Chapter 16
It was two hundred and six.
They found that out an hour later, because Ellery Halloran had counted them at the Greer gate and had written it on the back of his hand in pencil and had been looking at it all morning.
Stuart went down that rise at a limping run and did not remember any of it.
The two lines came together on the flat at twenty past three in the afternoon on the sixteenth of February, and nobody arranged it and nobody ran it, and it was not a meeting.
It was two hundred and six people and a hundred and twenty-three people arriving in the same place, and it made a noise like nothing Stuart had ever stood in.
He found Halloran at the head of it beside a wagon.
"Six days," Stuart said.
"Five and a half."
"That is not sixty people, Mr. Halloran."
Ellery Halloran took his hat off and put it back on.
"No," he said. "Let me tell it in order or I will get it wrong."
"Tell it."
"I got to Greer on the eleventh at four in the afternoon and I called the town at six and I stood in that room and I told them the whole of it, and I told them there were a hundred and eleven people eight days out on four days of food and that nobody was coming whatever they voted."
"And?"
"And they voted yes in about eleven minutes," Halloran said, "which I want to say out loud because I had prepared four hours of argument and did not get to use one word of it."
"Sixty people voted to take a hundred and eleven."
"Sixty-one people voted to take a hundred and eleven," Halloran said, "and then a man named Torgerson stood up and said, we have not got the food, and the room went quiet, because he was right."
"Then what."
"Then a woman named Hattie Rusk stood up and said, then we had better go and get some," Halloran said, "and she said it exactly like that, like it was nothing, and that was the whole of the meeting."
"Get some from where."
Ellery Halloran turned around and pointed down the line.
"That is Lawyer's Creek," he said. "There are thirty-one of them and they brought eleven sacks of seed wheat which they should not have brought and I told them so and they told me to be quiet."
"Lawyer's Creek is on the page."
"Lawyer's Creek is on the page with nothing beside it, and a girl walked into it two years ago and told them and they did not believe her either," Halloran said.
"That is Winchester. There are ninety of them and they brought a threshing floor's worth of oats and four horses and a wagon, and the man driving that wagon is the man who took the old Frenchman's coat off him in November and beat him in a road."
Stuart looked down the line.
"He is here?"
"He is here," Halloran said, "and he has been asking since the Craig Mountain road whether the old man is alive, and I have not told him one thing, because I have decided that is not mine either."
"And the rest."
"Twenty-two out of the Salmon place with no name. Nine off a ranch on Lawyer's Creek that nobody knew was there. And fifty-four from Greer, which is everybody in Greer who can walk, and the seven who could not walk are sitting in that town right now with the gates open and a kettle on."
Stuart stood on a flat in the breaks.
"Mr. Halloran, how did four towns find out in five days."
"The girl," Halloran said.
"Nell?"
"The girl went to all of them," Halloran said.
"Two years ago. Every single one of them. She walked into Lawyer's Creek in the spring of the first year and stood in the road and told them about a book, and they gave her bread and did not believe her, and she walked to Winchester and did the same thing and they beat her too,
and she went to the Salmon place and got there four days late."
"They remembered."
"They remembered every word," Ellery Halloran said.
"That is the thing, Mr. Redman. I stood in four roads in five days and I did not have to explain one single thing. I said, the book was real and the Ninemile is open and there are a hundred and eleven people on the breaks with no food, and in every one of those four places somebody said out loud,
that girl."
"Where is she."
"She is about eleven feet behind you and she has not said one word in four minutes."
Stuart turned around.
Nell Fairweather was standing in the road with the 10/22 slung across her front and one hand on it, and she was looking down the line at two hundred and six people, and her face was doing nothing at all.
"Ma'am," Stuart said.
"Don't."
"Nell."
"Do not say it," she said. "I have been standing here trying to make it be a thing and it will not go. I got there late four times. That is still true. Nothing about this road makes that not true."
"No," Stuart agreed. "It doesn't."
She looked at him.
"You are not going to tell me it does?"
"I am not going to tell you anything," Stuart said. "I am fifty-one years old and I have got about one useful sentence in me and it is this. You were nought for four. And the four you were nought for are standing in this road with eleven sacks of seed wheat."
