Chapter 18 #3
"Say that again," Halloran said from the back.
"They're going ninety miles. They'll be there in seven days and back in twenty and there's no runner fast enough to ask us anything. So we can either pretend to give them orders that will be useless the second they arrive, or we can pick four people we trust and say out loud that we trust them."
"And if they get it wrong?"
"Then they'll have got it wrong honestly and in the open," Neve said, "and they'll come back and tell us, and we'll have a meeting about it, and that's the entire system and it's the only thing that's ever worked."
She looked around.
"That's the thing Burner said four years ago and everybody thought was a speech," she said. "Everybody talks to everybody. It doesn't stop being true when it's inconvenient."
They picked Burner, Sparrow, Sable, and Shyla.
Burner objected to the last one for eleven minutes and lost, and what beat him was not Shyla and not Neve but Delacroix, who stood up and said nine words.
"She's fourteen and she's better than four of you."
They went on the twenty-fourth of November and it was the hardest travel Burner had done since his hip, ninety miles in country going into winter, and it took eight days because of him and he apologized twice and Sable told him to stop.
They came into the camp on the second of December.
It was a small place, four buildings around a spring in a fold of hills, and there were about forty people and eleven children and a woman named Ardith who had been a rancher for thirty years and who ran it in the sense that everybody did what she said.
She met them at the fence with two men and a rifle she did not raise.
"You're the yard," she said.
"We're the yard."
"You came fast."
"We came as fast as I can walk," Burner said.
They did it properly.
They sat in Ardith's building for four hours with eleven people from that camp and told them all of it, from the beginning, from a clearing with a tarp in it to a maintenance yard to a man on a rope beside a piece of cut steel.
Sparrow told the part about the two years. He did it the way he had done it in front of ninety-six people in the shop frame, plainly, with no defense offered, and by the end of it there were four people in that room who could not look at him.
Burner told the rest.
He told them about Oates. He told them the man's name and that he had grown potatoes and shouted at a meeting and been right. He told them about the chain and about the two years of splitting wood and about the vote that went thirty-seven to thirty-five.
And he told them about the canvas on the bench.
I DON NO HOW TO BE HERE. I AM GOING TO TRY SOMWHERE THAT DON NO ME.
Ardith sat with her hands flat on the table for a long time after he finished.
"Well," she said. "That's a great deal more than I wanted."
"I know."
"You could have come up here and said, that man killed three people, get rid of him, and been home by Christmas."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because it's your camp," Burner said, "and because a man who gives you half a story is deciding for you and pretending he isn't, and I've been on the receiving end of that from somebody who was very good at it."
Ardith looked at him.
"He's called Hollis here," she said.
"That's not his name."
"I know it isn't. Nobody's called what they were."
She rubbed her face. "He came in in September with frostbite in three toes and about eleven pounds of him left. We fed him. He's been on the woodlot since October and he's the best worker in this camp and I mean that literally, I could put four men on that lot and not get what he does."
"Does he talk?"
"Not a word he doesn't have to. He says please and thank you and he eats and he works." Ardith's jaw moved. "There's a boy of about seven follows him around the woodlot and he's never once been anything but patient with him and I have watched, because I watch everything."
Sparrow said, "That sounds right."
"Does it?"
"It sounds exactly right," Sparrow said. "That's what he was in the yard for two years. That's what he is. The other thing was a different set of instructions."
Ardith stood up.
"Then I want to know something and I want one of you to answer it straight," she said. "If I leave him on that woodlot, is somebody in this camp going to die?"
The room went quiet.
Burner took a long moment.
"I don't know," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one and I've had eight days of walking to find a better one."
He put both hands on the stick. "Here's what I can tell you. He did those things under orders from a man who is dead. In six years he has never once done anything violent on his own initiative, not in the shed, not on the chain, not off the chain, not in three years since.
Sparrow knew him for two years and says he did it the way a man shovels snow."
"That's meant to be reassuring?"
"No," Burner said. "It's meant to be accurate. The reason nobody can tell you what he'll do is that nobody has ever seen him with nothing telling him what to do. That's the entire problem with the man and it's why he left our camp, and he said so himself in nine words on a piece of canvas."
