Chapter 10
The bell went four times and then it stopped, and then it went twice more, which was not a signal anybody had ever agreed on.
That was Sorenson again. He had been on that platform for nine hours and he had run out of drill and had done the only honest thing left, which was to ring something that meant come and look and I do not have a word for this.
Stuart got to the south end at a run he paid for.
There was no line at three hundred yards. There was no wagon and no fog and nothing coming up out of the low ground, and the last light was going out of the sky in a long flat band the color of a wet stone.
There was one man standing in the open at a hundred and fifty yards.
He had a white cloth on a pole.
"Well," Davey said, coming up beside him. "That's ours."
"That is exactly ours," Stuart said. "That is the trick we used on the seventeenth and they were watching us do it."
"You want to answer it?"
"I want to know what he's got in his other hand first."
He had nothing in his other hand.
He stood out there for eleven minutes while the light went, and he did not move and he did not call out, and at the end of the eleven minutes Stuart went up the ladder and took the glass and looked at him properly.
He was about twenty-two.
He was standing in wet ground in a coat too big for him with a stick and a bedsheet, and he was shaking, and it was not entirely the cold.
Stuart came down.
"Davey, I am going out to him."
"Stuart."
"It is a boy with a sheet."
"It is a boy with a sheet at a hundred and fifty yards from a wall where we buried four people this morning," Davey said, "and the last time somebody stood in the open in this valley with something in their hand it cost us a horse and a rider and two weeks."
"I know it."
"Then say why."
"Because that boy has been standing still for eleven minutes in front of eighty people who have every reason on this earth to shoot him," Stuart said, "and I have spent five years learning that the only thing that ever gets anybody anything is somebody standing in the open where he does not have to
be."
Davey looked at him a long moment.
"Camille goes up the platform."
"Camille cannot hold a rifle."
"Then Nell goes up the platform," Davey said, "and I am coming with you, and if you argue with me about that I will have this conversation in front of the whole wall and you will lose it."
They went out at forty feet apart.
The boy watched them come and did not move and kept the pole up, and Stuart could hear his teeth going from thirty feet away.
"That's close enough," Stuart said, at twenty.
The boy stopped.
"Put the pole in the ground and step back from it."
He did that.
"Now your coat. Open it and turn all the way around."
He did that too, and there was nothing under it but two shirts and a piece of rope for a belt, and Stuart Redman looked at a twenty-two year old with no weapon and no pack and no gloves and felt the whole day sit down on his shoulders.
"What's your name."
"Tarp," the boy said. "Josiah Tarp."
Stuart went very still.
Beside him, Davey said, "Say that again."
"Josiah Tarp."
"You're in the book," Stuart said.
The boy's face came apart.
"I'm in the book," he said, and then he sat down in the mud and put his hands over his head.
They got him inside and Maddie got a blanket on him and nobody asked him one question for forty minutes, which was Maddie's rule and had been since the second year.
Kestrel looked at him from the table and did not say anything for a long time.
"Josiah," he said at last.
"Mister Kestrel."
"How long."
"Since the fifteenth," the boy said. "Since about an hour after they found you gone."
"They put you on my job."
"They put me on your book," Josiah Tarp said.
"He has had me at the table since the sixteenth of October doing the stock columns and I have not been able to make my hand stop shaking since November, and he knows it, and he has not said anything about it, and that is the part that has been killing me."
Stuart pulled a chair around.
"Son."
"Yes sir."
"I am going to tell you what is written about you in a book in this room," Stuart said, "because you are going to find out anyway and I would rather you hear it from me at a table than off somebody in a lane."
"All right."
"It says, he is one of them. It says, he is twenty-two and he has been one of them since he was seventeen and he has not got the stomach for it and he cries in the woodshed. And it says, I am putting his name down here so that whoever reads this knows there is one who can be turned."
The room was quiet.
Josiah Tarp put his face in his hands.
"He wrote that in October," Kestrel said.
"You did not know me."
"I knew you well enough to write it down and stake my whole book on it," Kestrel said.
"And I want you to understand that I did not write it to be kind. I wrote it because I was about to walk out into a January and I thought there was a chance I would not get anywhere, and I wanted whoever got hold of that book to have one name they could use."
The boy did not look up.
