Chapter 16 #5
There were fourteen people at the fence line by then. Burner had told them to be visible and told them not to point anything.
Cutter stopped at forty feet.
He was smaller than Burner had expected. That was the first thing. A compact man of about forty with a flat face and pale eyes and four months of beard, and he was so thin that his coat hung off him like a sheet, and there was something wrong with the way he stood, a stiffness down the left side.
He did not say anything.
Burner got up off the drum and walked to fifteen feet and stopped.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
"You buried him," Burner said.
Cutter nodded once.
"Where?"
"Up by the old lake road." His voice was strange, low and unused. "There's a rock like a chair. He said it was a good spot. He picked it in November when he could still walk."
"He was sick."
"He wouldn't eat," Cutter said.
Burner went very still.
"Say that again."
"I brought food." Cutter's hands opened and closed at his sides. "I got two deer in November and a bighorn in December and I brought it all back and he wouldn't eat more than a little of it. Every day. For six weeks. I'd cut it and put it in front of him and he'd take a bit and stop."
"Why?"
Cutter looked at the ground.
"He said the count was wrong," he said.
Nobody at the fence line moved.
"I don't know what that means," Cutter said. "I asked him about nine times. He said the count was wrong and he'd done it again and it came out the same way and he wasn't going to make me carry it."
Burner had to take a breath before he could speak.
"Did he say anything else?"
"He talked a lot at the end. Most of it I couldn't follow." Cutter's mouth worked. "He said names. There was a lot of names. He said them for two days and I didn't know any of them."
"Four hundred and six of them," Burner said.
Cutter looked up.
"Was that what it was?"
"That's what it was."
Cutter took that in, slowly, and something moved behind his face that Burner could not read.
"He said one thing I understood," he said.
"Say it."
"He said, go to the yard. He said it about four times on the last day." Cutter's jaw tightened. "And I said what do I do there and he said, they'll tell you, and I said what if they shoot me and he said, they won't, they'll vote about it."
Burner stood in the snow with fourteen people behind him and a burned valley in front and did not trust himself to speak.
"So I came," Cutter said.
"It took you six weeks."
"I've been out there since the first." He said it without any self pity at all. "I didn't know how to come in. I don't know how to be anywhere. I've never once in my life gone anywhere that somebody didn't tell me to."
"And now somebody has."
"A dead man," Cutter said.
The wind came across the yard.
"I killed one of yours in October," he said. "In the shed. With the metal."
"Oates."
"I didn't know his name."
"His name was Oates," Burner said. "He grew potatoes at a place called the Kettle and he had a loud voice and he shouted at me at a meeting eleven days before you killed him, about a woman named Hobbes and her two children, and he was right to."
Cutter stood there.
"And Prentice," Burner said. "And Hobbes."
"Yes."
"You want to come in here."
"I don't know what I want," Cutter said. "I want to stop being out there. That's the only true thing I've got and I've had four months on it."
Burner looked at him a long moment.
"There's seventy people behind that fence," he said. "Four graves outside it. Three of them are yours. If you come in, they'll vote on you, and I'll tell you right now that I don't know which way it goes, and neither does anybody else, and it might take a week."
"All right."
"And if the vote goes against you, you walk back out."
"All right."
"And if you ever raise a hand to anybody here, there will not be a second conversation."
"All right," Cutter said.
Burner turned and looked back at the fence.
Halloran was standing at the gate with his hands at his sides. Sparrow was beside him with his burned hand against his chest, absolutely white. Weathers. Neve. Ferris, whose face was a thing Burner would remember for the rest of his life.
And behind them, halfway across the yard, Shyla, with one hand on Yak's collar, watching.
"Come in," Burner said. "Leave the rifle where it is."
Cutter walked through the gate on the nineteenth of February, and seventy people watched him do it, and nobody said a word.
The vote took nine days and Burner was not sure of the outcome until the last hour.
But that was later.
That night, with the man locked in the north bay of the shop frame with four people awake and Nate's own chain and ring set into the concrete, Burner went out and stood at the fence in the dark and looked north.
Shyla came out and stood beside him.
"Is it over?" she said.
Burner thought about ninety places in a notebook, and a valley with maybe two hundred people left alive in it, and spring coming in five weeks, and seventy-two people who had voted four ways in a basin and had held anyway.
"No," he said.
"Good," she said.
He looked down at her.
"Why good?"
"Because if it was over," Shyla said, "there'd be nothing to do."