Chapter 16 #3
"His name was Aurel Petrescu," he said, "and he had a sister."
Delphine went absolutely still.
"She is twenty years old and she is alive and she is in my valley," Stuart said, "and she has been walking this country for two years with a rifle warning towns off a list, and in February she got four of them to come out onto the breaks with wheat,
and she has never once got anywhere in time and she got everywhere in the end."
Delphine did not say anything for a long moment.
"Her," she said.
"Her."
"He said tell her I did it."
"He said tell her it was me that got it out," Stuart said. "And I have carried that to the wrong woman for fourteen months and I am sorry, and it was not wasted, because you needed it too."
Delphine looked at her hands in the sun.
"Bring her here," she said.
"That's eleven days."
"Bring her here," Delphine said. "I have got a great deal to tell that girl about her brother and I have got maybe three more years of talking in me, and I am not going to spend them on a step by myself."
He came home in July.
He came down the last of the north trace on a Tuesday afternoon in the dust with a satchel across his chest and a dog on his boot every time he stopped, and the valley was green in a way it had not been in five years, and there were thirty-one chimneys now.
Davey met him at the gate.
"Anything?"
"Vinegar Hill is standing. Forty-one. Ferrell's going to want a word with somebody about a rule he broke."
"Anything else."
Stuart took the letters out of the satchel and put them in Davey's hands, and then he stood there a minute.
"There's one more," he said.
"Say it."
"There's a trading post at the mouth of the Ninemile," Stuart said. "It has been open since April. They have got wheat and potatoes and salt fish and a river road south, and they are dealing square and they are not asking anybody any questions."
Davey did not say anything.
"Two places have traded with them already," Stuart said. "One of them is on the Salmon and one of them I would rather not say tonight. And nobody in either place knows what that man was, because nobody has told them yet."
"Then we tell them."
"Then we tell them," Stuart said. "That is what I am going to spend the next ten years doing and I have known it since I stood in a creek in February, and I want to say out loud that I do not expect to win it."
"You will not win it."
"No."
"Then why."
"Because a thing that has been written down is harder to lose than a thing that has not," Stuart said, "and because there is a boy at that table every evening writing a hundred and eleven names."
He went up the lane.
Shawna Hennefresy was in her garden and Callum was on a ladder and Maddie was shouting at somebody in the Hall, and Kestrel was on the throat wall with a stick under his arm laying rock, and Josiah Tarp went past him with a bucket and said, "Evening, Mr. Redman," the way he did every single day.
Nell Fairweather was sitting on the step of the Hall cleaning a rifle.
"Vinegar Hill," she said.
"Eleven days. She wants you in September."
"I know. You told me in June."
"I am telling you again."
"I am going," Nell Fairweather said. "I have got four magazines and a list in my head and I am going to walk her country for her and I am going to be early for once in my life."
Stuart went home.
Camille was on the step with her boots on the rail.
"You are walking," she said. It was an accusation.
"I have been walking for five years."
"You are walking badly and you are fifty-two in August and Maddie is going to look at that hip."
"Maddie is not going to look at anything."
"Maddie is going to look at that hip," Camille said, "and I have already told her, and you are going to sit in that Hall on Thursday and let her."
Stuart Redman sat down on the step of his own house in July.
Juno came out and put her head on his knee and leaned on him the way she had done every night since a creek in April, and away down the lane, in a window, a lamp was burning in the middle of the evening because nobody had ever asked her to put it out.
"There's eighteen more of those collars out there," he said.
"Seventeen," Camille said. "You found one on a bench in January and you have never once counted it."
Stuart sat with that for a while.
"Seventeen," he said.
"Seventeen."
"That's a lot of country."
"It is a great deal of country," Camille Aubert said, "and you are not going to sleep tonight, and I am going to go inside and let you sit out here with that, because I have learned in four years that there is no point at all in arguing with a man about a thing he was always going to do."
She went in.
Stuart stayed out.
The light went slowly the way it does in July, and the smoke stood up over thirty-one chimneys, and somewhere out there in two hundred little worlds there were seventeen dogs that had never come home and a man at the mouth of a creek with four hundred bushels of wheat and a country that was only
just finding out it had neighbors.
"All right," he said.
The dog looked up at him.
"Not tonight," Stuart said. "But all right."