Chapter 5 #2
"I'm asking you not to plan around his calendar." Burner put his hand flat on the table. "There's a difference. If we get ready for one morning, we're only ready for one morning. If we get ready for any morning, we're ready for the twenty-eighth too, and it costs us nothing but discipline."
Halloran looked at him for a long moment.
"You've thought about this more in five days than I have in two years," he said.
"You've been growing food. I've been doing nothing but this."
"That's charitable."
"It's not," Burner said. "I've been up on a mountain hiding from exactly this and getting very good at it, and I'd have gone on doing it forever if a kid hadn't crawled out of a woodpile. There's nothing charitable in this room, believe me."
Halloran almost laughed. It came out as a breath.
"All right," he said. "Then tell me the other thing. The thing you've been not saying since the gap."
Burner looked at the dead stove.
"Four people," he said.
"Yes."
"You know what that is."
"Tell me anyway."
"It's not labor." Burner met his eyes. "He doesn't need four workers. He's got six men and a truck and he can take food from anyone within fifty miles. Four adults of working age, chosen by you, walking out on their own feet."
"Say it."
"It's a test of whether you'll do it," Burner said.
"That's all it is. It's the whole point of the visit. The food he can take anytime. What he wants is fifty-one people who have already agreed once to hand over four of their own, because a place that's done that once will do anything after. That's how you take a settlement without burning it.
You get them to hand you four people and then you own them."
Halloran's jaw worked.
"And if we refuse."
"Then you've refused, and it's a fight, and it's a fight in nine days or fewer with two shooters and a decorative fence."
"And what do you say we do?"
Burner did not answer right away.
"I'm going to tell you something and you're not going to like where it comes from," he said.
"Four days ago I'd have said give him the food. All of it. Food you can regrow, people you can't, and you've got twenty children in this camp and a winter coming and every dead adult is three kids who don't make it to March."
"And now?"
"Now I've heard him ask for four people."
Burner shook his head. "You can't pay that. Not once. There is no version where you pay that once. Because the next time it's eight, and the time after that he doesn't ask, and every single person in this camp will have learned that when the truck comes, somebody gets picked and it might be them,
and after that this place isn't a settlement, it's a herd."
"So we fight."
"So we don't lose," Burner said. "Those aren't the same thing and the difference is the only thing that's going to keep anybody alive."
The arguing started that night, exactly as Sparrow had said it would.
It happened in the long hall after the meal, and it was not a meeting, because nobody had called one, which made it worse.
A man named Teague started it. Fifties, thick through the chest, hands like a mechanic, a good man by every account Burner had heard in five days. He had two grandchildren in the camp.
"Say it out loud," Teague said. "Somebody say it out loud, because everybody's thinking it at the table and nobody's saying it."
"Say what," Halloran said.
"That we have never had a problem in this valley that we couldn't live with." Teague put both fists on the plank table. "We gave them potatoes in the spring. It hurt. We ate thin in June. We lived. We gave them the July load. It hurt worse. We lived."
"We didn't all live," Weathers said from the end of the table.
"No," Teague said. "We didn't. And I have thought about that girl every day since and I'll go on thinking about her. But there are forty-nine other people in this room and nineteen of them are children and I have to think about them too."
"Twenty," somebody said.
"Twenty." Teague did not look around for the voice. "And that's the other half of it, isn't it. Twenty. Because we had nineteen until Tuesday."
The hall went quiet.
Burner sat with his back to the wall and his hands around a cup and did not move.
"Say it plain, Teague," Halloran said, very quietly.
"I don't want to."
"You've come this far."
Teague straightened up. He looked miserable.
"Two years," he said. "Two years, they come twice a year, they take, they go. Then a man walks in here with a rifle, and inside of five days the schedule moves up six weeks and they're asking for people instead of food."
He turned his hands over. "I'm not saying he did anything. I'm saying that's the sequence. And everyone in here has done that sum tonight already."
"That's not a sum," Weathers said. "That's a coincidence with a grudge in it."
"Maybe."
"It is," Halloran said. "And I'll tell you why, and I want every person in this room to hear it, because this ends tonight or it eats us."
