Chapter 16 #2
Weathers had the far corner roped off with a blanket on a line and there were five patients behind it and two women helping her who had come out of that building's back room three days ago.
Neve was sitting on the floor with eleven children in a half circle, and she was teaching them something, and Shyla was sitting at the end of the row with Cass beside her.
Otway had a crew of nine outside doing something with sheet steel and the shop frame, and Burner could hear them hammering.
Nate had the tool bench and four people and there was a smell of hot metal.
Nobody had asked him about any of it.
He got a cup of something hot and stood in the doorway and drank it, and Sable came and stood beside him.
"How long was I out?"
"Fourteen hours."
"What did I miss?"
"Everything," Sable said. "There was a meeting at ten this morning and it went four hours and it was the best one I've seen."
"About what?"
"About winter." She counted on her fingers.
"Halloran's got the food sorted. Nine days is wrong, by the way. The nine days was for twenty-two people eating properly. Weathers recounted it for seventy on short rations and it's eighteen days,
and then there's forty-one deer worth of hunting country within four miles that hasn't been touched in two years because everybody around here was too frightened to walk in it."
"That's not enough."
"No. But it's not nine days." She nodded at the building.
"And Otway's got a plan for the shop frame. Roof it with the sheet steel that's already on the ground, wall the north and west with stacked drums and gravel, put a stove in it from the parts pile. That's forty people out of this room by the middle of November."
"Does it work?"
"He says it's how a fire camp overwinters equipment and he did it for nine years. Nobody argued with him because nobody else has done it."
Burner stood there and watched the room.
"Nobody woke me," he said.
"No."
"Why not?"
Sable looked at him.
"Because you were asleep," she said, "and because there wasn't anything only you could do, and because if we'd woken you it would have meant we were the kind of camp that can't have a meeting without one man in it."
He nodded slowly.
"That's right," he said.
"You don't sound happy about it."
"I'm not unhappy about it." Burner turned his cup in his hands. "I'm trying to work out what I am."
Halloran put Cutter to the camp that night, because Cutter still had to be dealt with as a fact even though he was four miles gone, and because a man had died and there was nothing to be done about it except look at it properly.
He told it straight. The rope, the steel, the single guard, the decision he had made at five o'clock about the wounded and the cold.
Then he said, "That was mine. I'm not going to have people working it out in whispers for three weeks. I made a bad call while tired and a man is dead of it."
Burner stood up.
"I walked past that bay at half past six," he said. "I saw one man on a tied prisoner and I registered it and kept walking because I wanted to look at a stove."
The room was quiet.
A woman near the back said, "So did I."
Somebody else said, "And me."
And then, in a way that Burner had not expected at all, eleven different people said some version of it, which was not absolution and was not meant to be, and which did the thing that needed doing, which was to put a failure where it belonged instead of on one man's back.
Halloran let it settle.
"There'll be a funeral tomorrow," he said. "Third grave. And then we're going to talk about the rules for prisoners, because there will be more and we've got none, and I'd rather write them now than at two in the morning with somebody tied to a drum."
They buried Oates on the twenty-sixth.
Three graves outside the wire now, Brill and Corlett and Oates, and the ground was harder every day, and a man named Pike who had come out of the shed in September and who had been a stonemason before the lights went out started cutting names into a flat slab without asking anybody if he could.
November came in hard.
It snowed eleven inches on the second and then it went to four below and stayed there for a week, and the shop frame roof was not finished and forty people slept on a concrete floor in a room built for twenty.
Three children got sick in the first week. Two of them got better. The third was Marin's little brother, who was four years old, and he died on the ninth of November of something Weathers could name and could not treat, and that was the fourth grave.
The hunting was better than anybody had dared hope.
Burner took it over because it was the one thing he was still unambiguously the best at, and he ran it like a business: pairs, never alone, four miles maximum, everything reported, every round accounted for.
They killed nineteen deer and four elk in November.
