Chapter 15
Nobody answered him.
Stuart stood in four inches of new water with a lantern in his hand and looked at a black slot in the rock about four feet wide with a creek going through the bottom of it, and he did not say one word.
"He is not going to answer that," Ames Pruitt said, very quietly.
"No."
"Then let's go."
"Not yet."
The voice came again.
"I can hear three of you," it said. "One of you is standing in the water. I would like to say some things and then I am going to go away, and you can listen or you can walk off and I will say them anyway, because I have not got anybody else to say them to."
Iris Wendt put her hand on Stuart's sleeve.
"That is a man buying time," she said.
"I know what it is."
"There are forty men on the other side of that rock."
"There are forty men on the other side of that rock who cannot get through a four foot hole in the dark one at a time into a lantern," Stuart said, "and I have got a woman up on that flat with nineteen children and a hundred people who have been walking since noon,
and every minute he talks is a minute they get further away."
He handed her the lamp.
"Take it back forty feet and put it on a rock and step away from it," he said. "If anybody puts a head through that gap I want the light on them and not on us."
She did it.
Ames Pruitt did not move.
"Go on," Stuart said.
"No sir."
"Ames."
"I have been standing behind a shot box with my hands behind my back for eleven hours doing what I was told," Ames Pruitt said, "and I am going to stand here now, and you can argue with me in front of the water."
Stuart did not argue with him.
He came forward until he was eleven feet from the gap and stood in the dark out of the lantern light with the creek running over his boots.
"Say your things," he said.
There was a silence on the other side.
"You are Redman," the voice said.
"I am."
"You do not sound like the page."
"Nobody does."
"No," Mathis Aubert said. "That is true and I have thought about it a good deal. I have got fourteen pages on you in a book and not one of them has got your voice in it, and I have found that the voice is the only part that is ever of any use."
"Say your things."
"Is my father alive."
"That is not one of your things."
"It is the only one of my things," the voice said. "The rest is talk."
Stuart stood in the water.
"He is alive," he said.
The silence went on a good deal longer that time.
"Where."
"Not here."
"That is not an answer."
"That is the only answer you are getting from me tonight or any night," Stuart said, "and I want to be square with you about why, because I have found that telling a man which part you are refusing him works better than pretending there is nothing there."
"Go on."
"He is not mine to hand over," Stuart said.
"He came down a rise into my town with his hands out and five dogs behind him and sat at a table for eleven hours and answered everything anybody asked him, and he is a free man and he goes where he likes, and if he ever decides to walk up a creek and find you he will do it without me."
"Has he said he will."
"No."
"Has he said he will not."
"No," Stuart said.
Another silence.
"I am going to tell you a thing about him," Mathis Aubert said, "and you can put it wherever you keep things."
"Say it."
"He has been sitting on my ridges for two years," the voice said. "I have known it since the second summer. I have seen the dogs at two miles eleven times and I have had a man with a glass on him for whole afternoons and I have never once sent anybody up there."
"Why not."
"Because I am not going to be the man who did that," Mathis Aubert said.
"And because every time I decided to, I put it off for a week, and then a week, and then it was a year, and then it was two, and if you think that sounds like a good man you are wrong. It sounds like a man who cannot finish anything."
Stuart said nothing.
"You have got a hundred and eleven people up on that flat."
"I have got a hundred and eleven people a long way past that flat," Stuart said, "and they have been going east for three hours and they have got seven miles on you and they are not coming back."
"A hundred and eleven people in February with no stores."
"That's right."
"You have not thought that through," Mathis Aubert said, and there was nothing triumphant in it at all, which was the worst thing about it.
"Every ounce of food those people have eaten in five years came out of the yard at that mouth. It is nine hundred yards of sheds. It is four hundred bushels of wheat and eleven tons of potatoes in a root house and forty barrels of salt fish, and you have just put a mountain between them and it."
"I know what I did."
"Then you know that you have not rescued anybody," the voice said.
"You have moved them. And in about two weeks, somewhere out on the breaks in the cold, somebody is going to work out that there was food behind the wall they walked away from,
and you are going to find out what a hundred and eleven people do when they are hungry and somebody in the group knows the way back."