"Was I right," Kestrel said.
"I'm sitting here."
"That is not the same thing and you know it. Answer the man."
Josiah Tarp took his hands down.
"He sent me," he said.
Nobody moved.
"Say the whole of it," Davey said.
"He sent me out with the sheet at four o'clock and he told me what to say and he told me to say it to the man Redman and nobody else," the boy said, "and he stood eleven feet from me while he said it, and he knew, and I knew he knew, and we both stood there and did not say the other thing."
"What other thing."
"That I was not coming back."
Stuart sat with that.
"He let you go."
"He gave me a job he did not need done," Josiah Tarp said, "by a man he cannot use anymore, on a night when it is going to freeze, and he did not send anybody behind me, and Mr. Redman,
I have been walking a hundred and fifty yards trying to decide whether that is mercy or bookkeeping and I have not got there."
"It's both," Stuart said. "That's what nobody tells you."
"What do I do with that."
"You put it down for tonight," Stuart said. "Now say what he sent you to say, word for word, and do not improve it."
The boy closed his eyes.
"He says, you have got two of my books and three of my people and I have got fourteen dead in your mud and I am not coming back for any of it," he said.
"He says, we are going east on the twenty-fifth and you will see the fires from your north bench and you may count them if you like. He says, there is nothing at the Ninemile for you to find by the time you get there."
"That's it?"
"No sir. There's one more and I have to say it the way he said it."
"Go on."
"He says, tell Redman the road is open and nobody will stop him on it, and tell him that is not a kindness, it is an invitation, and tell him I have read about him in a book for two years and I would like to see whether the man is the same size as the page."
Stuart sat back.
"Well," Davey said.
"Yes."
"That's a dare."
"That's a dare," Stuart agreed, "and it is a very good one and it has got my name on it, and everybody in this room needs to notice that it was delivered by the one person in that valley who was guaranteed to make me believe it."
Camille came in at ten.
She came in with her arm strapped across her front and Maddie behind her saying things to the back of her head that she was not listening to, and she stopped in the door and looked down the length of the Hall at an old man sitting at the end of the long table.
Stuart got up.
"Camille."
"Sit down."
"Camille, I lied to you this morning and I have been waiting eleven hours to say so."
"I know exactly what you did this morning and I am not going to talk about it tonight," she said, "and you will hear about it for a year and you have earned that. Sit down."
He sat down.
She walked the length of the Hall.
Pierre Aubert got to his feet. He did it slowly and he did it badly, a seventy-one year old man who had been sitting on a bench for eleven hours, and he put his hands down at his sides.
They looked at each other.
"Tu es le frère de mon père," Camille said.
"Oui."
"Tu ne lui as jamais écrit."
"Non."
"Pas une fois. En vingt ans."
"Pas une fois," the old man said. "Et il est mort ici, dans ce pays, à un portail, et je ne l'ai su qu'il y a neuf jours."
Camille Aubert stood in the middle of the Hall with her arm strapped across her front.
"Then you will sit down," she said, in English, "and you will tell me about my father, and you will not tell me about your son tonight, and tomorrow you will tell me about your son and I will listen to the whole of it."
"Camille."
"Non. Tonight is my father."
She sat down across from him.
"Everybody out," Maddie said.
They held the meeting at noon on the twenty-third with four fresh graves on the rise past the woodpile and the whole town in the long room and the doors open because there was no other way to fit them.
Davey read the dead.
He did it first, before anything else, by name, with what each one had been doing when it happened, and it took four minutes and nobody moved.
Then he read out the whole of Pierre Aubert's account off the sheet, every word of it, including the part about nine times in a glass at four hundred yards.
Then he read the message from the Ninemile.
Then he sat down.
"Now," he said. "We are going to do three things and I am going to tell you what they are before anybody starts, so nobody is arguing about one thing while somebody else is arguing about another."
"Say them!"
"One. This town votes on whether to send anybody east. Two. If it votes yes, it votes on who and how many. Three. Whatever happens, this town weighs four people,
because we have got four people inside this wall who have not been weighed and two of them have killed men for us and one of them came out of a bedsheet last night."
Somebody at the back said, "And the old man."
"And the old man," Davey said. "Whole. Worst and best. Out loud."
It took six hours.