Chapter 20
She went in June with eleven people and she was gone fifty-one days, and Burner stood at the gate on the fifty-second morning because somebody on the north wall had called it at four miles.
She came up the old state route at the front of a party of fourteen, because three had come back with her from a camp he had never heard of, and she was brown and thin and she had cut her hair off somewhere around the third week and it had not been done well.
She stopped in front of him.
"Forty-four became fifty-three," she said.
"At the meeting?"
"Nine more walked in during it. Two of them had come three hundred miles because somebody showed them a piece of paper in a market." She was trying not to grin and failing. "There were eleven hundred people, Burner."
He stood there with his stick.
"Say that again," he said.
"Eleven hundred."
He had to sit down on the drum by the gate, and she sat down next to him, and ninety-odd people stood around in the burned ground and waited, and neither of them said anything for about a minute.
"I told them," Shyla said.
"About her?"
"About all of it. I said her name first." She looked out at the acres. "And then I sat down, and a man from two hundred miles north stood up and said he'd carried one of the four agreements home last year and read it out at his own camp and they'd voted on it and put it on a wall."
Burner closed his eyes.
"That's it," he said. "That's the whole thing."
"I know."
"That's the entire thing, that's what it was all for, a man two hundred miles north reading a piece of paper out loud to people who've never heard of us."
"I know," Shyla said. "That's why I ran the last four miles."
That was the ninth year.
Burner lived a long time after it, which surprised a great many people including himself, and the shape of those years was so unlike the shape of the first six that he sometimes had trouble believing they belonged to the same man.
He taught.
Nineteen a winter, then twenty-four, then thirty when they built the second room onto the school in the eleventh year. He taught the nine principles and then eleven, because he added two more in his fifties and had the sense to know they were not as good as the first nine and taught them anyway.
He sat in a blind and shot deer and Weathers had been right, he killed more than he ever had climbing ridges.
He answered questions. That turned out to be most of it. People came from four valleys to ask him things, and he found, to his considerable discomfort, that he had become the man you went to see, and he handled it by never once giving anybody an answer without saying how sure he was of it and why.
"He'll tell you he doesn't know," a woman from the Crossing told her daughter once, in Burner's hearing. "That's the whole reason to walk four days."
Weathers died in the eleventh year at seventy-nine, in her sleep, having worked a full day.
There were six hundred people at the funeral and she would have hated every minute of it. Four of the women she had trained ran the clinic after her and two of them were better than she had been at the actual medicine and none of them were as good at telling people the truth on the first day.
Halloran died in the fourteenth year.
He went slowly, over about nine months, and he was lucid until the last three weeks, and Burner sat with him most evenings through that winter and they talked about almost nothing of consequence, which was the point.
Near the end Halloran said the only serious thing he said that whole time.
"I've been trying to work out what we actually did," he said.
"Say it, then."
"We kept having meetings." Halloran's hand moved on the blanket.
"That's it. That's the whole of it. Everybody thinks it was the fire and the well and Neve at the siding. It was that we kept having meetings when it was stupid to, and we voted when there wasn't time, and we told people things they'd rather not have known."
"Yes."
"It's not much of a legend."
"No," Burner said. "It's better than one."
Halloran was quiet a bit.
"That was a good answer," he said. "You've got much better at those."
"I had a long time."
He died in February and there were eleven hundred people at that funeral, from thirty-one settlements, and a girl of nineteen from the Crossing read out the four agreements at the graveside because somebody had decided that was how it should be done and nobody could remember afterward who.
Shyla ran the west route until she was twenty and then ran the whole system until she was thirty-one, and then handed it to the girl from the creek camp and went to the school.
She married a man from the ranger station in her twenty-fourth year. His name was Ansel and he was quiet and patient and entirely unintimidated by her, which Burner considered the single most important qualification available.
They had three children.
The first was a girl and they called her Neve, which Burner had expected and which still put him on a drum by the fence line for about twenty minutes.
