Chapter 19 #3
"That's what I can't get past. Everything else had a shape. Halstead had a reason. Cutter had orders. Even Stale was doing something, he was being what he was. This was nothing. This was three men shouting about I don't know what and one of them had a thing he'd sharpened on a wheel."
"I know."
"I want it to be about something," Burner said.
"I know you do."
He took his hands down and his face was wrecked.
"That's the whole of my life," he said. "Six years. Work out what it's about, find the mechanism, take the mechanism apart. And I have just watched the best of us die for no mechanism whatsoever and I do not know how to be a person in a world where that happens."
Sparrow spoke for the first time.
"Neither does anybody," he said.
Burner looked at him.
"That's it," Sparrow said. "That's the whole answer and I've had six years on it. Nobody knows how. Everybody's just doing the next thing until it stops hurting like that and starts hurting the other way."
They sat.
Somebody came and put a blanket around Burner's shoulders and he did not see who.
At about two in the morning the encampment had gone almost entirely quiet, and a woman came and sat down on the crate beside him.
She was about sixty. Small, square, gray hair cut short with what looked like a knife, and she had a face like a piece of weathered board.
She did not say anything for a while.
"I'm Henrietta," she said eventually.
"Burner."
"I know who you are. Everybody here knows who you are." She had a tin cup which she handed to him and which turned out to have whiskey in it, actual whiskey, the first he had tasted in six years. "Drink that. All of it."
He drank it.
"I came down with the Crossing people," she said. "Nine of us. We're four days east of here."
"I don't know it."
"You wouldn't. There's forty-one of us and we've got no notebook and nobody's ever written us down." She took the cup back. "I heard her speak yesterday afternoon."
Burner did not say anything.
"I've been alive sixty-two years," Henrietta said, "and I have heard a great deal of talking, and that was the best twenty minutes of it."
"She wrote it on the road," Burner said. "Four days out. On the back of a seed list."
"Of course she did."
They sat.
"My husband died in the second winter," Henrietta said. "Not to anybody. He got a cut on his hand on a piece of tin and it went bad and there was nothing and nobody and he was dead in eleven days, and he was fifty-eight and he had never hurt one person in his life."
Burner turned his head.
"And I spent about two years doing exactly what you're doing right now," she said. "Which is looking for the sense in it. And there isn't any, and I want to tell you the one thing I actually learned, because everybody told me a great many things and eleven of them were useless."
"Say it."
"The sense isn't in the death," Henrietta said. "There's never any in the death. It's all in what was happening beforehand, and you were standing right in the middle of that and so was she, and there was a great deal of it."
Burner put his face in his hands again.
"Four hundred agreements got carried out of here this afternoon in five directions," Henrietta said. "She did that. That's what she was doing when it happened. She wasn't doing anything else."
He sat there a long time.
Then he did something that he never afterward entirely explained to anybody, including himself.
He reached across his body and undid the crossdraw rig and took the Rhino out of it.
He held it in both hands and looked at it.
Flat sided, hexagonal cylinder, all wrong angles, the strangest looking handgun he had ever owned and the only one he had ever loved.
He had carried it every single day for six years.
He had killed three men with it and one of them forty minutes ago at nine feet.
He turned it around and held it out to her, butt first.
Henrietta looked at it.
"No," she said.
"Take it."
"I've got a shotgun."
"Take this and protect yourself with it," Burner said.
She did not move.
"There are forty-one of you four days east and nobody's ever written you down and nobody knows you're there," he said.
"And there are men who want to kill you. Not tonight and maybe not this year, but there are, and there always will be, and every single person at this siding found that out again about three hours ago."
Henrietta took it.
She took it properly, with her hand off the trigger, which told him something.
"That gun is loaded with full-power .357 Magnum jacketed hollow points," Burner said.
"Eighteen more in the slide on that belt and there'll be no more made in your lifetime so use them like they're gold. It fires out of the bottom chamber, which is why the barrel sits in line with your hand, which means it won't break your wrist the way any other snub .357 will."
"All right."
