Chapter 18
They got the potatoes in.
A hundred and sixty acres in twenty-six days, with people coming from four camps to help and going home with a share, and by the end of September there were eleven root cellars in that valley with something in them and a written record of who was owed what,
kept by a woman from the ranger station who had been an accountant and who had wept the first time somebody asked her to do something she was good at.
It was the first winter in three years that nobody planned around starving.
That was the year things got easier, and Burner came to understand something about easier that he had not expected, which was that it did not make people calmer. It made them argumentative.
Nobody argues about the allocation of firewood when there is a truck coming. The winter of the third year, ninety-six people in a maintenance yard argued about nearly everything, and Halloran aged visibly, and the camp discovered that peace has its own kind of grinding.
They argued about the school.
They argued about whether the western camps should get seed at the same rate as the eastern ones when the eastern ones sent more people to the harvest.
They argued for eleven days about a dog that bit a child, which was not Yak, and which was put down in the end, and about which three families did not speak to each other until spring.
Burner sat through all of it and said almost nothing.
"You're quiet," Halloran said, in February.
"I'm no use on any of it."
"That's not it."
"No," Burner admitted. "It isn't."
"Then what?"
Burner turned his cup in his hands.
"I keep waiting for it to be serious," he said.
"Somebody stands up and argues about firewood for two hours and I sit there with my whole body telling me that it doesn't matter, that we should get on to the real thing. And there isn't a real thing. This is it. This is what we were doing all of it for."
Halloran nodded slowly.
"It took me about a year to come down off the first one," he said.
"Off what?"
"July, two years back. The girl. Neve." Halloran looked at the stove. "For about eleven months after that I couldn't sit in a room where people were being ordinary. It felt like a lie. It felt like everybody had agreed to pretend."
"What fixed it?"
"Nothing fixed it. It wore off." Halloran shrugged. "One day I was arguing about a fence post and I noticed I actually cared about the fence post. That's all it was."
Burner thought about that for a long time afterward.
Cutter left in March.
He did it without telling anybody, which was not the same as running, because he left everything he had been given and took only a coat and three days of food, and left a piece of canvas on the tool bench in the north bay.
It said: I DON NO HOW TO BE HERE. I AM GOING TO TRY SOMWHERE THAT DON NO ME.
Burner read it standing in the north bay with the morning light coming through the drums.
They had a meeting about whether to go after him and it went ninety minutes and the vote was fifty-nine to thirty-one to let him go, and Ferris, who had voted against him every single time for two years, was one of the fifty-nine.
"Say why," Halloran asked him, afterward, not unkindly.
"Because he's spent two years in this camp doing what he was told and not one single person ever asked him what he wanted," Ferris said. "And then he wanted something, and it was to leave, and I'm not going to be the man who says no to the first thing he ever asked for."
Sparrow took it hardest.
Burner found him at the fence line that evening looking west and stood beside him a while.
"I taught him to write his name," Sparrow said.
"I know."
"Ninety words. That's all he ever had. And he used about eleven of them to explain himself and I don't think he's ever explained himself in his life."
"No."
Sparrow rubbed his face with his good hand.
"He'll do something terrible," he said. "Somewhere. Won't he."
Burner did not answer for a while.
"He might," he said. "Or he'll sit down in a camp somewhere and split wood for eleven years and nobody will ever know what he was. I've thought about it a great deal and I honestly don't know which, and I've decided that not knowing is the price of not chaining him."
"That's a very comfortable thing to say."
"It's not comfortable at all," Burner said. "It's the least comfortable thing I've ever agreed to."
In April, Yak died.
He went the way old dogs go, slowly and then quickly, and he was thirteen or fourteen and had been a fat gray thing on a breeder's floor outside Missoula in a world with electricity in it.
He stopped eating on the ninth of April.
Burner sat with him for two days on a blanket in the corner of the block building, and on the second night Shyla came and sat down on the other side of the dog and did not say anything, and the three of them stayed like that until about four in the morning,
when Yak put his head down and stopped breathing.
