Chapter 15 #4
He stopped.
"There's a notebook on the shelf above the stove," Halstead said. "Two years of it, every name, every date. It's the only honest thing in this valley and I'd like it to survive me."
"It'll survive you."
"Will you read it?"
Burner thought about it.
"Yes," he said.
"Then it'll have been worth writing."
The vote was at four in the afternoon, in the burned yard, in the cold, with seventy people standing on the concrete and two more still inside the block building a hundred and ten feet away.
Halloran read out the offer in full and Burner stood beside him and did not speak until he was asked.
"Say your piece," Halloran said.
Burner stepped up onto a steel drum so they could see him.
"If we let him go, we get nine days and a heated building and nobody else dies here," he said. "That's real and anybody who tells you it isn't is lying to you."
He looked out at them.
"And he'll be alive in April," he said. "And there are other camps in this valley, three that I know of, and in April he will walk into one of them with nothing in his pockets and start again, because there is nothing else he knows how to be.
He said that to me himself an hour ago and he said it honestly."
Somebody in the crowd said, "Then we starve him."
"Then we sit in a burned yard for three weeks with seventy people and no roof for most of us and a man with a rifle behind a steel door," Burner said, "and we will lose people to cold and sickness who would not otherwise have died, and I cannot tell you how many,
and it will probably be more than two."
"So which is it?"
"I don't know," Burner said.
He got down off the drum.
"I've stood on a rock four times in six weeks and told you what I'd do," he said. "This one I've turned over for six hours and it comes out different every time, and I am not going to stand up here and pretend to a certainty I don't have, because that is exactly how a man starts being him."
Halloran counted the vote three times because the first two came out level.
Thirty-five to thirty-three, with two abstaining.
"Say it," somebody called.
Halloran put the slate down and his face was gray.
"He walks," he said.
They opened the gate at half past five in the failing light.
Burner walked him to it, alone, with seventy people standing back along the fence line watching in absolute silence.
Halstead had three days of food in a canvas bag and no rifle and no knife and the same coat he had worn every time Burner had seen him.
At the gate he stopped.
"Thirty-five to thirty-three," he said.
"Yes."
"Two abstained."
"Yes."
"Do you understand what you've just shown me?"
"Tell me."
"That it works," Halstead said. "That seventy frightened people can be handed the worst decision in this valley and they will make it, and it will be close, and it will hold."
He looked out at the burned acres. "I have spent two years believing that was impossible. That's the thing I'll be walking north with."
"Good."
"It isn't good," Halstead said. "It means I was wrong about everything for two years, and there are a hundred and forty people in the ground because of it, and I am going to have to think about that while I walk."
He stepped through the gate.
"Twenty minutes," he said. "Cutter will come out. He'll put the rifle down at forty feet and he'll walk forward and he will not say one word to anybody, and I would ask you not to speak to him either, because he is not able to be spoken to."
"Understood."
Halstead started to turn, and stopped, and looked back over his shoulder one last time.
"The girl," he said.
Burner's hand did not move this time.
"She's nine," he said. "Her name's Shyla. She's got a friend called Cass who she's teaching to knit badly, and a dog. She sleeps through the night now. I'm telling you because you've asked about her three times and I want the answer to be an actual person and not a thing you regret not taking."
Halstead stood in the gateway for a long moment.
"Thank you," he said.
Then he walked north into the burned ground and the dusk, and seventy people watched him until he was a dot and then watched the dot until it was nothing.
Cutter came out twenty minutes later.
He put the rifle down at forty feet. He walked forward with his hands out and he did not say one word to anybody and nobody said one word to him, and four people took him and put him in the north bay of the shop frame with a rope on his wrists,
because nobody had voted about Cutter and nobody knew what to do with him.
At seven that night Burner walked into the block building for the first time.
It was warm. That was the first thing, and it was so overwhelming that he had to stand inside the door for a second with his eyes shut.
There was a stove going. There were three rooms and a concrete floor and a bench along one wall and it smelled of forty people who had lived hard in a small space, and it was the first warm building Burner had stood inside since the sixth of January.
Shyla came in behind him with Yak and stopped and did the same thing he had done.
"It's warm," she said.
"Yes."
She went and put both hands flat on the stove pipe six inches from it, not touching, just holding them there.
"Are we staying?"
Burner looked around the room. Concrete walls. A roof. A well outside that could not freeze. Nine hundred pounds of tools in a steel frame. Fifty acres you could see across. Nine days of food and seventy-two people and the twenty-fourth of October.
"For the winter," he said. "After that I don't know."
"That's okay."
He went to the shelf above the stove.
The notebook was there, a hardbacked ledger with a cracked spine, and he took it down and opened it and looked at two years of small square careful handwriting.
He read four lines and closed it.
"What is it?" Shyla said.
"It's a list."
"Of what?"
Burner put it under his arm.
"Everything he did," he said. "And everybody he did it to."
Outside in the dark, somebody started shouting.
Burner was through the door in three seconds with the rifle coming up.
Priest was running across the concrete from the north bay of the shop frame, and his scalp wound had opened again and there was blood down the whole side of his face, and he was shouting one thing over and over.
"He's gone," he said. "Cutter's gone. The rope's cut and there's a man dead on the floor and he's taken a rifle and he's gone north."