Chapter 7
Truman Fenner called her the night before he testified.
He called her every night. He had called her every night since December, at seven, from his kitchen in Hygiene, and it had started as a man checking that she was sleeping and had turned into something neither of them named.
Eleven minutes, usually. The dogs. The weather. Whether the road was frozen.
"They've got me at ten tomorrow," he said.
"I know."
"Anna's driving me. I'm not — " A pause with a lot in it. "I've never done this. I've never been in a thing like this."
"You just say what happened."
"That's what the lady said."
"Then that's what you do." Renee had the phone on her shoulder, wiping down a tray. "Truman. There's nothing you can say tomorrow that hurts me. There's no version of it."
He was quiet a second.
"Well," he said.
That was all. Well. Fifty-six years old, and a man who said about four hundred words a week.
"Truman?"
"Nothing." He cleared his throat. "You want me to look at that hoop house door? That latch is going to pull out on you in a wind."
"It already did."
"See, now."
"Come Thursday," Renee said, and he said he would, and they hung up, and she thought about well for about a minute and a half and then put a tray away and forgot it entirely.
She did not go.
She had preconstruction on the twenty-fourth and a drill sub in Wiggins who wanted answers about seed delivery, and she had made herself a rule in January: the inquiry was not going to eat the business. She had a laminated schedule taped inside the hoop house door and she worked it.
So the seventeenth of February she spent under plastic, potting up, with the little propane heater going and her sleeves shoved up.
The transcript went public at twelve forty.
She knew because Nina Ackley texted her, which Nina Ackley had never done — no question in it, no ask, just a link and four words: You should read this.
Renee looked at her phone on the bench for a while with her hands full of soil.
Then she wiped them on her jeans, badly, and sat down on an overturned crate in a hoop house at twelve forty-four in the afternoon and read Truman Fenner's testimony with mud on her thumbs.
The first eleven pages were the evacuation, and she knew all of it.
The eleven a.m. look east. The roof. The county alert nobody got.
Him going door to door up the ridge because he did not like the color of the sky, and how many houses that was, and what time he hit each one.
He was a terrible witness in the way that honest men are terrible witnesses: he corrected himself constantly, he said "I'd be guessing" four times, and when counsel tried to get him to agree that the notification system had performed adequately he said, "I don't know what adequate means.
I know I knocked on eleven doors and the phones hadn't. "
Page fourteen was her.
Q. And you returned to the property later that evening. A. I went back up at seven. I'd been trying since about five. Q. Why? A. Because I'd counted a trailer and two vehicles and I hadn't counted her.
Renee read that and had to stop for a second, because she could hear him say it — the exact flatness of it.
Q. You said you'd been trying since five. Trying to do what? A. Get back up the road. They had it closed at the county line and then at the second cattle guard. Q. Were there other people attempting to get back up that road? A. Yes. Q. Can you say who?
And then page sixteen.
A. Mr. Ridgeway was there. Q. Chase Ridgeway.
A. Yes sir. Q. At the roadblock. A. He was at the bottom when I got there.
That'd be five thirty, about. He had it out with the deputy pretty good and the deputy wasn't wrong, they had the road closed, there was fire on both sides of it by then.
Q. And then? A. He drove off and I figured he'd gone.
Then about six I come around the north side to try the old ranch two-track and he's at the fence line on foot.
Q. On foot. A. Through the wire. He'd gone through the wire and he was up the fence line maybe two hundred yards and moving.
Q. In what conditions? A. It was burning on that side.
I want to be clear it was not survivable up there at six o'clock.
I've been on grass fire my whole life and I'd not have gone up there and I'd not have let anybody.
Q. What did you do? A. I went and got him.
Q. And? A. I got both arms around him at the second gate and I held onto him.
Q. For how long? A. I don't know. Q. Approximately. A. Until he quit.
Renee put the phone face down on the bench.
She sat in a hoop house at nineteen degrees outside and sixty-some inside, with the propane heater ticking, and she looked at a flat of blue grama plugs, and she did not move for a long time.
