Chapter 20 #2
He had asked, before he died, that the eleven settlements he had gone to as Halstead's talker be named at his funeral, and they were, and four people from three of them came, and one of them spoke, and what she said was not forgiveness and was not meant to be.
Burner had been there. It was the last long journey he ever made.
On the fourth of November, Shyla came and sat with him and stayed.
She was forty-two. She had gray in her hair and her mother's face, which she did not know and nobody could ever tell her, and she had run the west route and the whole system and the school, and she had been offered the camp twice and turned it down both times for reasons she had learned from him.
She sat on a chair by the bed with her hands in her lap.
"They've stopped lessons," she said. "Ada organized it. Thirty children voted on it and it was unanimous and she wanted me to tell you it was a proper vote with a count."
Burner laughed, which he should not have done, and paid for it for a minute.
"Tell her it's the best vote anybody's ever taken," he said.
"I'll tell her."
They sat a while.
"You're not going to make it to spring," she said.
"No."
"I wanted to say it out loud."
"Weathers taught you that."
"Weathers taught everybody that," Shyla said. "It's about the only thing this whole valley does properly."
The light came in the windows. Somewhere outside there were children shouting in the way that children had shouted at the Kettle on the first evening he ever walked into it, when there had been fifty-one people and a woodpile and four kids running around it because nobody had called them in yet.
"I've been thinking about your father," Burner said.
Shyla turned her head.
"Four seconds and a hole," he said.
"Yes."
"He did the best thing available. That's all anybody's ever done. He had four seconds and one option and he used it and it worked, and I've thought about that man for thirty-three years and I've never once been able to think of anything better he could have done."
"No."
"And the thing is," Burner said, "he'd do the same today."
Shyla frowned.
"What?"
"If it happened today. If there were men in that clearing today, he'd still say get in the hole." Burner's breath went and he waited for it. "Because that's what you do with four seconds. The hole is always the right answer at four seconds."
"Then what changed?"
"Everything before the four seconds," he said. "That's the only place it was ever possible to change anything. Not the moment. The nine years before the moment, when eleven camps did or did not talk to each other."
Shyla sat very still.
"That's the whole book," she said.
"That's the whole book."
She was quiet for a long time.
"I'm going to write that down," she said.
"Do."
"Word for word."
"Change the wording," Burner said. "It's too neat. Anything that neat's half a lie."
Shyla laughed and then put her hand over her eyes for a second.
"You have never once let a good line stand," she said.
"That's because I've met men who were very good at lines," Burner said, "and every single one of them was wrong."
That night the fever came up and for about nine hours he was not entirely in the room.
He was on the bench above the road in the grass with the frost coming through his shirt and a truck stopping below him, and a man crouching in the dirt with his hand flat on the ground and lifting his arm to point up the slope.
He was in a cut bank with a girl asleep against his ribs and a dog across both their legs.
He was standing on the north bench with a box of matches in his hand saying, either you tell me you'd do it too or you tell me not to, and I'll actually listen.
He was in a hole in the ground in the smoke saying, she told me to come and get you, you specifically.
He was walking a man to a gate in the failing light with seventy people standing back along the fence line in absolute silence.
He was holding a torch up over forty faces saying, it's a sheet of paper and a person walking.
He was on the ground at a rail siding with his hand flat against a wound and a cup lying beside them still mostly full.
At about four in the morning he came back.
Shyla was still in the chair. She had not moved in nine hours and her hands were in her lap and she was awake.
"You're here," he said.
"I'm here."
"How long?"
"All night."
Burner lay there and looked at the ceiling of a school building in a place that had once been a maintenance yard with three fuel tanks on stands.
"There's a thing I've never said to you," he said.
Shyla leaned forward.
"Say it," she said.
He took a while to get it out and she let him.
"When I came down into that clearing," he said, "I'd been on that mountain eleven months, and I want you to understand that I was finished. Not sad. Finished. I'd sat down with it and worked it out properly and I'd decided that a man alone was the only honest thing left in the world."
"I know."
"You don't, because you were nine and you were in the deadfall and you couldn't see my face." His breath went and he waited for it. "I came out of that treeline and I put a rifle on a wall of green and I was about four pounds of pressure from the worst thing anybody's ever done."
Shyla did not move.
"I know that too," she said.
"No."
"I do." Her voice was steady. "I've known since I was about thirteen. I used to think about the sound of it. The safety came off before you said anything."
Burner closed his eyes.
"Then here's the part you don't know," he said. "The reason I didn't was Yak. He wouldn't go forward. He whined once and he stopped, forty feet back, and in twelve months that dog had never once refused me anything."
"You've never said that."
"I've never said it to anybody." He turned his head on the pillow.
"And I have spent thirty-three years knowing that everything I am was decided by a dog's opinion in about a second and a half. All of it. The Kettle, the yard, Neve, the siding, eleven hundred people in a field. A dog stopped walking."
Shyla put her hand over her mouth.