Chapter 18 #4
She looked at Cutter, who was looking at the floor.
"He did what a man told him to do," she said. "For two years. And then that man died, and he had nothing, and he came to a camp and asked to be chained up, and then he asked to be unchained, and then he left because he couldn't work out how to be there."
She turned back to the room.
"I don't know if he's safe," she said. "Nobody does. But I know he's the only person I've ever heard of who did those things and then spent six years trying to work out what he is instead of building something to make it all right. The other one built a notebook. This one just went and split wood."
She sat down.
The vote was twenty-three to seventeen to let him stay, on conditions that took another hour to write down, and one of the conditions was that Ardith would write to the yard twice a year for as long as they both lived, and both of them did.
Afterward, in the dark, Cutter came out to where Burner was sitting on the fence rail.
He stood there a while.
"I don't know what to say," he said.
"You don't have to say anything."
"That girl."
"Her name's Shyla."
"I know her name," Cutter said. "I heard it in your yard for two years. She used to walk past the north bay."
"Yes."
"She never once looked at me like I was a thing."
Burner sat with that.
"No," he said. "She wouldn't."
Cutter stood in the cold.
"You could have said the other half first," he said.
"I said I'd say Oates first."
"You could have lied."
"I've spent six years learning what happens to people who decide what other people ought to know," Burner said. "I'd rather be the other thing."
They left on the seventh of December and it took eleven days going back because the weather closed in, and they came into the yard on the eighteenth in the dark with four inches of snow on them.
Neve had the meeting the next morning and they told it all, exactly, including the vote count and the conditions and Shyla's speech, which Shyla refused to repeat and which Sable repeated for her from memory almost word for word.
Then Neve said, "Was it the right thing?"
And ninety-six people argued about it for two hours and did not reach a conclusion, and Neve closed the meeting by saying that not reaching a conclusion was allowed and was in fact the correct outcome about a third of the time,
and that anybody who wanted certainty was welcome to go and find a man with a notebook.
That night Burner sat by the stove in the block building with his leg out and his stick against the wall.
Shyla came and sat down on the floor with her back against the drum, where she had sat since she was nine, though she barely fit under his elbow now.
"Ardith'll write in June," she said.
"She will."
"And it'll say he's fine."
"Probably."
"And then she'll write in December and it'll say he's fine, and that'll happen for about twenty years and then one of them will die." Shyla turned the stick in her hands, an old habit. "And that's it. That's the end of the story and nobody will ever know if we were right."
"Yes."
"That's awful."
"It's the best ending there is," Burner said.
She tipped her head back and looked at him.
"Say why."
"Because the other kind of ending is the kind where you find out," he said. "You only find out when something happens. Every single time in my life I have found out whether a decision was right, it was because somebody died."
Shyla thought about that for a while.
"So not knowing is good."
"Not knowing is what peace is," Burner said. "That's the whole of it. Peace is a great many people not finding out whether they were right about each other."
The stove ticked.
"I'm going to run the west route in the spring," Shyla said.
"I know."
"You said next year, last year. It's next year."
"I know that too."
"Are you going to fight about it?"
Burner looked at the fire for a long moment.
"No," he said.
"Really?"
"I'm going to hate every one of the nineteen days and I'm going to be standing at that gate on the twentieth," he said, "and I am not going to say one word against it,
because you're fifteen in May and you're better at it than four of the adults and because a man who holds onto a thing past its time is the whole of what's wrong with everything."
Shyla was quiet.
"That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," she said.
"It was meant to be awful."
"It's both," she said.
In February a runner came in from the east with something nobody had seen in six years.
It was a piece of paper, printed, not written, on a hand press somebody had got working two hundred miles away, and it had a list on it of eleven settlements and a date in July and four lines about a meeting.
Burner held it under the lamp for a long time.
"What is it?" Neve said.
"I think," Burner said slowly, "it's somebody trying to do what we did, over a much bigger piece of ground."
He put it down on the bench.
"And they've put it in writing," he said, "and sent it to people they've never met, and signed it with a place and not a name."
Neve picked it up and read it twice.
"July," she said. "That's five months. It's a hundred and ninety miles."
"Yes."
She set it down and looked at him, and Burner knew what was coming about a second before it came, and found that he had been waiting for it for about two years.
"You'll have to go," Neve said.