Then she picked the phone up and read the rest.
There was not much more of it. Counsel asked whether Mr. Ridgeway had said anything and Fenner said he had, and counsel asked what, and Fenner said, "I'd rather not."
The commissioner said he did not have to.
And then two pages later, on his way out of a question about the second attempt, Truman Fenner said the thing that took Renee's legs out from under her, and he said it the way he said everything, like reading a gauge:
A. I'd like to say something if I can. Q.
Go ahead. A. Everybody keeps asking me about him leaving.
He shouldn't have left without her and he knows it and I'm not here to argue that.
But there's about four hundred people in this county have decided they know what a man is by ten minutes of a bad afternoon, and I was on that hill for nine hours and I'm the only one that was, and I've not been asked one time what he did with the other eight.
Nine weeks.
That was the number she kept coming back to, walking the north fence line in the cold with no coat on, because she had gone out of the hoop house without one and got four hundred yards before she noticed.
Nine weeks and two days.
He had stood at her fence eleven days ago and signed insurance forms and told her to keep left on the road.
He had sat in a rented kitchen in December and said I thought you were in the first truck.
He had put a statement in a public docket that said I did not think about where she was, three paragraphs, and had not put one clause of this in it.
Not one. He had written I have nothing to add about the rest of that afternoon and let the whole county read I did not think about where she was as the totality of Chase Ridgeway on the twelfth of December.
He had gone through a wire fence.
Renee stood at the second gate of her own place with her arms wrapped around herself and found that she was furious.
That was the thing she had not seen coming and could not have predicted. She had expected — if she had ever let herself imagine learning something like this, and she had not — she had expected it to soften something. It did the opposite. It went through her like a hot wire.
How dare he.
That was the actual sentence in her head, and it made no sense, and she knew it made no sense, and she was not able to stop it.
How dare he make her carry this too.
She had spent nine weeks building a man she could survive.
It had taken enormous work. She had assembled him out of the binder and the statement and the ninety minutes and nothing happened, and he was a coherent man, a man whose attention had been somewhere else for eleven weeks and who had driven down a hill without counting her, and you could leave a man like that. You could leave him and sleep.
And Truman Fenner, who could not lie and did not know what he was doing, had stood up in a county building at ten in the morning and handed her a different one.
Not a better one. That was what she could not make anybody understand later, including Maggie, including eventually Chase.
Not a better one — the man at the fence line at six o'clock had still gotten in the first truck at 3:33 without asking, and going back afterward did not un-ask it, and she was never going to accept it as payment.
She was very clear about that, standing at the gate. She was clear about it for four months.
A more complicated one.
And she did not have room. That was the honest thing.
She had a nine-hundred-and-forty-acre contract and four thousand dollars and a trailer at nineteen degrees, and she had built exactly enough structure to hold one version of her husband, and now there were two of him and they both had to live in her chest.
She went back and got her coat, and then she got in the truck instead.
She found him on the steps of the county building at ten of three.
She had told herself she was going in for the preconstruction packet, which was true, and which she could have gotten emailed, which was also true.
She parked in the gravel lot and came around the corner of the building and Truman Fenner was sitting on the third step from the bottom in a sport coat.
She had never seen him in a sport coat.
That was what got her, walking up. Fifty-six years old, and he had gone out and put on a sport coat to tell the truth to three commissioners, and now he was sitting on a cold concrete step in it with his forearms on his knees.
"Hi, Truman."
He looked up and his whole face went.
"Aw, hell," he said.
"Where's Anna?"
"Getting the truck. She's — " He gestured vaguely toward the lot and gave up. "Renee, I didn't know they were going to ask me that. About who else was on the road. I've been sitting here an hour."
"I know."
"I sat in there and I answered it before I'd thought about it.
That's all that was. She asked me who else was trying to get up and I said his name because he was there.
" He rubbed the back of his neck hard. "And then I'm walking out and I get to the bottom of these steps and it lands on me that you're going to read that on a phone. "
Renee sat down on the step next to him.