"You can put a man dead on the ground with one shot," he said. "I want you to hear that, because there's people who'll tell you a handgun's no good and they're wrong, and at across-a-room distance that round will finish anything that walks."
He looked at her.
"I always put two or three rounds in a man just to be sure," he said. "Every single time. Because a man who's been hit once can still swing, and I watched that happen tonight in front of me and I could not draw fast enough."
Henrietta held the revolver in both hands.
"That's what this is," she said.
"Yes."
"You're giving me your gun because you were nine feet away and forty minutes too slow."
"Yes," Burner said.
"That's not a good reason."
"No," he said. "It isn't. It's the worst reason there is and I've got nothing else tonight and I'd rather you had it than I did."
Henrietta sat with it in her lap for a long moment.
Then she put it inside her coat.
"Then I'll take it," she said, "and I'll tell forty-one people where it came from, and when I die it'll go to somebody and they'll be told too."
"That's more than it deserves."
"That's exactly what it deserves," Henrietta said. "That's what everything in this world is now. A thing and a story about the thing, and if the story goes, the thing's just metal."
She got up.
"Sixty-two years," she said. "I'll tell you the other thing I learned and then I'll leave you alone. You will not process it. That's the wrong word and somebody's sold it to you. You'll carry it. It'll get no lighter and you'll get stronger,
and one day about four years from now you'll be doing something ordinary and you'll notice you're carrying it without setting your feet."
She walked off into the dark.
They buried Neve at the Junction.
That was Shyla's decision and Burner did not argue with it for one second, because she stood up on the second morning in front of the people who were still there and said it in about eleven words.
"She was twenty-five and she'd only ever been in two places," Shyla said, "and one of them was a room she didn't choose. Let her be somewhere she picked."
Bosworth gave the ground. Three hundred people were still at the siding and every one of them came.
Pike was not there to cut a stone, so a man from the north camp who had been a monumental mason in another life did it in two days on a piece of granite from the rail bed, and Shyla gave him the words.
NEVE
SHE CAME OUT OF THE BUILDING AND BUILT A SCHOOL
There was no date, because nobody knew when she was born.
Burner spoke at the grave and got about nine words out and could not continue, and stood there for a while with his hand on the stone, and then Sparrow put a hand on his shoulder and walked him back, and nobody in three hundred people thought any less of him for it.
Shyla spoke instead.
She spoke for six minutes without notes and she did not cry once, and she told them about a nineteen year old in a back room who had been in there for three months while a man in a canvas coat ate at a table forty feet away, and about what that woman had built in six years afterward.
And she finished with the thing that got printed.
"The last thing she said was tell them there were four hundred and sixty," Shyla said.
"She didn't mean us. She meant that it was possible. She meant that four hundred and sixty people from thirty-one places stood in a field and nobody made them and nobody paid them and nobody was afraid of anybody."
She looked out at them.
"She got stabbed by a man with a sword off somebody's wall and she died in the dirt at a rail siding," Shyla said.
"And there is no meaning in that and I'm not going to pretend there is. But she spent the last afternoon of her life getting four hundred pieces of paper printed and sent out in five directions, and those are gone now, and you cannot get them back,
and that is what she did with her twenty-five years."
Bosworth printed that too.
They started home on the tenth of July.
It took twenty-two days because Burner's hip was bad and because nobody was in a hurry, and they walked most of it in something that was not quite silence.
On the ninth night Shyla came and sat down next to him at the fire.
"You've been doing it again," she said.
"Doing what?"
"Deciding things. In your head. You've been eleven days deciding something and you haven't said it."
Burner turned the stick in his hands.
"I'm going to stop," he said.
"Stop what?"
"All of it. The routes, the caches, the notebook work. I'll teach for as long as anybody wants me to and I'll sit in a blind and shoot deer and I'll answer any question anybody asks me." He looked at the fire. "But I'm not going to be a person who goes anymore."
Shyla was quiet.
"Because of Neve?"
"No." He shook his head. "Because of what I did at the fire."
"You shot a man who'd just"
"I know what I did," Burner said. "And it was correct and I'd do it again and I don't lose one minute of sleep over that man. That's not it."
"Then what?"
Burner sat with it for a while.