Chapter 15 #2
"I do not know their names," Mathis Aubert said, "and that is the single most contemptible sentence I have ever said out loud, and I have got a book with a hundred and eleven names in it in my hand right now and I could look them up."
Stuart turned around and walked out of the water.
"Redman."
He stopped.
"Tell him," Mathis Aubert said, "that I saw the dogs."
Stuart went on walking.
They went east all night.
There was no argument about it and nobody suggested camping. The moon came up at about nine over the breaks and the crust came back hard at eleven and they took it, and a hundred and twenty-five people went east across the breaks in the dark at the speed of the slowest of them.
It was the longest night of Stuart Redman's life and the parts he remembered afterward were all small.
Bride Kelsall walking backward for a mile with a two year old on her hip because its mother had her hands full of a four year old.
Nell Fairweather carrying a rifle and a sack of somebody's potatoes.
Iris Wendt and Ellery Halloran taking the shafts of a handcart with four hundred pounds of nitrate in it and putting an old woman on top of the bags and pulling her nine miles.
Pierre Aubert walking at the back the entire night behind five dogs that swung across the road in a line at the pace of the last person, and stopped eleven times.
Camille with one arm, at the front with Odile Sorenson, saying the same eleven words.
They stopped at six in the morning in a bend of a dry wash with high banks, because Kestrel said it was the only place inside twenty miles you could put a hundred people out of the wind, and he was right.
They made nineteen fires.
Stuart counted them and then sat down on a rock and looked at them and did not do anything else for about ten minutes, which was the first ten minutes he had not done anything in six days.
Josiah Tarp came and sat down next to him.
"One hundred and eleven," he said.
"Say it again."
"I counted them twice at the wash and then Kestrel counted them and then Mrs. Brantner counted them off the rows," Josiah said. "One hundred and eleven. Every person who walked out of that gate is in this wash."
Stuart put his hands over his face.
"Sir?"
"Give me a minute, son."
"Yes sir."
"No," Stuart said, and took his hands down. "Don't go. Sit there. I am going to say something and I would rather say it to somebody who counts things."
"All right."
"That is the first time in five years," Stuart said, "that I have gone out after something and come back with all of it."
"There were three of ours hurt."
"Nobody died," Stuart said. "Fourteen went in and fourteen came out and a hundred and eleven came with them, and I have been standing here for ten minutes waiting for somebody to come and tell me the number is wrong, because it always is."
Josiah Tarp did not say anything for a while.
"It might still be," he said.
"I know it."
"There is no food, sir."
"I know that too."
They did the count that mattered at eight in the morning and it was worse than anybody had said out loud.
Ellery Halloran did it, because he was the only man there who had run a town and was not from the Ninemile and was not from the Crossing, and everybody trusted him for exactly those reasons.
A hundred and twenty-five people.
Food for four days if nobody ate much. Six days if they went to one meal.
It was a hundred and eleven miles to the Crossing over the breaks in February and it was ninety-four to Greer.
"Greer," Halloran said. "That is the only sentence in this. Greer is nine days from here and Greer has got a granary and sixty people and a hard road out, and Greer is going to have to put a hundred and eleven people up until spring, and I am going to walk in there and ask them to."
"They'll say no," somebody said.
"They will say a great many things," Ellery Halloran said, "and then they will vote, and I have lived among those people for twenty-six years and I am going to stand in that room and tell them the truth and let them decide. That is all anybody has ever been able to do."
Stuart came over.
"You will not get there in nine days at this pace."
"No."
"You will get there in thirteen and you have got six."
"I know it."
"Then you go ahead," Stuart said. "You and the girl and two horses we have not got, and you go at the speed of a person and you get there in five and you come back with carts."
"Greer has got four carts."
"Then bring four carts," Stuart said, "and bring them out to meet us, and do not tell those people at that meeting that a hundred and eleven are coming whatever they vote, because that is a lie by tomorrow and they will smell it.