Nell Fairweather put her hand over her mouth and turned around and walked about forty feet and stood with her back to everybody.
Nobody went after her.
They camped on that flat in the open with four hundred people and fifty-one fires and it was the largest gathering of human beings that had happened in that country in five years.
Stuart walked through it at nine at night and could not stop walking through it.
There were four hundred people and no rows in it anywhere.
That was the thing he kept coming back to.
He went past a fire where a woman from Winchester was showing a woman from the Ninemile how to bank green fir, and past another where three children who had never seen a stranger in their lives were being taught a game with pebbles by a boy from Lawyer's Creek,
and past a third where nobody was talking at all and four people were simply sitting.
He found Perpetua Nash sitting on a wagon tongue.
"Ma'am."
"You are the one they all point at."
"I am afraid so."
"Sit down," she said. "I want to tell somebody a thing and it might as well be you and then I will not have to tell anybody again."
He sat down.
"I have not been outside at night in three years," Perpetua Nash said.
Stuart did not say anything.
"They did not forbid it," she said. "I want to be accurate. Nobody ever said the words. It was that the shed was where I was and my hip was bad and there was no reason, and after about a year I stopped thinking about it, and I have been sitting on this wagon tongue since dark looking at that sky."
"Is it different than you remember."
"No," she said. "That is what I wanted to tell somebody. It is exactly the same. I had got it into my head that it would have changed."
Stuart Redman sat on a wagon tongue in the breaks for a while with a woman of sixty-one and looked at the sky and did not say anything at all.
They talked about the winter on the eighteenth, in a circle of about thirty people at Greer, because there was no room in that country big enough to put four hundred in and no building either.
It went badly for two hours and then it got sorted.
Nobody could hold a hundred and eleven. Greer could hold thirty and said so.
Winchester could hold forty and had come with a wagon and had already decided.
Lawyer's Creek said eleven and Hattie Rusk said out loud that eleven was too few and the Lawyer's Creek man said he knew it and could not do better and would rather be honest than generous in a road.
That left thirty.
They went to the Crossing.
Stuart had not asked for it and had deliberately not spoken for the whole two hours, and it was Kestrel who said it from the sledge.
"There is a valley eleven days north with eighty-three people in it and two towns' worth of food in the cellars," he said, "and it has got a wall and a rule and a man who counts everything, and it took thirty-one people in one March and nearly came apart over it and did not."
"Will they take thirty?"
"They will weigh them," Kestrel said. "Whole. Worst and best. Out loud, in a room, one at a time, and it will take four nights and it will be ugly on the second one."
"And then?"
"And then they will take them," he said, "and I know that because I have been lying on a table in that Hall for a month and I watched them do it to me."
They went north on the twenty-second.
It was thirty from the Ninemile and fourteen who had gone out from the Crossing, and Pierre Aubert, and five dogs, and four hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate that Iris Wendt refused to leave in a shed at Greer and refused to put in a creek and hauled the entire way home on a handcart with her own
hands, saying only, "We may want it."
They buried nobody on that road.
They came down the last of the north trace on the fifth of March in the afternoon and the crust was going and the smoke was standing up over the valley and there were twenty-six chimneys and a wall and a gate with somebody on it.
The bell went twice.
Then it went twice again, and then whoever was up there stopped ringing it and started shouting, and by the time the column came down the last three hundred yards there were eighty-three people in the lane.
Davey came out to the ditch line.
He stopped there, the way he had stopped there on the twenty-fifth of January, and he stood in the mud and counted, out loud, the way he did everything.
Stuart watched him get to fourteen and stop.
"Fourteen," Davey said.
"Fourteen," Stuart said.
"Out of fourteen."
"Out of fourteen."
Davey put his hands on his knees and stayed like that for about four seconds and then straightened up.
"And the rest of them," he said.
"Thirty," Stuart said. "And they have not been weighed, and I have promised them nothing, and I have told every one of them on the road that this town is going to look at them in a room and that it might say no."
"Did you tell them what I would do if it said no."
"I told them you would carry it."
"Good," Davey said. "That is the only answer."
He looked past Stuart at thirty people standing in the mud on the north trace and then he walked past him and went and stood in front of them.