Chapter 13 #3
Burner folded the canvas once and put it down on the crate.
"Your counterfeit cult ends with me," he said.
Halloran looked at him for a long moment.
"That's a fine sentence," he said. "What's underneath it?"
"Nothing yet."
"Burner."
"I mean that." He sat back down on the crate. "I've had that sentence in my mouth for about nine days and it came out because I was angry, and I'd rather say so now than let all of you walk out of this tent thinking I've got a plan behind it."
Weathers snorted, once.
"Well," she said. "That's refreshing."
"Here's what I've actually got," Burner said. "He's made one mistake and it's the same one he's made every time, and it's the only reason any of us are alive."
"Which is?"
"He explains himself."
He picked the canvas back up.
"Look at this. He didn't have to write it. He could have starved us in silence and we'd never have known what was happening until it was happening. Instead he walks across a firebreak in daylight and leaves nine lines of pencil telling us exactly what he intends to do and exactly when."
"Because he wants the twelve," Sable said.
"That's what it says. And I think that's half true."
Burner shook his head slowly. "The other half is that he can't help it. He sent Sparrow to our gate to explain terms. He came eleven miles at night to give a speech at a barricade. He stood in a burning yard and watched me go through a fence instead of shooting. Every single time, he explains."
"Why?"
"Because if he doesn't say it out loud, then it's just a man taking things," Burner said. "The saying is the thing that makes it a system. He needs an audience or it stops being what he tells himself it is."
Halloran leaned back against the tent pole.
"So what do we do with that?"
"I don't know yet," Burner said. "But I'd like everybody in this tent to sit with it, because it's the only crack there is."
They put it to the camp the next morning.
Halloran read the canvas out loud, all of it, without softening one line, standing on a flat rock with seventy-two people in the snow in front of him.
Burner watched their faces while it was read.
He watched the twelve from the shed particularly, and hated himself for doing it, and did it anyway.
Sable's brother Nate listened with his splinted leg out in front of him and his jaw set. The woman of about sixty who had not spoken since the fence did not react at all. The two nine year olds were not there, because Burner had asked for that specifically and nobody had argued.
And a man named Ferris, who had come out of the shed and who had said perhaps forty words in eleven days, put his head in his hands about halfway through and left it there.
When Halloran finished there was a long silence.
Then Ferris stood up.
"I'll go," he said.
The basin went absolutely still.
"That's what it says, isn't it. Twelve. He wants twelve and there's twelve of us and we're the twelve he's owed." Ferris's voice cracked on the word. "And everybody here has been too polite to say it and I've been sitting in that tent for eleven days waiting for somebody to."
"Nobody in this camp has said that," Halloran said.
"Not out loud."
"Not at all. Sit down."
"My wife is in that yard," Ferris said.
The whole basin heard it.
"She was on the work detail in August. She got sick in the second week of September and they moved her into the block building and I have not seen her since the fourteenth."
He was shaking. "And I stood in a hole in the ground on Thursday and a man told me to run north and I ran, and I have thought about nothing else since."
Weathers stood up.
"Sit down, Ferris," she said, and it was not unkind. "You're not going anywhere today and neither is anybody else, and I'll tell you why in one sentence and then you can argue with me for a week if you like."
Ferris looked at her.
"If twelve people walk out of this basin," Weathers said, "then in March he'll ask for twelve more, and there'll be nobody left to say no, and your wife will still be in that building."
Ferris sat down.
But the thing had been said, and everybody had heard it, and Burner stood at the edge of the crowd and watched it go into seventy-two people like water into sand.
It took eleven days to come back up.
They were eleven good days, in their way, and Burner would think about them later as the last stretch of ordinary time.
The snow melted off and came back twice. They killed four more deer. Weathers got Delacroix onto her feet for ninety seconds on the fifth of October and the whole basin knew about it inside an hour.
Priest's shoulder closed. Nate's leg was rebroken and reset by Weathers with three people holding him and a leather strap in his teeth, and he screamed and then apologized for screaming, and it set straight the second time.