Shyla cried for a long time.
Burner did not, that night. He did it about eleven days later, alone, out at the fence line at dusk, for approximately ninety seconds, and then stopped and went back in and nobody ever knew.
They buried him outside the wire, past the graves, under a slab that Pike cut without being asked.
"He heard them first," Shyla said, at the grave. "Every single time. At your camp, and at the bench, and the first night at the woodpile."
"Yes."
"He's the reason I'm alive."
Burner looked at the flat stone.
"He's the reason we both are," he said.
That summer was the good one.
Burner thought of it that way for the rest of his life, the fourth summer, the one where nothing came.
Two hundred and forty acres. Eleven camps in regular contact and three more in occasional. A trail system with marked caches and eight people who ran it and a rough agreement about salt that took four months to negotiate and held for twenty years.
Neve got the school onto a proper footing with nineteen children in it full time and eleven more part time, and she started something that nobody had thought of, which was writing things down.
Not a notebook of names. The other thing.
She had four adults who had been engineers and mechanics and a nurse and a schoolteacher sit down and write out what they knew, in plain words, in school exercise books scavenged out of a burned building, and she made the older children copy them by hand as writing practice,
which produced four copies of everything and put them in four different camps.
Burner watched that happen and understood it was more important than anything he had ever done.
Priest married the girl from the ranger station in August. He was nineteen. There were two hundred people at it and it lasted two days and somebody made the terrible beer again.
Delacroix taught eleven people to shoot that year and none of them ever had to.
And in September, Halloran said he was done.
He said it in a meeting, without warning, in the middle of a discussion about cellar allocation.
"I'd like to stop," he said.
The room went quiet.
"Not leave. Stop doing this." He put the slate down on the bench.
"I've stood up in front of this camp four hundred times in four years and I've read out every vote we've ever taken and I've carried all of it, and about three weeks ago I noticed that I've started being angry at people for disagreeing with me."
He looked around at ninety-six people.
"That's the sign," he said. "I've watched two men in this valley go past that sign and I'm not going to be the third."
They argued with him for two hours and he let them and did not change his mind.
Then somebody said, "Well then who?"
And that was the beginning of the worst month the camp had since the winter.
Everybody assumed it would be Burner.
That was the thing he had not prepared for at all, and it came at him from every direction in the first week, and he spent eleven days saying no in increasingly plain terms until finally he had to stand up in a meeting and explain it properly.
"I'm going to say this once and then I'm going to say it the same way every time it comes up," he said.
Ninety-six people looked at him.
"I'm the man who lit a mountain on fire with twelve people inside the burn," he said. "I'm the man who sent a burned man into a yard. I'm the man who walked Halstead to the gate after a thirty-five to thirty-three vote and then dug the grave of the person it killed."
Nobody moved.
"Every single one of those was the right call as far as I could see it at the time, and two of them were wrong, and the reason this camp survived is that there was always somebody standing next to me who could say no," he said.
"That was Halloran. For four years, that was Halloran, and half of you have never once thought about it because it doesn't look like anything from outside."
He leaned on the stick.
"If you put me in that job," he said, "there is nobody left to say no to me. And I'd like you all to consider what I'm actually good at, which is deciding things fast when people are dying. That's a genuine skill. It is the single most dangerous skill a man can have in a camp where nobody's dying."
He sat down.
They elected Neve in October.
She was twenty-three years old and she had spent three months in a block building in a yard and eleven of the ninety-six people voted against her and she got up on a drum and thanked every one of them by name for voting honestly, which was a thing nobody had ever done,
and which ended the argument entirely.
Halloran cried a little afterward, which he denied.
Burner went back to what he was actually for.
That winter he ran the notebook work and the trail system and the caches, and he taught, and he discovered that teaching was the thing he should have been doing all along.
He took sixteen people that winter and taught them what he knew.
Not shooting. Delacroix did shooting. Burner taught the other thing, the thing he had learned lying in frozen grass above a road while four men looked up a slope at him,