Chapter 17 #3
And on the eleventh of August, in the second summer, a runner came in from the west at four in the afternoon with a message that took the whole camp apart in about a minute.
Stale's people had taken the church camp.
Not raided it. Taken it. They had walked in on the ninth with nine men and they had killed the old man and two others and they were still there, three days later, sitting in it.
And they had eleven people alive in the building.
And nailed to the door, the runner said, where anybody coming up the creek could see it, was a strip of canvas with two words on it in charcoal.
It said: SEND BURNER.
The meeting started at five and ran until two in the morning, and it was the worst one the camp ever had, worse than the basin, worse than the vote on Halstead.
Burner said almost nothing for the first four hours.
He sat on a drum at the edge of the shop frame with the stick across his knees and listened, and what he heard was ninety-six people discovering that they had become the place other people send for.
"He wants Burner," Ferris said. "That's the entire message. Two words."
"That's not an offer," Halloran said. "There's no terms in it. There's no if and no then. It's a name on a door."
"Then what is it?"
"It's bait," Delacroix said.
She had said perhaps forty things in front of the camp in two years and every one of them landed like a dropped stone.
"He's killed three people at a camp he doesn't need, twenty-two miles from here, in a place with no food in it in August," she said. "He didn't go there to take anything. He went there because it's the closest thing to us that isn't us."
"So he wants the yard."
"He wants the yard, or he wants us out in the open walking toward him, and either way the eleven people in that building are what he's using to get it."
"Then we don't go," somebody said.
And that was the thing that split the room.
Burner listened to it for another hour.
He heard a woman say that eleven people at a church twenty-two miles away were not worth nine of their own, and he heard four people shout her down, and then he heard her stand up and say it again, better,
and he watched about twenty people realize that she was making the same argument Teague had made in a long hall two years ago and that Teague had been right to make it.
Teague was dead now. He had died in the winter of the second year, of the leg wounds he took at the well, eleven weeks after they healed, of something Weathers said started in the marrow.
Burner thought about him for a while.
At nine o'clock Sparrow stood up.
"I've got something and you're all going to hate it," he said.
"Say it," Halloran said.
"He knows the name Burner because somebody told him," Sparrow said. "That's the only way. He came out of the northwest fourteen months ago and there is nothing in this valley that would have taught him that name except a person."
The shop frame went quiet.
"Say the rest," Burner said. It was the first thing he had said in four hours.
"There's four camps west of the crossing that we've been running seed and salt to since last November," Sparrow said. "And there's about forty people in them who know exactly who you are, where you sleep, that you walk with a stick, and how many rounds this camp has."
"You think somebody sold us."
"I think somebody was asked at knifepoint and answered," Sparrow said. "Which is not the same thing at all and I want to be careful about that, because if this camp starts talking about betrayal we'll lose every single one of those four camps inside a month and that's probably what he wants."
Nate said, "Or somebody in here."
"Or somebody in here," Sparrow agreed.
Nobody looked at the north bay. Burner noticed everybody not looking at it.
"Cutter's been off the chain six months," he said. "He's been outside that fence about eleven times, always with somebody, and he's had four hundred chances to walk and hasn't. If anybody in this room wants to say the thing, say it now and out loud and let him answer it."
Nobody did.
"Then we're done with that," Halloran said. "Not because it's impossible. Because we're not going to run a camp on suspicion we can't test."
At eleven o'clock Burner got up.
He did it slowly, with the stick, and it took him a moment, and ninety-six people waited.
"I'm going to tell you what I want," he said. "And then I want everybody in this room to understand that what I want is the single worst reason to decide anything, and that I know it, and that I've been sitting on this drum for six hours making myself say it that way."
He leaned on the stick.
"I want to go," he said.
Nobody moved.
"Not because it would work. Because there's a strip of canvas on a door with my name on it, and there have been eleven people in that building for three days, and every hour I sit here I can feel the shape of the man I'd have to become to be all right with that."
He looked around at them.
"And that's exactly the feeling that Halstead spent two years installing in people," he said.