Ardith stood there.
"And if I turn him out in December," she said, "he dies."
"Probably."
"So you've walked ninety miles to hand me a choice between maybe and certainly."
"Yes," Burner said. "And I'm sorry, and I'd do it again, because you were going to find out eventually and this way you find out with all of it."
They talked to him the next morning.
Burner went out to the woodlot alone, at Ardith's insistence, because she said she was not having four armed strangers walk up on a man in her camp.
It was a cold clear morning and the lot was a half acre of stacked rounds and a chopping block and a man in a borrowed coat working a maul.
Burner came up the path with the stick and Cutter saw him at about sixty feet and stopped.
He stood there with the maul hanging from one hand.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
He looked better. That was the first thing. He had weight on him and his face had changed in a way Burner could not name, and he was still the same compact man with the flat face and the pale eyes.
"They told you," Cutter said.
"A woman heard you say a name in your sleep."
Cutter absorbed that.
"I didn't know I did that," he said.
"Most people don't."
He set the maul down, carefully, on the block, and stepped back from it, which was a thing he did not have to do and which Burner noticed.
"Are you here to take me?"
"No."
"Are you here to kill me?"
"No."
"Then what?"
Burner leaned on the stick.
"I've been trying to work that out for eight days," he said, "and I got it about four in the morning."
"Say it."
"I came to find out if it held," Burner said.
Cutter looked at him.
"If what held?"
"Three years ago you put a piece of canvas on a bench and said you were going to try somewhere that didn't know you," Burner said. "And I've thought about that every week since. And what I wanted, every single time I thought about it, was to find out that it had worked."
Cutter did not say anything for a long moment.
"It's the best three years of my life," he said.
"Is it."
"I get up. There's wood. I do the wood." His hands opened and closed. "Nobody asks me anything. Nobody tells me anything either but that's different, they just don't need to, because there's wood and I know what to do with it."
"And the boy?"
Cutter's face did something.
"Tam," he said. "He's seven. He talks the whole time. He asks about four hundred questions a day and about half of them I can't answer."
"What do you do?"
"I tell him I don't know."
Burner stood in the cold and felt something settle in him that had been standing up for three years.
"They're going to have a meeting," he said. "This afternoon. All forty of them. About you."
Cutter nodded slowly.
"Will they turn me out?"
"I don't know. It'll be close."
"Are you going to talk?"
"If they ask me to."
"What'll you say?"
Burner thought about it.
"That you killed a man called Oates in a shop frame in October six years ago," he said, "and that he grew potatoes and had a loud voice and was right about a woman called Hobbes. And that you sat on a chain for two years without complaining and worked,
and that when we took it off you didn't walk out the door for two hours, and that when you did leave you left everything you'd been given and wrote nine words to explain yourself and that it was the first thing you ever did on your own."
Cutter looked at the ground.
"That's more than I'd say," he said.
"I know."
"You'll say the Oates part first."
"Yes."
"Good," Cutter said.
They had the meeting at two in the afternoon and it went five hours.
Cutter sat in it. Ardith insisted. She said there would be no meeting in her camp about a man that the man was not in, and four people objected and she overruled all of them.
He sat on a bench at the side with his hands on his knees for five hours and did not speak once, and Burner watched him and understood that this was, for him, exactly the same as the chain.
The boy Tam was not there. Somebody had taken all eleven children out.
Burner spoke for eleven minutes and said what he had said he would say and put Oates first.
Sparrow spoke for thirty and it was worse than anything he had ever done in the shop frame, because these people did not know him and had no two years of watching him carry water one-handed to set against it,
and by the end of it there were people in that room looking at Sparrow with more horror than they looked at Cutter.
Shyla spoke.
Burner had not expected it and could not stop it and sat there with his hands on the stick while a fourteen year old stood up in front of forty strangers.
"I was nine when my parents were killed," she said. "It wasn't him. It was different men and they're all dead now and I don't know which ones did it and I never will."
The room was silent.
"I've thought about this more than anybody here," she said, "because it's the actual question of my whole life, and I've had five years on it."