He taught nine people to shoot properly and eleven more to butcher and pack out, and by the end of the month there were four people in that camp who could go out without him and come back with meat, and the day he realized that was the day he stopped feeling like a man waiting for something.
Delacroix started walking in mid November.
She went from the building to the shop frame and back, forty yards, twice a day, with her hand pressed against her left side, and on the twenty-first she walked all the way to the gate and stood there for a while looking north and then walked back.
The shop frame got its roof on the twenty-fourth.
Otway had built a thing that was not a building by any prewar standard and that would have failed every inspection ever written, and which was warm, and which took forty people out of the block building,
and when the first stove was lit in it there was a noise from inside that Burner heard from two hundred feet away.
Sparrow was voted on in December.
Halloran had put it off for six weeks and finally could not, because a man cannot live in a camp for two months in an unvoted condition without it becoming its own kind of cruelty.
Sparrow stood up in front of seventy people and said what he had done for two years.
He did it in plain words, with no defense offered and no excuses made, and he named the eleven settlements, and where he could, he named the people. It took nineteen minutes and there was not one sound in that room while he did it.
Then he sat down.
Burner spoke for him. Halloran spoke for him. Rowe, who had lost two fingers and most of two toes and who now moved around that yard on a pair of crutches Nate had made him, stood up on those crutches and said eleven words: "He cut the trucks. I was on the gate. Let him stay."
Ferris spoke against.
He did it well and he did it without heat and he said that Sparrow had stood in front of eleven camps and helped destroy all of them, and that his wife had spent a month in a back room while Sparrow ate at a table forty feet away,
and that these were facts and no amount of later usefulness erased them.
He was completely right and everybody knew it.
The vote was fifty-one to nineteen to let him stay.
Sparrow did not say anything afterward. He went outside and stood in the snow for about twenty minutes and then came back in and started carrying water with his one good hand, which was what he had been doing for six weeks anyway.
Burner read the notebook in December.
He had been putting it off since the twenty-fourth of October and he finally sat down with it on a night when the wind was bad and the shop frame was too loud to sleep in, and he read it front to back in seven hours by lamplight.
It was exactly what Halstead had said it was.
Two years of small square handwriting. Dates. Names. Quantities. Every settlement, every take, every person killed and the reason in one flat sentence.
There were four hundred and six names in it.
Somewhere around three in the morning Burner understood what he was actually reading, and it was not a confession and it was not a ledger.
It was a map.
Four hundred and six names, and beside most of them, a place. Camps, families, single houses, a woman who kept bees on a creek eleven miles east, a group of nine at a church with a man who thought God would handle it, two families up on the creek who had already decided to starve quietly.
He sat with the lamp burning down and did the thing he had been avoiding for six weeks, which was to think past March.
The next morning he asked Halloran for a meeting.
"About what?"
"About next year."
"It's the eleventh of December."
"That's why," Burner said.
They did it at noon with the whole camp, in the shop frame with the stove going, seventy people sitting on the concrete floor and on drums and on the tool bench.
Burner stood up with the notebook in his hand.
"There's four hundred and six names in this," he said. "And about ninety places. Most of the people are dead. A lot of the places aren't."
He opened it.
"There's nine people at a church eleven miles east of the old crossing. There's a woman who kept bees. There's two families on the north creek. There's a camp of fourteen at a ranger station that he hit twice and didn't finish."
He closed it.
"Halstead is alive somewhere north of here with a man called Cutter and no food and no people," he said.
"And in about April he is going to walk into one of those places and start again, because I let him, because thirty-five of you voted for it and I carried it out, and I would like everybody in this room to hold onto that because I do."
Nobody moved.
"So here's what I want us to think about between now and spring," Burner said. "Not a plan. I haven't got one and I'm not going to pretend to. A question."
He looked around at all of them.
"We've spent four months surviving one man," he said.
"And we won, more or less, and it cost us four graves and a hundred and forty people in this valley who were dead before we ever started. And in April there'll be another one. Not him. Somebody else. Because there's always another one,