He stood up. "Halstead moved the date because he found out someone here was getting ready. Not because a stranger showed up. Because we started moving grain and closing approaches and putting eyes on the ridge. He said as much through his man."
"Which he only did because of him," Teague said.
"Yes." Halloran nodded. "That's right. Burner is the reason we started getting ready. That's exactly what he is. And you've turned it around backwards and called it the reason they're coming."
"They are coming sooner."
"They were always coming!" Halloran's voice cracked across the hall and everyone flinched.
"God almighty, Teague. They were coming in October. They've been coming since the day we put the first seed in the ground. The only thing that's different is that this year somebody told us the truth about it instead of letting us find out at sunrise."
Nobody spoke.
"Sit down," Halloran said, more quietly. "All of you. I'm going to say one thing and then we're going to talk about it properly, at a meeting, tomorrow, with everyone, and we're going to vote like we always do."
He put his knuckles on the table.
"The one thing is this. They asked for four of us. By name is not how it works, they said we choose, and that's the trick of it, because it means that at some point in the next nine days somebody in this room is going to look around at everybody else and start doing that math in their head.
And the minute we do that, we are finished, whether they ever show up or not."
He let it settle.
"So nobody does that math," he said. "Nobody. Not out loud, not alone at night, not with your wife. If I hear that it's happening I will stand up in this hall and say the four names are mine four times over, and I will mean it."
He walked out.
The hall stayed quiet a long time after the door shut.
Burner sat where he was and looked at the cup in his hands and became slowly aware that a great many people were not looking at him in a very deliberate way.
Shyla found him afterward, out by the woodpile in the dark.
She had Marin's knitting in her hands, four inches of something gray and badly done, and she was carrying it the way people carry things they intend to get better at.
She sat down on the chopping block next to him without asking.
"They think it's your fault," she said.
"Some of them."
"That's stupid."
"It's not stupid." He looked out at the black shape of the ridge. "It's wrong. But it's not stupid. When something bad is coming, people want a reason, because a reason means somebody could have stopped it, and that feels better than the truth."
"What's the truth?"
"That bad things come whether you deserve them or not."
She thought about that, turning the knitting over in her lap.
"They think it's my fault too," she said.
Burner turned his head.
"Who said that to you?"
"Nobody said it." She shrugged one shoulder, small. "I heard a lady say if the girl hadn't come. She stopped in the middle. She didn't know I was there."
Burner sat with that for a while and found that he was holding the edge of the chopping block hard enough to hurt.
"Listen to me," he said.
She looked up.
"You crawled into a pile of wood and you stayed there for two days without making a sound, and that is the single bravest thing I have ever heard of a person doing," he said. "Not a kid. A person. I've known grown men who couldn't have done it."
"That's not the same as it not being my fault."
"No," he said. "But it's the true thing, and the other one isn't, and I'd rather you carried the true one."
She was quiet.
"There's nine days," she said.
"Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"I think it's fewer," Burner said. "I think he lied about the date. I've told Halloran so."
She nodded slowly, filing it, the way she filed everything.
"What are you going to do?"
"Tonight I'm going to look at that map until I can draw it with my eyes shut," he said.
"Tomorrow I'm going to teach eight people how to stand behind a rock without getting killed. And then I'm going to go down and look at their yard myself, because everything I've got right now is a guess, and you don't hang fifty-one people on a guess."
"You're going down there?"
"Not tonight."
She was quiet a moment.
"Take Yak," she said. "He hears things."
"I know he does."
"He heard them at your camp." She looked down at the knitting. "He heard them before you did. Both times."
Burner looked at her sideways in the dark and understood that she had been keeping score of every single thing since the clearing, filing all of it, building a picture of the world out of two days in a deadfall and everything since.
"Shyla."
"Yeah."
"When this is over. Whatever happens." He stopped, because he had not planned the sentence and now it was out in the open with nowhere to go.
She waited.
"I'm not going back up the mountain," he said.
She did not say anything at all.
But she moved about four inches along the chopping block until her shoulder was against his arm, and she stayed there, and after a while she went back to the knitting, and the two of them sat in the cold with the stovepipes ticking behind them and the ridge black against the stars.