Tell them we are eight days out and moving and that they have got eight days to decide."
Halloran looked at him.
"You are going to move a hundred and eleven people toward a town that has not said yes."
"Yes," Stuart said.
"That is a hard thing to do to a town."
"It is a hard thing," Stuart agreed, "and I am going to do it, and if Greer votes no I will stand in that road and take it and turn a hundred and eleven people north and walk them to my own valley on four days of food, and it will be the worst thing I have ever done and I will do it."
Halloran and Odile Sorenson went west at nine.
They took nothing but what was in their pockets and a day of food and they went at the speed of two people who could go all day, and Odile Sorenson stopped once at the top of the wash and looked back and then went on.
The column went east at ten.
It went slowly and it went in no rows at all, and Stuart Redman walked at the front of it for the first hour and then went back and walked at the middle and then at the back, and that was where he stayed.
Pierre Aubert was at the back.
They walked together for about two miles without saying anything.
"He asked about you," Stuart said.
"I know."
"You were forty feet away in the dark."
"I was eleven feet away in the dark," Pierre Aubert said, "behind the spur, and I heard the whole of it, and I did not come out, and I am going to have to decide what that was."
"What do you think it was."
"I think it was cowardice."
"It was not cowardice," Stuart said.
"How do you know."
"Because I have watched a coward for five years and he does not come down off a ridge into a town with his hands out," Stuart said.
"You did not come out from behind that rock because there were a hundred and eleven people on a flat and they were four minutes from moving and you knew exactly what would have happened to those four minutes."
Pierre Aubert walked a while.
"He said he saw the dogs," he said.
"He did."
"Eleven times in two years."
"That's what he said."
"Then he has been looking at me for two years and letting me live," the old man said, "and I have been looking at him for two years and letting him live, and neither one of us ever walked four miles."
"No."
"That is going to be the whole of my life when I am dead," Pierre Aubert said. "Four miles."
They walked.
"Old man."
"Yes."
"There are a hundred and eleven people on this road who are only here because you sat on a ridge for two years and learned the ground," Stuart said. "Ames Pruitt put a shot in a crack you found. I came down a fold you came down eleven times. Those are your four miles and you walked them."
"That is a kind thing to say."
"It is not a kind thing, it is correct, which is different," Stuart said, "and a Frenchwoman taught me the difference in a lane in January."
They made nine miles that day and eleven the next and eight the day after that, and on the fourth day the food went to one meal and nobody complained about it in front of the children.
On the sixth day a woman named Perpetua Nash, who was sixty-one and had a bad hip and had not been out of a drying shed in three years except to the yard, walked eleven miles and sat down at the end of it and cried, and would not say why, and Bride Kelsall sat with her for an hour and did not ask.
On the seventh day they came up onto a long bare rise in the middle of the afternoon.
Stuart was at the back and he heard it start at the front, which is how he always heard everything.
It came down the column the way sound does, a change in the noise of people walking, and then somebody at the front shouted something, and then there was a kind of movement that went through a hundred and twenty-three people like wind through wheat.
"What is it," Kestrel said, from the sledge.
Stuart went up the outside of the column at the fastest thing his hip would give him, past a hundred people who had all stopped walking and were standing on a bare rise looking west.
Camille was at the front.
She had the glass up and she did not lower it when he came up beside her, and she said, in a voice that he did not recognize at all, "Stuart. Count them."
He took the glass.
Four miles west, coming out of the Greer grade onto the flat, strung out along the road in the flat gray light, there were carts.
He counted four.
Then he moved the glass and counted past them, and there were more, and they were not carts.
There were people.
There were a very great deal more than sixty people on that road, and there were horses, and there was something at the head of the line that was bigger than anything Greer had ever owned, and Stuart Redman stood on a rise in the breaks with a glass in his hand and could not make it be what it was.
"Camille."
"I know."
"That is not sixty people."
"No."
"How many is that."
"I stopped at two hundred," Camille Aubert said.