Chapter 10 #2
Stuart had been in that room for the February vote and the May vote and the June vote and had thought he knew what the worst of it sounded like, and he was wrong, because none of those rooms had had four graves outside the door.
Bettine Kleiss stood up at two o'clock.
She was a widow of about thirty hours and she stood up in the middle of the long room with her hands folded in front of her and she said, "I am going to speak against it, and I want everyone to know I am not doing it out of grief, and I am going to say why."
"Say it," Davey said.
"Eighty-three people," she said. "That is what we are. Yesterday it was eighty-seven and this morning I woke up and it was eighty-three, and there is a hole in our north gate and a throat full of stakes with men in it that nobody has buried yet."
The room was silent.
"They have told us they are going east," she said.
"They have told us the road is open. They have told us to come and see. And every single person in this room who wants to go is going because a man on a horse at three hundred yards dared us to,
and I want to say out loud that I have watched men be dared before and I have never once seen it end well."
She sat down.
Stuart did not answer her, and afterward he could not have told anybody why not.
Old Hal Brewer answered her.
He got up off his stool with his stakes finished and his hands ruined and he said, "I want to agree with everything that woman just said and then I want to vote the other way, and I would like about ninety seconds to explain how a man does both."
"Take it."
"I am seventy-nine," Hal said. "I was in this valley before any of you and I will be in the ground in it before most of you, and I have spent five years watching this town get very good at one thing, which is deciding who we let in the gate."
He looked around the room.
"February, we weighed a woman. May, we weighed thirty-one people and got it wrong. June, we weighed her again and fixed it. We have got a rule about it that I helped vote in and I am proud of that rule."
"Hal."
"I am nearly done. Here is my point." The old man's voice did not go up at all.
"Every single time, we have been deciding about people who were standing in front of us. Somebody walks up to that gate and we look at them and we weigh them and we say yes or no. And that is a fine thing and I would not change it."
He put his hand on the table.
"But there are a hundred and eleven people who are never going to stand in front of us," he said.
"They cannot get here. They cannot walk up to that gate and be looked at. And on the twenty-fifth they are going to be put on a road in February by men who do not intend all of them to arrive, and they are going to be a hundred and forty miles away,
and the reason we will not have weighed them is not that we decided against them."
"Then what."
"It is that they were too far off," Hal Brewer said, "and I have got to tell you, I do not think that is a reason. I think it is a distance. And I would like to find out, before I die, whether this town is a town that says no, or a town that says too far."
He sat down.
Nobody said anything for about eleven seconds.
Then Shawna Hennefresy stood up at the back.
She had not spoken in a meeting since June and everybody in that room knew it, and the whole place turned around.
"I am not going to argue either side," she said.
"Then why are you up," somebody said, not unkindly.
"Because I have got one thing that nobody else in this room has got and it is not a good thing and I would rather not have it," Shawna said. "I have been on the other end of it."
The room went very quiet.
"For twenty years I put a lamp in a window," she said, "and there were people out there in the dark who could have come up that road and did not, because it was late, or it was far, or it was not their business, and I do not blame one of them. Not one. I want that understood."
She looked at the middle of the room.
"But I want you to know what it is like to be the thing at the end of the road that nobody comes to," she said. "And then I want you to vote however you like, and I will not think less of anybody, and I mean that, and I have got no more to say."
She sat down.
It went sixty-two to nineteen.
They spent an hour on the how and it went the way Davey had said it would, which was badly, until Pierre Aubert asked to speak and Davey let him and half the room hated it.
"Eleven people," the old man said. "Not more."
"Why eleven."
"Because the place I am talking about is forty feet wide and eleven people can work it and twenty cannot, and because eighty men going east from this valley is a war and eleven people going east is a thing that can be hidden,
and because every single person you send is one you have not got on that wall."
"And you?"
"I am going," Pierre Aubert said. "I have got the ground in my head and it is not on any paper and I am not going to be able to give it to you. And I want to say the other thing in front of everybody, which is that my son is at the other end of that road,
and that any one of you has the right to think about that for as long as you like."
Nobody said anything.
"I have thought about it for two years," the old man said.
"I have not got anywhere. I am not going to pretend to you that I will be a whole man on that road. I will do what I said I would do and I will do it as well as I can, and if it comes down to a thing at the end I do not know what I will do,