The second was a boy called Halloran, which everybody shortened to Hal inside a week.
The third was a girl and Shyla did not name her after anybody.
"Why not?" Burner asked.
"Because two's enough," Shyla said. "The third one gets to just be a person."
Her name was Ada and she was the one who followed Burner around.
He was sixty-one when the last of it came.
By then the maintenance yard had four hundred people and was not called the yard anymore, it was called Neve's, which had started as a joke somewhere around the fifteenth year and had simply stuck the way names do.
There were greenhouses along the whole north fence and a second well and a grain mill that a man from the Junction had built and two buildings with glass in the windows.
The valley had about two thousand people in it and there were eleven settlements in regular contact and fifty-three in the printed network and Bosworth's press had been rebuilt twice and had two children of its own,
one at the Crossing and one four hundred miles north in a place none of them would ever see.
Burner had not fired a rifle at a person in twenty years.
There had been trouble, three times. A group out of the southwest in the eighteenth year that had lasted six weeks and had collapsed when four settlements simply refused to trade with them and told everybody why.
A bad business at the creek camp in the twenty-second that had ended with two dead and a man hanged after a trial that eleven settlements sent people to and that people argued about for a decade afterward.
And a thing in the twenty-sixth year that Burner had been consulted on and had got wrong, and had said so afterward in front of four hundred people, which was the last time he stood up at a meeting.
But nothing came with a truck. Nothing came with a schedule.
He had understood why in about the fourteenth year, sitting in a blind on a cold morning with nothing to do but think.
It was not that bad men had stopped happening.
It was that the shape they needed was gone.
There was no longer any place in that country where nine people sat alone in the dark hoping to be overlooked, and a man who wanted to build something out of fear had to do it in front of everybody, and nobody had yet worked out how.
He knew it would not last forever. He said so, repeatedly, to anybody who would listen, and it annoyed people, and he kept saying it.
"Eleven years," he told a class of thirty in his fifties. "That's about how long a thing like this lasts on its own before somebody works out the trick of it. After that it only lasts because people keep choosing it, every year, when it's inconvenient."
"How do we make them choose it?"
"You don't," Burner said. "You keep the paper printed and the routes open and you tell people what happened to other people, and then it's up to them, and some years they'll get it wrong."
The thing that took him was his lungs, in the autumn of his sixty-second year, and it took about five weeks.
He knew what it was by the second week. So did everybody else.
He refused to be moved into the clinic building and they put a bed in the corner of the school instead, which was his own request and which the four women who ran the clinic argued about for two days before giving in.
"Why the school?" Ansel asked him.
"Because there's noise," Burner said.
There were thirty children in that building six days a week and he lay in the corner of it through October and listened to them learn things, and people came in and out all day, and it was the exact opposite of a mountain in the Bitterroots with a dog and a rule, and that was entirely the point.
Sable came.
She was sixty-five and her knees had gone completely and she came on a cart from the creek camp where she had lived for eleven years with her brother Nate until he died, and she sat by the bed for three days and they talked about almost nothing.
On the last morning she said, "Do you remember the tin cup on the rock?"
"Above the basin."
"Four cigarette ends."
"I remember exactly what it looked like," Burner said. "I could draw it."
"So could I," Sable said. "Thirty years."
She held his hand for a minute, which she had done twice before in her life, and then she went.
Priest came. He was fifty-nine and gray and he had run the whole northern trail system for eleven years and he sat by the bed and could not talk for the first ten minutes.
"You put me in a shutter slot," he said eventually.
"I know."
"I've thought about it every year."
"So have I. I've apologized to your face twice and I'll do it again."
"No," Priest said. "That's not what I came to say. I came to say that I was sixteen and I asked for it, and that I have spent forty years being the man who was in the slot, and it's been a good thing to be. I wanted you to hear it from me before."
Sparrow had died eleven years earlier, in his seventies, at the Junction, where he had gone to live in the nineteenth year and had spent a decade teaching people how to talk to strangers at a gate.