Chapter 10 #3
and I would rather say that here than have somebody find it out at the wrong moment."
Davey wrote it down.
"That's the most honest thing anybody has said in this room in five years," he said.
They picked them at five.
Stuart Redman. Camille, over Maddie's objection and Stuart's, and she won it the way she won everything, by pointing out that her left arm did not aim a rifle. Nell Fairweather and her four magazines. Pierre Aubert and five dogs.
Josiah Tarp, who stood up and volunteered and then had to sit down again.
The Pruitt boy, who had walked the north road twice in a winter and had not been home four days.
Odile Sorenson, nineteen, who could go all day.
Gil Pruitt's brother Ames, who was a blacksmith and had been putting wagon iron into a wall for three days and knew what two hundred pounds of something did to rock.
A man off the east side named Cobb Halloran, who was no relation to the man in Greer and said so eleven times.
And Kestrel.
That one took forty minutes and Maddie fought it with everything she had and lost, and the thing that lost it for her was Kestrel himself, sitting up on the table with his wrapped hands in his lap.
"I cannot walk," he said. "I know it. I am not going to stand here and tell this room that I can, because in about eleven days I would prove otherwise on a road and cost somebody their life carrying me."
"Then what are you asking for."
"I am asking to be pulled," he said. "On the sledge. By his dogs, which pull it better than any man here. And I want to tell you what you get for it, and then you can vote."
"Go on."
"There is not one person going east who has been inside that wall," Kestrel said.
"Not one. He has sat above it for two years and I lived in it for five. I know where the water comes in. I know which of the sixty men will not fire. I know that the north gate bar is dropped at nine and lifted at five and I know the woman who has been counting it for two years,
and her name is Fenna Oyelaran and she will not come out of that gate for anybody on this earth unless somebody says my name to her first."
The room was quiet.
"And I want to say the last part in front of everybody," Kestrel said, "because it is going to be said behind my back otherwise."
"Say it."
"I was one of nine men in a cut in the Clearwater in April," he said. "I ran them. Some of you have known that for eleven days and the rest of you found out this morning. I have never once said it was not what it was and I am not going to start."
He looked around the long room.
"I am not asking this town to forgive me," he said. "I am asking it to use me. Those are two different things and the second one is the only one I have got any business asking for."
It went fifty-nine to twenty-two.
They left on the twenty-fifth at first light.
The crust had come back in the night, which was the first piece of luck anybody had had since the ninth, and eleven people and five dogs and a sledge went out the south door of the throat at twenty past six with the whole valley standing on the wall in the dark.
Davey walked out to the ditch line with them and stopped there.
"Eleven days," he said. "That is what I am going to tell this town. Eleven days out, and then however long it takes, and then eleven days back."
"Don't give them a number."
"I have to give them a number," Davey said. "A town with no number in it eats itself in a week. I will give them a number and I will tell them it is a guess and I will keep telling them."
"Davey."
"Yeah."
Stuart put his hand out and the young man took it.
"Anything that comes over that wall while I am gone is yours," Stuart said, "and you will run it the way you ran the hall in June, and I want you to know that I stood outside that window and watched you do it and did not go in, and that was the best night I had all year."
"You are going to make me cry in front of eighty people."
"You'll live."
They went up onto the south flat in the first gray.
At the top of the rise Stuart stopped and turned around the way he always did, and looked back at twenty-six chimneys standing up out of the dark with the smoke going straight and the wall black along the north end and four new stones on the rise past the woodpile.
Down at the end of the lane, in a window, a lamp was burning.
"All right," he said.
They made nineteen miles that day and they made it on crust that held until two in the afternoon, and Nell Fairweather walked at the front of the line the whole way because she was the only one who had been on the Greer grade in the last two years.
They camped in a barn with no roof at the north end of a burned place that had been a town.
And at eleven o'clock that night, from the top of a bench four miles east, Odile Sorenson came down off the watch and woke Stuart with her hand on his shoulder and did not say anything at all, only pointed.
He went up.
Away off east and south, along the black line of the breaks, at a distance he could not judge and did not want to, there were fires.
He counted them twice.
Eleven the first time.
Nineteen the second.