wrote in that book for two years."
"For them."
"For them," Nell said. "He was seventeen when they took Cottonwood and he was fast at figures and he had a good hand and they found that out in about a week, and they did what they do, which is they give you a job and then they give you a reason and then they give you something to lose."
"And you?"
"They did not take Greer," she said. "Greer said held. Greer had sixty people and a good road out and a man who had been a game warden, and they looked at it twice and wrote held twice and went away.
And my brother was inside and I was outside and I have spent two years walking to places on that list and getting there late."
Stuart sat down slowly.
"You've been warning them."
"I have been trying to warn them," Nell Fairweather said. "I got to Reubens eleven days late. I got to a place on the Salmon that is not on your page and I was four days late. I have been on foot in this country for two years with a rifle and a list in my head and I am nought for four."
"Nought for four."
"Nought for four."
"And your brother?"
She put her spoon down.
"He got a page out," she said. "In November. He got a page out of the book in the fall party and put it in a hand and told the hand where to put it, and nine days later they found the tear and they worked out who, and that is the whole story and I do not want to tell the end of it tonight."
Kestrel said, from the table, "Wick."
Every head in the room came around.
"What did you say," Stuart said.
"Nothing. I said a name."
"Say it again."
"It is not the same," Kestrel said. "It cannot be the same. Wick was the Kiln and the Kiln was the Clearwater and this is the Ninemile and it is a hundred and forty miles apart."
Nell Fairweather had gone very still with her hands in her lap.
"They called my brother Wick," she said.
The Hall went absolutely silent.
"Because he was thin," she said. "Like a candle wick. That is what they called him and that is what he signed and I have not heard anybody say it out loud in two years."
Stuart Redman sat in that room and felt the last four days and the last four years fold together into one piece.
"Ma'am," he said, and his voice was not right. "What was his given name."
"Aurel," she said.
"Aurel Petrescu."
She came up out of the chair.
"How do you know that name."
"Because I buried him on a road in April," Stuart said, "two hundred miles north of here, and I put a board over him with his name on it and the dates and Romanian underneath, because a man in that town said a man ought to be from somewhere,
and forty-one people stood in that road and four of them cried."
Nell Fairweather put both hands on the table and stood there.
"Say it again," she said.
"Aurel Petrescu."
"He was my mother's second," she said. "Different fathers. Say the rest."
"He got a page out to me at a table in Vinegar Hill," Stuart said, "and he died nine days later in a road with a bullet in him, and the last thing he said was tell her I did it, tell her it was me that got it out."
"Her."
"I thought he meant a woman in a kennel," Stuart said. "I have thought that for nine months. I stood at a wheel in April and I told her he had said it and she wept, and I have never once until this minute thought it might have been anybody else."
Nell Fairweather sat down.
She sat down and put her face in her hands and did not make one sound, and the whole Hall looked at the floor, and after about a minute Maddie went over and put a hand on the back of her neck and left it there.
They came on the twenty-second at four in the morning.
There was no moon and there was a thin fog off the melt and the wind had gone around into the north and the temperature had dropped eleven degrees in three hours, which was the thing Stuart had been dreading since the thaw, because the mud went to iron and iron carries men.
Sorenson was on the north platform and he did not ring the bell.
That was the drill and they had drilled it for five days. He came down the ladder and went to four doors in order and by ten past four there were nineteen people on the wall in the dark and not one lamp lit in the whole valley.
Stuart was in the throat.
He had put himself there on the first night and had not let anybody argue him out of it since, and he was lying behind a log crib eleven feet inside the door with Camille on his left and Gil Pruitt on his right and Hal Brewer's stakes in two rows in front of him in the dark.
"How many," Camille said.
"I count twelve."
"There are more than twelve."
"I know there are more than twelve. I am counting the ones I can see."
They came slow.
That was the first thing and it was the thing that told Stuart exactly what they were. They did not rush the wall. They came up out of the low ground in a line at a walk and they stopped at three hundred yards and they stood there for eleven minutes in the fog doing absolutely nothing.
"What are they doing," Gil whispered.