Chapter 9
Stuart stood in the frozen mud forty feet from an old man and five dogs and did not say anything for a while.
The sun came up over the eastern rim behind the fir and went gold along the edge of the world, and the animal in him stood up and said there, it is over, the day is here, and Stuart Redman knew exactly how long that was going to last and did not bother with it.
"Say that again," he said.
"My name is Pierre Aubert."
"That's the second half I want."
The old man's jaw worked.
"The man who shouted at your wall last night is my son," he said. "His name is Mathis. He is forty-four years old and he has been a hundred miles from me for two years and I have not been able to get within a mile of him since the spring."
"Your son."
"My son."
"You understand what I've got behind me," Stuart said. "I have got four people dead in that throat. I have got a boy of sixteen with his face gone. I have got a woman in a house up that lane who has been a widow for about ninety minutes."
"I know it."
"Then you had better understand that if I turn around and walk twenty feet and say that name to the people on that wall, there is not one thing on this earth that I could do to save you."
"I have thought about that the whole way down the rise," Pierre Aubert said, "and I came anyway, and I would like it noted that I came with my hands out and my dogs behind me and I did not send anybody in my place."
"It's noted."
They stood there.
"I have got a niece on that wall," the old man said.
Stuart's hand tightened on the shotgun.
"She is on that wall right now with a French rifle and a bad arm," Pierre Aubert said, "and she has not seen me since she was eleven years old in a kitchen in Saint-Céré, and I would rather be shot in this mud than have her come out here and find me with a bag on my head."
"You are not going to see her this morning."
"No."
"Not today and maybe not this week and maybe not ever, and that is not mine to give you, it is hers," Stuart said. "Do you understand me."
"I understand you exactly."
"Then come inside the wall."
They took him in at seven.
Stuart did it himself and he did it in front of everybody, which he thought about for a long time afterward and never once regretted, because the alternative was a rumor and a rumor in a valley that had buried four people before breakfast would have killed somebody by nightfall.
He walked the old man up the lane with his own hand on his arm.
The five dogs came in behind them in a line and lay down outside the Hall door in a row and did not move for six hours.
The lane was full.
Nobody said one word. Stuart walked an old man in a good coat through eighty-three people standing in the mud beside four bodies laid out under blankets, and the silence went with them the whole way like water.
At the Hall step he stopped and turned around.
"This man came down off that rise alone with his hands out," he said, loud. "He is going to sit in that Hall and he is going to answer every question this town has got, in order, out loud, with Davey writing it down. And he is going to do it before anybody eats."
Somebody in the middle said, "Was he with them."
"He was not on that ground last night."
"That is not what I asked."
"No," Stuart said, "it isn't, and you'll have the whole answer inside the hour and I am not going to give you half of it out here in the cold. Davey?"
"Fourteen people," Davey said. "Same as always. The rest of you have got four graves to get out of froze ground and a wall with a hole in it, and I will read the whole of it out on this step at noon and I will not leave one word out."
They went in.
Camille was not in the room.
Stuart had put her in his own house with Maddie and the arm and had told her a lie, which was that there was nothing happening for an hour, and he had never lied to her in four years and he did it on the Hall step and did it badly and she had looked at him and gone anyway,
because she could not hold the rifle up and knew it.
He was going to pay for that and he knew it.
Pierre Aubert sat at the end of the long table with his hands flat on the wood in front of him where everybody could see them and did not ask for anything.
"Name," Davey said.
"Pierre Marcel Aubert."
"Age."
"Seventy-one."
"Where from."
"Saint-Céré, in the Lot," the old man said. "Then Montréal in ninety-four. Then Prince George in two thousand and one. Then Bonners Ferry, in this country, in two thousand and nine, which is where I was when the lights went out."
"That's Idaho."
"That is Idaho."
"Then you have been in this country sixteen years."
"I have."
"And your brother was in this country too," Davey said.
"My brother was in this country and I did not know it," Pierre Aubert said.
"That is the first hard thing and I will say it now and get it over with. He came to Montana in ninety-eight and I found out in two thousand and four from a woman in Québec and I did not write, and he did not write,
and we were nine hundred miles apart for twenty years and neither of us picked up a telephone."
