Chapter 19 #4
"I drew that revolver before I knew I was doing it," he said. "Six years of carrying it in the same place and eleven hundred draws in the dark, and my hand went for it without one thought passing through my head. And it was the right thing, this time, at nine feet."
He looked at her.
"But that's what I am now," he said. "That's a body that's been built into one shape for six years. And I'm forty-one and my hip's ruined and my hands went for a gun in a crowd of four hundred and sixty people before my brain did,
and there is going to come a night when that's the wrong answer and somebody's dead because I was fast."
Shyla thought about it.
"That's a good reason," she said.
"Is it?"
"It's an honest one." She pulled her knees up. "Which is nearly the same. You told me that once."
"I did."
"Who does the routes?"
"You do," Burner said. "And Priest, and Sable while her knees hold, and the sixteen people I've taught and the sixteen I'll teach this winter, and in about eleven years there'll be forty people doing it and nobody will remember it was ever one man with a stick."
Shyla was quiet for a long moment.
"That's what she wanted," she said.
"I know."
They came into the yard on the first of August.
Somebody on the north wall saw them at four miles and by the time they reached the gate there were ninety-six people standing in the burned ground in front of it, because eleven of them had already counted the party and got ten.
Halloran came out first.
He was sixty-one now and he walked slowly and he stopped about fifteen feet away and looked at all of them and then at the ground, and Burner watched him work it out and there was nothing to be done about it at all.
"Say it," Halloran said.
Burner said it.
He said it in the open in front of everybody, all of it, in order, without softening one line, because that was the thing this camp had been built on and because Neve had run four hundred meetings on that exact principle and he was not going to break it at her own.
It took eleven minutes.
When he finished, Halloran stood there with his hands at his sides and did not move for a long time.
Then he said, "It was right that she went."
"It was."
"I want that said now, tonight, before anybody has three days to think about it."
Halloran turned around and raised his voice so the whole yard could hear him.
"She made the argument herself in March and it was the best one in the room and every single person here agreed with it, and I'm not going to stand in this yard and watch ninety-six people spend a year deciding it was a mistake."
Nobody said anything.
"She was right," Halloran said, "and she's dead, and both of those are true at once, and that's the whole of what this is."
He walked back inside.
He was not seen for two days and nobody went to get him, and on the third morning he came out and started arguing with Otway about cellar allocation, which everybody understood.
The four agreements went up on the wall of the school in September.
Shyla put them there, in Bosworth's printing, framed under a sheet of greenhouse glass, and under them she put the nine principles that Burner had taught for four winters, and at the bottom of those, the last one, in her own hand.
The thing that beats a bad man is not a better man. It's that everybody talks to everybody.
Ardith's letter came in December, as it had every June and December for four years.
It said the winter was hard and that they had lost a woman of eighty to a fall, and that the wood was in, and that Hollis was well and that the boy Tam, who was now eleven, had been taught to split properly and was good at it.
Burner read it twice and put it in the box with the other seven.
That winter he taught nineteen people instead of sixteen and it was the best class he ever had, and one of them was a girl of thirteen from the creek camp who was so much better than everybody else that he made her stand at the back and help,
and she ran the west route at nineteen and the whole system at thirty-one.
And in February, a runner came in from the east with a piece of paper.
It was printed, on Bosworth's press, and it had a list on it of forty-four settlements and a date in July, and four lines about a meeting.
At the bottom it said: SECOND YEAR.
Shyla brought it to him in the block building where he was sitting by the stove with his bad leg out.
He held it under the lamp for a long time.
"Forty-four," he said.
"Forty-four."
"There were thirty-one."
"I know." Shyla sat down on the floor with her back against the drum, where she had sat since she was nine, and where she still sat at sixteen even though she no longer fit under his elbow at all. "Eleven of the new ones came in because somebody walked to them. That's in the letter."
Burner set the paper down on the bench.
"Are you going?" he said.
"Yes."
"Good."
"You're not."
"No."
Shyla looked up at him.
"Say why," she said. "Properly. Not the thing about your hands."
Burner looked at the stove for a while.
"Because if I go," he said, "there'll be four hundred people at that siding and about a hundred and fifty of them will know my name, and I will be the man who was on the mountain and lit the fire and held the well. And they will look at me and wait,
and that is exactly the shape that everything goes wrong in."
"And if I go?"
"They'll look at a sixteen year old who runs the west route," Burner said, "and they'll have to listen to what you actually say."
Shyla was quiet.
"That's the real reason," she said.
"That's the real reason."
She tipped her head back against the drum.
"I'll tell them there were four hundred and sixty," she said.
"Tell them there were thirty-one places," Burner said, "and now there's forty-four, and that's what she died in the middle of doing."
"I know."
"I know you know."
The stove ticked.
"Burner," Shyla said.
"Yes."
"When I come back in August."
"Yes."
"Will you still be here?"
He looked down at her, at sixteen years old, at a girl who had crawled out of a pile of deadfall in a spruce clearing with spruce needles in her hair and had not made one sound for two days.
"I'll be at the gate," he said.