Chapter 17 #4
nineteen from a camp east that nobody in the yard had even met until March.
By the evening of the third day there were two hundred and eleven people in the maintenance yard, and there was not room for a quarter of them to sleep under a roof, and it did not matter because it was August.
Weathers cooked for two hundred people with eleven helpers and did not complain once, which everybody agreed was the true sign of a miracle.
Burner sat on a drum by the gate and watched them arrive and did almost nothing at all for four days except answer questions, and by the second evening he understood that this was the actual work and that he had spent two years thinking it was something else.
An old woman from the ranger station sat down next to him on the third night.
"You're the one from the grass," she said.
"That's a name that's got away from me a bit."
"It's got all the way to Idaho," she said. "There's a man came through us in June who'd heard it at a place near Salmon."
Burner stared at her.
"That's three hundred miles."
"People walk," she said.
They went on the seventeenth of August.
Two hundred and eleven people walked twenty-two miles in two days, and among them were nineteen children and four people on crutches and one woman of seventy-eight who would not be left behind and who was carried the last four miles by six people taking turns.
Burner walked it with a stick and it took him everything he had.
They came up the creek drainage below the church on the morning of the nineteenth, and they came up it in the open, in daylight, in a line across four hundred yards of grass.
Burner stood at the front with Halloran and Neve and Sparrow, and nobody in that entire line carried a rifle where it could be seen except nine people, and those nine were at the back on a rise a quarter mile off with Delacroix, and that was the whole of the arrangement.
At three hundred yards the line stopped.
Nothing happened for eleven minutes.
Then a man came out of the church door and stood on the steps.
He was not what Burner had expected, which was a thing he had stopped being surprised by. He was about fifty, heavy through the shoulders, with a gray beard cut square, and he had a pistol on his hip and he did not draw it.
He stood on the steps and looked at two hundred and eleven people standing in a field.
Burner went forward alone.
It took him a long time, because of the stick, and the whole field watched him do it, and he was aware that walking three hundred yards badly in front of two hundred people was a more useful thing than anything he could have said.
He stopped at forty feet.
"You wanted me," he said.
Stale looked at him. Then past him, at the field.
"What is this," he said.
"It's the valley."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the whole answer," Burner said. "There's two hundred and eleven people in that line and they're from nine camps and every one of those camps knows the other eight by name. There's four of them you've taken food from. There's one you killed a man at in June.
They all talked to each other about it inside of a week, every time, and that is the only thing I came here to tell you."
Stale's jaw worked.
"I've got eleven people in this building."
"Yes."
"I can start on them right now."
"Yes," Burner said. "And there's two hundred witnesses in that field and there's nine camps behind them and there are people in Idaho who have heard of this valley, and if you do that, there is nowhere in four hundred miles that will take you or any man standing behind you, ever,
for the rest of your lives."
He let that sit.
"I'd like you to notice that I'm not threatening you," he said. "I've got nine rifles on that rise and you've got nine men and if it comes to shooting, a lot of people in this field die and you die too and none of that helps the eleven in your building. I'm not here to beat you."
"Then what?"
"I'm here to tell you what this place is now," Burner said, "because you came here from somewhere that isn't like this and you've been operating for fourteen months on an idea that stopped being true."
He shifted his weight on the stick.
"Two years ago there was a man in this valley who understood exactly one thing, which is that a camp is only takeable if it's alone," he said.
"He spent two years making sure nobody ever talked to anybody. He was very good at it. He was better at it than you are and he died in the snow eighteen months ago with nothing."
"And you killed him."
"No," Burner said. "That's what everybody thinks and it's wrong. He starved because there was nothing left to take, because every place he'd have taken it from was talking to every other place. That's all that happened. That's the only thing that ever happened."
Stale stood on the steps for a long time.
"And what's your offer," he said.
"There isn't one."
"Everybody's got an offer."
"He did," Burner said. "He had terms and schedules and a notebook and he explained himself at every gate in this country, and it was all one thing dressed as another. I'm not going to do that to you."
