Chapter 16 #2
"My name is Davey Stennis and I speak for this town," he said. "You are cold and you have walked eleven days and there is a fire in that Hall and there is food in it and nobody is going to ask you one question tonight."
Nobody moved.
"Tomorrow is going to be hard," Davey said. "I am not going to lie to you in a road. But it is tomorrow and it is not tonight, and tonight you are coming in."
Maddie was standing in the lane with her sleeves already rolled.
The weighing took four nights and it was ugly on the second one exactly the way Kestrel had said it would be.
Thirty people stood up in that long room one at a time and said what they were, whole, worst and best, out loud, and for eleven of them there was a thing they had done with a bar and a gate and six men, and every one of those eleven said it,
because Fenna Oyelaran stood up first and said hers and then sat down and did not cry.
It went twenty-nine for thirty and one hold.
The hold was a man of thirty-eight who would not say what he had done at the Ninemile and said so plainly, and the town voted to hold him and feed him and ask him again at the melt, and he said that was fair and went and split wood for four months and asked to speak in June.
They weighed Kestrel on the fourth night.
He stood up for it. That was the thing. He had been eight weeks on a table and eleven days on a sledge and Maddie had told him he could sit, and he got up off the bench with a stick under his arm and stood on three toes and a bad right foot in front of eighty-three people for nineteen minutes.
He did not ask for anything.
He said what he was and what he had done and he named the Kiln and the column and the cut in April, and then he named Cottonwood and the number sixty-two and the nine that did not arrive, and then he stopped and said, "That is the whole of it,
and I am not going to tell you anything about what I have done since, because you were all there for it."
It went seventy-one to twelve.
Bettine Kleiss voted no and stood up afterward and said out loud that she had voted no and would vote no again and had no quarrel with anybody who voted otherwise, and Kestrel walked over to her at the fire and said, "Ma'am, I would rather have your no than most people's yes," and she said,
"Then we understand each other," and that was the end of it.
They weighed Pierre Aubert on the fifth night and nobody in that room had any idea what was going to happen.
Camille spoke.
That was the thing nobody had expected. She stood up in the long room with her arm out of the strap for the first time in six weeks and she said, "I am going to say four things about this man and two of them are bad."
The room went silent.
"He did not write to my father in twenty years," she said.
"My father died at a gate in this country and this man was nine hundred miles away and did not know it, and I have not forgiven him for that and I do not intend to, and I want that said in front of everybody so that nobody in this valley thinks I am standing up here out of blood."
"And the second bad one?"
"He had his son in a glass at four hundred yards nine times and did not fire," Camille said, "and four people in this valley are in the ground because of that, and he said so himself at this table on the twenty-third of January before anybody asked him."
She looked around the room.
"And now the other two," she said. "He warned six towns in two years and was beaten in one of them and put in a shed in two, and four of those six towns came out onto the breaks in February with wheat."
"And the fourth?"
"He came down off a rise into this valley with his hands out on the worst morning this town has ever had," Camille Aubert said, "and he sat at that table for eleven hours and answered everything, and he did not once ask any of us for anything, and he has not asked since."
She sat down.
It went sixty-eight to fifteen.
They made him take the empty house south of Callum Hennefresy's, and he took it, and he did not thank anybody very much, and Stuart found him three days later mending a stretch of the throat wall that had been on the list since the twenty-second of January.
Spring came up out of that valley the way it does.
The crust went in the middle of March and the lane went to mud and the mud went to dust by the end of May, and the Crossing put in a crop with a hundred and thirteen people in it and had to build a third root cellar and had nineteen men to build it with.
They cut wood in April for the first time in the history of that valley.
That was Davey. He stood up in the long room on the ninth and said that a town that cuts wood for the winter it is in is a town that has learned nothing, and they cut for three winters out, in the spring, in the dry, with everybody on a rope.
Josiah Tarp wrote the book.
Nobody asked him to. He came to Davey in April and asked for paper and Davey gave him the last four of the good sheets in the valley, and Josiah Tarp sat down at the end of the long table every evening for two months and wrote out a hundred and eleven names in his own hand with what he knew beside
each one.
He did not write it as a list of victims.
He wrote it the way Kestrel had written it in October, with the true things beside each name, who could read and who was sick and who had a child and which child, and at the end he wrote the six men in the wall and the two who lived and the four who did not, and the eleven names of the women,
and he did not soften one word of it.
Then he gave it to the town.
"What do I do with this," Davey said.
"You keep it," Josiah said. "That is all. You put it somewhere dry and you keep it, and if in ten years somebody comes up that road asking about a person, you take it out and you show them."
"That's the counting," Stuart said, from the wall.
"That's the counting," Josiah Tarp said.
The mail started again in May.
Stuart walked it the way he always had, and the roads were not the same roads. There were four settlements between the Camas and Vinegar Hill in October and there were eleven of them by August, because two hundred and six people had stood in a road in February and found out that they had neighbors.
He went north in June and found Vinegar Hill.
That was the thing that had sat in him since January, and he walked it alone because he would not let anybody come with him, and he came up the last bend expecting the thing the Pruitt boy had seen, which was no smoke and an open gate and a loose horse.
There was smoke.
There were forty-one people in Vinegar Hill and there had been forty-one people in it the whole time, and what had happened in January was that a party of nine armed men had come over the divide on the fourteenth and Ferrell had taken every soul in that town nine miles up a draw to a mine adit and
sat there for eleven days with them.
"You left the gate open," Stuart said.
"I left the gate open and I left a horse in the road," Ferrell said, "and I left four hundred pounds of flour on the floor of the post where they could not miss it, and they took it and they went, and I have been called every name in this valley for it since and I would do it again."
"They'd have burned it."
"They would have burned it," Ferrell agreed, "and a town is forty-one people, and a post is a building."
Delphine was on a porch with her hands in the sun.
She had a needle in them and she was not managing it well and she was managing it, and there was a half grown dog asleep against her foot and she did not get up.
"Mr. Redman," she said.
"Ma'am."
"You look very tired."
"I have had a winter."
"So have we all." She put the needle down. "Say the thing you have come nineteen days to say and do not make a performance of it."
Stuart sat down on the step.