Sparrow's burns turned from weeping to scabbed to shiny and terrible, and he lost most of the use of two fingers on his left hand, and he did not complain about it once, which Burner noted and which the camp noted more.
They did not vote on him.
Halloran kept putting it off and Burner knew exactly why and said nothing, because the longer it went the more days there were of people watching a burned man haul water one-handed and say thank you, and that was worth more than any speech either of them could have made.
Shyla taught Cass to knit.
She was a terrible teacher and Cass was a worse student and the two of them produced, over nine days, something that was theoretically a scarf and that Tomlin described, out loud, as looking like a dead animal, which was the first joke anybody had heard out of any of the three of them.
Burner watched them from across the fire and did not interrupt.
"She's different," Weathers said, sitting down beside him.
"How?"
"You know how. Don't make an old woman do all the work."
Burner turned his cup in his hands.
"She sleeps," he said.
"Since Thursday week. Right through, most nights. Marin told me." Weathers stretched her legs toward the fire. "You know what did it, don't you?"
"The two of them."
"The two of them," Weathers agreed. "She spent five days sitting on that log looking down the trail, and what she was actually waiting for was to find out whether the world works. Whether a person says a thing and then the thing happens."
"That's a lot to hang on one trip."
"That's all any of them hang it on. You were asked a question and you answered it correctly and now she sleeps at night." Weathers drank. "Don't get comfortable. She'll ask you about eleven thousand more before she's twenty."
On the ninth of October, Halstead's men killed a man named Prentice four miles south of the basin.
He had gone out with a partner to check a snare line and they had been gone three hours and only one came back, and he came back at a run with no rifle and said there had been two men in the rocks and that Prentice had gone down at the first shot and had not moved.
Burner went out with six people and brought the body in.
It had not been touched. That was the part he did not say out loud to anyone but Halloran. The rifle was gone and the pack was gone and the man had been left exactly where he fell with no interference at all, which was a thing that told you something about the men who had done it.
They buried him on the tenth.
It was the first grave in the basin and forty people stood around it in the cold and Halloran said some things and a woman sang a hymn badly.
Burner stood at the back and understood that the schedule had started nine weeks early, and that Halstead had lied about that too, and that the lie was not a lie exactly but a demonstration.
Two days later a woman named Hobbes went out to the spring at dusk, alone, against every rule the camp had, and did not come back.
They found her rifle at the water's edge.
They did not find her.
That was the one that did it.
The meeting happened on the thirteenth of October and nobody called it, which was how Burner knew it was real.
It started as an argument about the watch rotation and it was something else inside of four minutes, and by the time Halloran got there sixty people were standing around the cook fire and three of them were shouting.
"It's not December," a man named Oates was saying. "That's the point. He said December and it's the thirteenth of October and we've buried one and lost one."
"He didn't say he wouldn't."
"He said the fifteenth of December!"
"He said you have until the fifteenth of December," Burner said.
They turned.
"Read it again," he said. "It's on the crate in Halloran's tent and anybody can read it. He never once said he'd wait. He said we had until. Those are different sentences and he chose the one he chose."
"That's a technicality."
"It's not a technicality, it's the whole design," Burner said. "He wants us out here doing exactly this. Look at us. Sixty people standing around a fire at nine in the morning arguing about what a sentence on a piece of canvas means."
"Then what are we supposed to do?" Oates shouted. "Prentice had a wife! Hobbes had two kids, they're in that tent right now with everybody else's kids, and what am I supposed to say to them?"
Burner did not have an answer for that.
Halloran got up on the rock.
"All right," he said. "We'll do it properly. Right now, in front of everyone, and everybody speaks who wants to, and then we vote, and whatever it is we'll live with it."
It took four hours.
Burner had been in a lot of bad rooms in eleven months and this was the worst, because it was not a bad room. It was seventy-two frightened, decent, exhausted people trying to do an impossible thing honestly, and every single person who spoke was right about something.
A man said they should send the twelve.
He said it badly and he was shouted down and then he stood there and said it again better, that seventy-two people cannot eat, that the twelve would be fed, that it was the only path where nobody starved, and that anybody who called him a coward could come and take his watch rotation for a week.
A woman said they should scatter.