"That's the mechanism. Somebody puts a name on a door and suddenly one man's private sense of himself is the thing deciding what ninety-six people do. That's how it always goes wrong. That's how it went wrong for him."
"So you're saying don't go," Ferris said.
"I'm saying I am the worst possible person to be listened to on this question," Burner said, "and I'd like to say my piece and then sit down and not speak again, and I'd like the rest of you to argue it out as though I weren't in the room."
He took a breath.
"Here's the piece. We've got ninety-six people and about six hundred rounds and nine rifles that matter. He's got nine men in a clapboard building with eleven hostages and twenty-two miles of country between us. Everything about that is bad."
"And?"
"And the one thing we have that he does not understand is that there are four hundred people in this valley who are in contact with each other," Burner said.
"He came here from somewhere that isn't like that. He's operating the way everybody operated in the first year, which is that a place is alone and a place can be taken and nobody will ever know."
He sat down on the drum.
"That's all I've got," he said. "And I've got no plan attached to it and I want that said plainly. I've been wrong five times in two years and every single time it was when I was certain."
They argued until two in the morning.
At two, Neve said, "I want to try something and I want a vote on it tonight because every hour costs eleven people."
"Say it."
"Send runners," she said. "Not to him. To everybody."
She was standing on a crate at the back with her arms folded, twenty-two years old, and there was not a person in that room who did not stop to listen when she talked now.
"Nine camps," she said. "Everybody we're in contact with. Every one of them gets a runner tonight and the message is the same four sentences: Stale has taken the church. He has eleven people. He has asked for one man by name.
We are not sending him and we are not attacking and here is what we are asking you for."
"Which is what?"
"People," Neve said. "Not fighters. People. Everybody who can walk twenty-two miles and stand in a field."
The shop frame went absolutely silent.
"Say that again," Halloran said.
"He's got nine men," Neve said. "He is operating on the belief that a place is alone. So we take that away from him. I want two hundred people standing in the open ground below that church at first light in four days, in a line,
and I want about nine of them to have rifles and I want the other hundred and ninety to have nothing at all."
"That's the most insane thing I have ever heard," somebody said.
"Probably."
"He'll shoot them."
"He's got nine men and maybe two hundred rounds," Neve said. "How many can he shoot?"
Burner sat very still on his drum and felt something go through him like cold water.
"Say the whole thing," he said quietly.
Neve turned to him.
"He's got eleven hostages because he thinks hostages work," she said.
"They work when there's one camp and it's small and it's scared. They don't work when the entire valley is standing in the field looking at him, because then he's nine men in a wooden building surrounded by two hundred people who all know each other's names,
and there is nowhere for him to go and nothing for him to trade and no way for any of it to be secret."
"And when he shoots the first one?"
"Then he's shot somebody in front of two hundred witnesses from nine camps," Neve said, "and there will not be a place in this valley that will take his men in for the next twenty years, and every one of those nine men knows what that means better than he does."
Sparrow made a sound.
Everybody looked at him.
"That's it," he said. His burned hand had come up to his mouth.
"That's the thing. That's what Halstead was terrified of. That's why he sent me to eleven camps one at a time instead of ever letting two of them talk. That's the whole of it.
That's the only thing we were ever afraid of and I never once said it out loud because I didn't let myself finish the thought."
"Would it work?" Halloran said.
"I don't know," Sparrow said. "I know it's the only thing I ever saw that would have worked on us."
They voted at three in the morning.
Eighty-one to fourteen with one abstention, and it was the largest majority the camp had ever recorded on anything that mattered.
Nine runners went out before dawn.
Priest went west. Sable went northwest to the two creek families. Shyla, who was eleven now, went to the nearest camp with two adults, four miles, and was furious about the escort and went anyway.
They had four days.
It was the strangest four days of Burner's life and he spent almost all of it sitting down.
People came in.
They came in ones and twos and then in groups, all through the second and third day, up the old state route and across the burned acres that were now a hundred and sixty acres of potatoes and barley: fourteen from the ranger station, nine from the creek,