Chapter 16 #3
and the reason there's always another one is that every camp in this country is nine people sitting alone in the dark hoping to be overlooked."
He set the notebook down on the bench.
"I'd like to go and find them," he said.
The shop frame was completely silent.
"All of them. Every place in this book that still has a person in it. Starting in March, in pairs, with food we can't spare, walking out to strangers who will point rifles at us."
"And say what?" somebody asked.
"That there's seventy-two of us at the maintenance yard," Burner said, "and that we know what's been happening to them, because we've got the book it was written in."
He sat down.
There was no vote that day, because it was December and there was nothing to vote on yet, and Halloran said as much and said they'd take it up in February.
But Burner watched the room while people thought about it, and he saw the thing he had been hoping to see, which was seventy people looking at a problem that was not about tomorrow.
That night Shyla came and found him on the bench by the stove.
She sat down and put her feet up on a drum and did not say anything for a while.
"Cass is asleep," she said.
"Good."
"She has bad nights still. About every four days."
"So do you."
"About every six." She shrugged. "It's getting further apart. Weathers says it keeps getting further apart for years and then one day you notice you didn't count."
Burner smiled a little.
"That sounds like her."
Shyla looked at the stove.
"Are you going to go?" she said. "In March. To the places in the book."
"Somebody's going."
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at her.
Ten years old now, or close to it. Nobody knew her birthday and she did not either, and Marin had decided it was going to be in May and that had been that.
"Probably," he said.
"For how long?"
"Weeks at a time. Not four days. Weeks."
Shyla nodded slowly, and she did not do the filing thing, and she did not do the okay.
"Then I want to learn to shoot," she said.
Burner turned his head.
"No."
"I'm not asking to go."
"Good, because"
"I'm asking because you're going to be gone for weeks at a time starting in March," Shyla said, "and there's a man called Cutter out there who cut a rope with a piece of steel, and I have been thinking about that every single night since October and I would like to stop."
Burner did not answer for a while.
"That's a good reason," he said.
"I know it's a good reason. I've had two months."
"You're ten."
"I'm nine. Probably." She looked at him steadily. "And I hid in a woodpile for two days and I walked twenty-six miles in October and I have never once asked you for anything."
That was true, and it landed the way true things do.
"I'll teach you in the spring," Burner said. "Not now. In the spring, properly, the way I taught Priest, and you will hate about eleven days of it."
"Okay," she said.
And then, very quickly, she leaned over and put her head against his arm for about four seconds, and then sat up again as though nothing had happened, and went back to looking at the stove.
At the end of December there was a night of bad wind, and in the morning of the first of January there were tracks in the snow outside the fence.
One man, walking the wire, the full length of the north side, forty feet out.
He had stopped eleven times. At each stop the snow was packed where he had stood for a while, and at the sixth stop, directly opposite the shop frame door, something had been left on the ground.
It was a strip of canvas, folded twice, laid flat.
Burner picked it up with his heart going and unfolded it and read it standing in the snow in the gray morning light.
It was not the small square careful hand.
The writing was enormous, dragged, barely letters at all, made by somebody who had learned to write and then mostly forgotten.
It said:
HE DIED ON THE 19TH. I BURIED HIM. I AM STILL HERE.
Burner stood in the snow with the canvas in his hand for a long time before he called anyone.
Then he walked the tracks himself, the whole length of the north fence, forty feet out, and counted the eleven stops and looked at each one.
At every stop the snow was packed down in the same way: two deep impressions, weight shifted from foot to foot, a man standing still for a long while and then moving on.
At the fourth stop there was a cigarette end.
Hand rolled, in a strip of book page, exactly like the four on the rock above the basin in October.
Burner crouched over it and understood something and did not like it.
He brought Sparrow out at eight in the morning.
Sparrow read the canvas twice and then handed it back and stood there with his breath going up in the cold.
"That's Cutter's writing."
"You're sure?"
"I taught him to sign his name in the first winter. It took four months." Sparrow's face had gone gray. "He could do about ninety words. He hated it. He said it made his head hurt and he meant it literally."
"So he wrote this."