"Then what happens?"
"You send out the eleven," Burner said. "And then you walk out, all nine of you, west, and every camp in this valley will know your faces by the end of the month. And if you come back and take from anybody, two hundred people will know inside four days, and they will not sell you food,
and they will not let you sleep, and there is no winter in this country that a man survives that way."
"That's a threat."
"It's a description," Burner said. "There's a difference and it took me two years to learn it and I'd rather you didn't have to."
Stale looked out at the field again.
"And if I don't?"
Burner was quiet for a moment.
"Then I'm going to walk back to that line," he said, "and we're going to sit down in this field. Two hundred people. And we're going to stay here, in the open, for as long as it takes, and every day more of us will come,
because the runners went out to eleven places and four of them haven't answered yet."
"You'd starve us out."
"We'd out-wait you," Burner said. "It's August. We've got a hundred and sixty acres of potatoes coming in nine weeks and you've got whatever's in that building."
He turned and started back.
"That's it?" Stale called.
Burner stopped and looked back over his shoulder, and he was aware, distantly, that he had learned this gesture from a man on a rock in the snow and that he had never managed to unlearn it.
"There's one more thing and it's not part of any of that," he said. "It's just true and I'd like it said."
"Say it."
"The old man you killed on the ninth. His name was Deering. He shot at my friend from a window two years ago and missed by nine feet and then shouted at us for twenty minutes, and then he walked twenty-six miles at seventy-one years old to look at a camp he didn't trust,
and he took eleven pounds of seed potatoes home and grew them."
Stale did not answer.
"Nobody in that field is going to forget his name," Burner said. "That's the thing you actually can't survive."
He walked back to the line.
It took eleven hours.
Two hundred and eleven people sat down in a field in the open in August and waited, and they built fires at dark and cooked, and somebody started singing at about ten at night and got shouted down and then started again quieter and was allowed.
Burner sat with his bad hip out in front of him and watched the church.
Shyla sat next to him, because she had walked twenty-two miles and been at the back of the line with the nine rifles and Delacroix and had not been allowed any further forward, and had said exactly one thing about it, which was, "Next year."
"He's not coming out," she said, around midnight.
"He might."
"He's been standing in that doorway for four hours."
"I know."
"What happens if he doesn't?"
"Then tomorrow there'll be more of us," Burner said, "and the day after there'll be more than that, and at some point one of his nine men will look at the field and do the sum."
At twenty past four in the morning, the church door opened.
Eleven people came out.
They came out slowly and in a line and they stopped on the steps as though waiting to be told to go further, and then somebody in the field shouted a name and one of the eleven started running, and then all of them were,
across three hundred yards of black grass toward two hundred people getting to their feet in the dark.
Burner could not stand up fast enough to see it properly.
He got up with the stick and by the time he was upright it had already become the thing it was going to be, which was two hundred people in a field at four in the morning making a sound he had not heard since before the lights went out.
Nine men walked out of the church an hour later.
They went west, on the old road, in the gray light, and they walked past the end of the line at about eighty yards, and two hundred and eleven people stood in silence and watched them go and nobody did anything at all.
Burner watched Stale walk past.
The man looked once, at the line, at the whole length of it, and Burner saw him do the thing that everybody did eventually, which was to try to count and give up.
They buried Deering properly the next morning, and the two others, and there were two hundred people at the funeral of an old man who had shouted at strangers from a churchyard.
Halloran said a few words and then said he had not known him, and asked if anyone had, and eleven people spoke.
On the walk home, Sparrow fell in beside Burner and matched his pace, which was slow.
"You didn't offer him anything," he said.
"No."
"Not a thing. No deal, no terms, no arrangement." Sparrow shook his head slowly. "I stood in front of eleven camps and gave every one of them a choice, and you stood in front of that man and gave him a description of reality and walked away."
"That's about right."
"Do you know that's the exact opposite of everything we ever did?"