Chapter 12 #3
They were sitting down, most of them. They were in rows and they had sat down where they stood and they had blankets, some of them, and there were fires, four of them, small ones, spaced out along the rows.
There were children.
He made himself count and stopped at nineteen and did not go on.
"They've got fires," he said.
"They have got fires."
"Then nobody is killing anybody today."
"No," Pierre Aubert said. "That is the thing I have been trying to make myself say since the bell and I am going to say it now. My son is not a man who kills a hundred people in a yard. I want to be very clear that I am not defending him and I am not asking anybody to be easier on him.
I am telling you what he is, because you are about to make decisions and you need the right animal in your head."
"Then what is he."
"He is a man who builds a system and then follows it," the old man said, "and the system has never once had killing in it as a step, and that is exactly what makes it as bad as it is. Nobody in that valley has ever had to do a terrible thing all at once.
They have only ever had to do a small thing that was already on the list."
Nell Fairweather had come up on her belly on the far side and had the second glass.
"There are eleven men," she said.
"Where."
"Two at the scale house door. Four in a line on the north side of the rows. Three at the fire nearest us. One walking. One sitting on a stack of timber by himself about eighty yards from everybody with a book on his knee."
Stuart swung the glass.
The man on the timber stack was too far to see properly, a shape in a coat with a canvas backed something across his lap and his head down, and Stuart watched him for a long minute and the man did not move except to turn a page.
"That is your son," he said.
"That is my son."
"What's he doing."
"He is finishing the book," Pierre Aubert said.
The light came up.
It came gray and then gold along the eastern rim of the canyon, and eleven hundred feet below them a hundred and eleven people sat in rows in the gravel and watched a sunrise, and Stuart Redman lay on a ridge and watched the promise go out of it flat and dead over about forty minutes.
Nobody moved down there.
At twenty past seven a woman got up out of the rows and walked eleven steps to a fire and put a stick on it, and a man on the north line watched her do it and did not say anything, and she walked back and sat down.
"They are not tied," Camille said.
"No."
"Nobody is tied. Nobody is fenced. There is a road out of that yard going south and there is nobody standing on it."
"I know."
"Then why does nobody walk."
And Josiah Tarp, lying eleven feet down the slope where nobody had told him he could come, said, "Because of the count."
Everyone turned around.
"Say it," Stuart said.
"They are in rows of eleven," Josiah said. "There are ten rows and one short row. Every person in every row knows the ten people around them, and the rows do not change, and they have not changed in five years."
"So?"
"So if you walk, your row is short at the next count," he said, "and the man with the book does not come after you. He writes the row number."
Nobody said anything.
"It is not a guard," Josiah Tarp said. "There has not been a guard in that place since the second year. It is ten people who will be standing in the gravel tomorrow morning being counted while you are three miles down a road in February with no coat."
Stuart put the glass down and put his forehead on his arms.
"That is the ugliest thing I have ever heard," he said.
"That is the whole of it," Kestrel said. He had come up the last of it dragging himself on his elbows with his wrapped hands and nobody had been able to stop him. "That is the entire machine and it is the only thing in there worth calling a wall, and the brick one is decoration."
"Then how did you get out."
"I did not have a row," Kestrel said. "I had a table."
At nine o'clock the man on the timber stack closed the book.
Stuart saw it through the glass, a small movement a mile away, a man shutting a canvas backed ledger and standing up and putting it under his arm, and something in the yard changed before he had taken four steps.
The rows began to stand up.
Nobody had shouted. Stuart was watching and he would have seen it. The rows stood up in order from the front, and they stood up the way people stand who have been doing a thing for five years, and the eleven men moved out to the edges of them without hurrying.
"They are going back up," Pierre Aubert said, and there was something in his voice that had not been there.
"How do you know."
"Because they are facing the creek road."
Camille said, "How long is eleven miles for a hundred and eleven people."
"Six hours," Josiah Tarp said. "Seven with the old ones."
Stuart Redman lay on a ridge above a canyon and did four things in his head in about eleven seconds, and afterward he could not reconstruct the order of them.
Eleven miles of creek road. Six hours. The narrow place at four miles down from the wall, which was seven miles up from the yard, which meant those people would walk into it at about two in the afternoon and out the other side by three.
And a cart with eight hundred pounds on it that was a day and a half from standing under that rock, with six people who needed a day and a half to climb it.
"They are going to be behind the wall by four o'clock," he said.
"Yes," Pierre Aubert said.
"And the rock does not get loaded until the sixth."
"Yes."
"Then we have missed it."
"We have missed this one," the old man said.
Stuart rolled onto his back and looked at the flat gray sky over the Ninemile and lay there for about four seconds.
Then he sat up.
"No," he said.
"Stuart."
"No. Listen to me." He came up onto his knees below the crest. "Josiah. Kestrel. Both of you. How many people are behind that wall right now."
"None," Josiah said. "That is what the bell means."
"Say it exactly."
"Six and six means everybody is out of the wall and the count is right."
"Everybody."
"Everybody," Kestrel said. "The wall is empty. It is empty for about eight hours twice a year and it is empty right now and it has been empty since yesterday afternoon."
"Who is in it."
"Nobody. They bar the gate from the outside and they leave it."
Stuart turned around and looked at eight people lying on a ridge.
"Then there is nothing up that creek this morning," he said, "except an empty brick wall with a barred gate, and a hundred and eleven people walking toward it, and eleven men, and four miles of road between them and a rock that six of our people are two days from being able to drop on it."
"And?"
"And we have got eight people, four rifles, five dogs, a nurse, a man on a sledge who cannot walk, and about five hours," Stuart said, "and I want everybody to hear me say out loud that I do not have a plan and that I am going to need one in about ten minutes."
Nell Fairweather rolled over and sat up.
"I have got one," she said.
Everybody looked at her.
"It is not a good one," she said.
"Say it anyway."
"Josiah," she said. "You said the rows do not change and that if a person walks, the row is short at the next count."
"Yes."
"When is the next count."
Josiah Tarp went completely still.
"At the gate," he said. "When they go back in. They count them in at the gate."
"And if the count is wrong at the gate?"
"Then they hold everybody at the gate until it is right."
"For how long."
"Until it is right," Josiah said. "I have seen it take two hours."
Nell Fairweather looked at Stuart.
"Then we do not have to stop a hundred and eleven people on a road," she said. "We have to make one row short."