"Why."
"Because he paid a debt of mine in eighty-nine and I never said thank you," the old man said, "and every year it got harder, and that is the whole of it, and it is a stupid reason and there is not a better one."
Davey wrote it down.
"Your son," he said.
"My son."
"Start where it starts."
Pierre Aubert looked at his hands for a while.
"He was a good boy until he was about nineteen," he said.
"I want to say that first and I want to be honest that every father says it. But he was. He was clever and he was kind to animals and he could do anything with his hands,
and then his mother died in two thousand and one and I moved him to a country where he did not speak the language properly and he was alone for three years at the age when a boy cannot be alone."
"Go on."
"He found people," the old man said. "That is all it ever is. He found people who told him that the reason he was alone was not that his mother had died and his father was a hard man, but that there was a thing wrong with the world, and that they had understood the thing,
and that if he came and sat with them he would understand it too."
"What kind of people."
"The first lot were nothing. Boys with a flag."
Pierre Aubert turned his hands over. "It was the second lot. There was a man in the Kootenai country with a piece of land and a generator and forty followers, and my son went up there in two thousand and six to help him put in a water line,
and he came back in two thousand and eight and he was not my son."
Kestrel said, from the table, "Was there a wall."
The old man looked over at him.
"There was a fence," he said. "The wall came later. The wall always comes later. It starts with a gate that is for keeping the deer out."
"How did it get from there to here," Davey said.
"Slowly. The way everything does."
"That's not an answer."
"No," the old man agreed. "Here is the answer. The man in the Kootenai country died in two thousand and fourteen and the forty people split into three pieces and my son took eleven of them south, and I did not see him for six years. And then the lights went out,
and about a year after that I heard the name of a place on a road, and I have spent four and a half years walking toward it."
"The Ninemile."
"The Ninemile."
"And when you got there."
"I have never got there," Pierre Aubert said.
"I have got to within four miles of it eleven times. I have sat on a ridge above it with a glass for a week at a time. I have never once been inside that gate, because the day I walk in that gate is the day my son has to decide what to do about me,
and I have been trying for two years not to make him decide."
Davey put his pencil down.
"Then what have you been doing."
"Warning people," the old man said.
Nell Fairweather said, from the wall, "Say that again."
Everyone in the room turned around.
She had not sat down. She had been standing against the wall by the door since they came in, with the 10/22 slung across her front on its piece of cord and one hand on it, and she had not said one word.
"Say that again," she said.
"I have been warning people."
"How many."
"Six places," Pierre Aubert said. "In two years."
"Name them."
"Reubens. Greer. A place on the Salmon with no name that had eleven people in it. Lawyer's Creek. Winchester. Here."
Nell Fairweather came off the wall.
"I was in Reubens," she said.
"I know you were."
"I got to Reubens on the fourth of March and I was eleven days late."
"You were nine days late," the old man said.
"I was there on the twenty-fourth of February and I stood in a road and told a man named Halloran that there was a party coming with a book and that he had about three weeks, and he thanked me and he gave me soup and he did not believe one word of it,
and I have thought about his face every day since."
"Then you were early."
"I was early and it made no difference at all," Pierre Aubert said, "and that is the thing I have learned in two years and I would rather not have learned it. It is not that people do not get told. It is that nobody can act on being told.
A town of forty people cannot build a wall in three weeks and cannot walk out in winter and cannot fight a hundred men, and so they say thank you and they give you soup and they go on."
"Then why do it."
"Because I am his father," the old man said, "and I did not do the other thing."
The room was quiet.
"What other thing," Davey said.
"Kill him," Pierre Aubert said.
Nobody said anything at all.
"I have had him in a glass at four hundred yards nine times," the old man said, in exactly the same voice he had used for everything else, "and I have got a rifle on a horse two miles east of here, and I am seventy-one and I was a good shot once, and I have not done it,
and last night eleven men came up a throat and four of your people are under blankets in your lane. So before anybody in this room asks me a question about whose side I am on, I want that on the paper and I want it read out at noon."
Davey wrote it down.
His hand was not steady.