Stuart stood in the water for a moment.
"Is that the part where I am supposed to send them back to you," he said.
"No."
"Then what's it for."
"It is for you to carry," Mathis Aubert said.
"That is all. I am forty-four years old and I have had about eleven hours to think about what I want from this conversation and that is the whole of it. I want you to carry it. I have carried the same thing for five years and I would like one other man in this country to know the weight."
"That's the ugliest thing anybody has said to me in five years."
"I expect it is."
"I'll take it anyway," Stuart said.
"I know you will. That is what the book says about you and that is the only part that turned out to be true."
The water went over the toe of Stuart's boot and into it.
"Now say the thing you actually came to the rock for," he said.
"Say what?"
"You have been talking for four minutes and you have not once asked for the books," Stuart said.
"You sent a boy with a bedsheet a hundred and fifty yards in January to ask for two books and a boy and a girl, and you have not said one word about them tonight, and I have been waiting for it since you opened your mouth."
There was a very long silence on the other side of that rock.
"No," Mathis Aubert said. "I have not."
"Why not."
"Because the book is worth nothing now," he said. "The book was a list of places that did not know they were on a list. You have been carrying a page of it around a country for three weeks and reading it out in halls."
"That's right."
"So there is no list anymore," Mathis Aubert said. "There is a rumor in four valleys and a warden on a ridge at Greer who has been telling everybody for two years, and by April there will not be one settlement on that page that does not know the word held means somebody looked at them twice."
"Then what have you got."
"I have got forty men and a mouth full of food and no wall and no people," the voice said, "and the interesting thing, Mr. Redman, the thing I have been sitting with since about two o'clock this afternoon, is that I do not know what that is."
"It's forty men and a mouth full of food."
"It is a trading post," Mathis Aubert said.
Stuart stood very still.
"Say that again."
"I have got nine hundred yards of sheds at the mouth of a creek with four hundred bushels of wheat in it and eleven tons of potatoes and a river road south," the voice said, "and there are two hundred little worlds out in this country that have not had salt since the third year."
"You think anybody is going to trade with you."
"I think in three years nobody out there will know the difference between a man who ran the Ninemile and a man who has got wheat," Mathis Aubert said, "and I think you know that better than I do,
because you have walked more of this country in five years than any man alive and you have seen exactly how long anything is remembered."
Stuart did not answer.
"That is what I came to the rock for," the voice said. "Not the books. I came to find out whether the man who walks the mail is going to spend the next ten years telling people what I was."
"I am," Stuart said.
"I thought so."
"I am going to walk into every valley between here and the Camas and I am going to say your name and the number and the word, and I am going to do it without any heat in it at all, because heat makes a story and a story fades, and a fact in a book does not."
"That is a very cold thing to say to a man through a rock."
"You asked."
"I did," Mathis Aubert said.
Then, after a moment: "You are not going to win that, you know."
"Probably not."
"There is going to come a winter where some town is hungry enough that they will take my wheat and be glad, and they will hear what I was and they will take it anyway, and then the next town will hear that the first town took it."
"Probably," Stuart said. "That has been the whole of my education since the lights went out."
"Then why do it."
"Because I count things," Stuart said, "and a thing that has been written down is harder to lose than a thing that has not, and because there is a boy up on that flat with a hundred and eleven names in his head and a girl with a list of four towns she got to late,
and neither one of them is going to stop either."
The creek ran through the gap.
"Then that is all," Mathis Aubert said.
"One more."
"Say it."
"Six men in the wall," Stuart said. "A boy told me six men were in that wall and did not come out and that he would not say any more about it in front of people. I am asking through a rock in the dark where nobody can hear either of us."
There was a silence.
"They are in the wall," Mathis Aubert said.
"Alive?"
"Two of them."
"And the other four."
"Eleven women with a bar out of a gate," the voice said, "and I want you to understand that I am not telling you that to make you sick. I am telling you because you are going to have a hundred and eleven people on a road for three weeks and about eleven of them are carrying that,
and somebody ought to know."
"Who are the eleven."