"He wrote this." Sparrow pushed his good hand through his hair. "Do you understand what that took? Nine words. He'd have spent an hour on it. Probably longer. Sitting somewhere in the cold with a pencil, working out the letters."
"Why?"
"Because it's the only way he had to say it."
Burner looked at the canvas again.
HE DIED ON THE 19TH. I BURIED HIM. I AM STILL HERE.
"Say the rest," he said.
"What rest?"
"You've gone the color of ash and it isn't because of the handwriting."
Sparrow was quiet a moment.
"The nineteenth," he said. "That's six weeks after he walked out that gate. Halstead had three days of food on him."
"So he lived six weeks."
"He lived six weeks with Cutter, in the worst November anybody's seen in ten years, on nothing."
Sparrow looked north at the burned acres.
"That means Cutter fed him. That means Cutter kept him alive for six weeks in a country that has nothing in it and then buried him and then walked twenty-six miles to tell us about it."
Burner turned the canvas over in his hands.
"That's not a threat," he said.
"No."
"It's not a demand. He hasn't asked for anything."
"No."
"Then what is it?"
Sparrow let out a long breath.
"It's a report," he said. "That's the only word for it. He's reporting in. He spent two years doing what Halstead told him and Halstead's dead and there's nobody left to tell anything to, and so he came here and told the only people in the world who'd know what it meant."
Halloran called the whole camp at ten.
Seventy people packed into the shop frame with the stove going and the wind coming through the north wall where the drums were not finished, and Halloran read the nine words out loud and then read them again because nobody believed them the first time.
Then he said, "Burner's going to tell you what he thinks it means, and then Sparrow's going to tell you what he thinks, and they don't entirely agree, and I want you to hear both."
Burner stood up.
"He's dead," he said. "That's the first thing and it's the biggest thing and I don't want it buried under the rest. The man who ran this valley for two years died six weeks ago in the snow somewhere north of here with nothing,
and there's forty of you in this room who have been waiting to hear that since July."
Nobody cheered. He had not expected them to. He watched it go into them instead, slowly, the way water goes into dry ground.
Neve put both hands over her face and sat like that for a long while.
Ferris did not move at all.
"The second thing is worse," Burner said. "Cutter's alive. He's been within forty feet of this fence in the last twelve hours. He walked the whole north line and he stopped eleven times and I've looked at every stop, and here's what I'd like everybody to understand about them."
He held up the canvas.
"He stood still for a long time at every one of them," he said. "Long enough to pack the snow. He wasn't looking for a way in. There's three ways into this yard that a man could use at night and he walked past all of them and didn't stop at any."
"Then what was he doing?" somebody asked.
"He was looking at us."
Burner set the canvas down on the bench.
"There were four people on watch last night and none of them saw him and I've already had that conversation with them this morning and it wasn't their fault. It was a bad wind and a dark night and a man who knows how to move."
He looked around. "But what matters is that he was out there for at least an hour with a rifle and he did not use it."
Sparrow stood up.
"I disagree with about a third of that," he said.
"Say it," Halloran said.
"He didn't shoot because there was nothing to shoot at. Everybody was inside and the wind was wrong."
Sparrow's burned hand was curled against his chest.
"I'm not saying he came here to kill anybody last night. I'm saying I don't think that tells us anything about tonight, or next week, or in April."
"You knew him," Weathers said.
"I knew him for two years and I would tell you honestly that I never once understood him."
Sparrow looked at the floor. "He was not cruel. I want to be exact, because it matters. He didn't enjoy it. He did things that turned my stomach and he did them the way a man shovels snow, and afterward he'd sit down and eat and sleep fine."
"And now?"
"And now the man who told him what to do is in the ground." Sparrow looked up. "I don't know what that makes him. Neither does he. That's the whole of what I think and it isn't reassuring."
They set the watch to four at a time that night and kept it there.
Otway finished the north wall of the shop frame in three days instead of eleven because forty people worked on it in shifts through weather that should have stopped them.
Nate and Pike built two firing positions into the fence line, real ones, with stone and steel drums packed with gravel, and Burner walked the whole perimeter with Sable and found nine places a man could get to the wire unseen and closed six of them and left three,
for the same reason he had always left some.
Nothing happened for eleven days.
On the twelfth of January there were tracks again.