Chapter 20 #3
"That's the thing I've never said," Burner said. "And I'm saying it now because you're going to teach this for forty years and there'll be people who want it to be a story about a man who decided something, and it isn't. It's a story about a man who nearly didn't, and was lucky."
She sat with it for a long moment.
"No," she said.
He looked at her.
"That's half of it," Shyla said. "The dog stopped walking, and then you lowered the rifle. And then you got down on one knee so you were lower than me, and you put a water bottle on the ground halfway between us instead of handing it to me, and you told me you wouldn't chase me if I ran."
Burner did not answer.
"Nobody taught you that," she said. "There's no dog in the world that did that. You were a man who'd decided to be alone forever and you got down in the dirt and made yourself smaller than a nine year old, and I have thought about those four minutes every single day of my life."
"Shyla."
"You want it to be luck because luck doesn't ask anything of anybody," she said. "It was luck and then it was you, and it's been you for thirty-three years, and you don't get to hand the whole of it to a dead dog on your last night out of modesty."
Burner lay there for a while.
"That's the best anybody's ever argued with me," he said.
"I had a good teacher."
"You had four."
He was quiet a bit.
"All right," he said.
"All right what?"
"All right, I'll take half of it," Burner said, "and you can have the rest of that argument at my funeral where I can't answer back, which is exactly what you're planning."
Shyla laughed and cried at the same time, which people do.
He lasted nine more days, which nobody expected.
They were good days, mostly. He slept a great deal and was clear when he was awake, and the school stayed shut and the children came in anyway, in twos and threes, because Ada had organized that too.
Ada was eight. She sat on the end of the bed and asked him about four hundred questions and about half of them he could not answer.
"What do you do then?" she asked.
"I tell you I don't know."
"That's what Mama says you always say."
"It's the only thing I've ever been consistently good at," Burner said.
On the third of those days Delacroix came.
She was seventy-eight and she had walked from the creek camp with two people holding her arms and she would not be carried, and she sat down by the bed and put her hands on her knees.
"Four," she said.
"Four," Burner agreed.
"It's in the record."
"It's in the record. It's on the wall of this building, in Bosworth's printing, under the agreements. It says four."
Delacroix nodded once.
"Then that's all right," she said.
She sat with him for an hour and said perhaps nine more things, which was about her rate, and every one of them was worth hearing.
On the seventh day Ardith's granddaughter came in with the letter.
It had come by the northwest route, as it had every June and December for thirty-one years, first from Ardith and then from her daughter and now from a woman of thirty who had never met any of them.
Burner had it read to him.
The wood was in. They had lost two people in the autumn, one of them ninety-one. The school had eleven children. And there was a line at the bottom that the woman reading it stumbled over because she did not understand it.
Hollis died in his sleep in March, eleven years ago now, but the note in our book says to keep telling you, so I am. Tam is sixty-two and still splits the wood and says he learned it from him.
Burner lay there for a while.
"Did it hold?" Shyla said quietly.
"It held."
"Thirty-one years."
"It held," Burner said. "Nobody ever found out whether we were right. That's what peace is. I've been saying that for forty years and I've just now believed it."
He went on the twelfth of November, in the afternoon, with the school windows open because it was unseasonably warm and there were children outside.
Shyla was there. Ansel was there. Ada was on the end of the bed.
He was awake and then he was less awake, and at about two o'clock he said something that nobody could make out, and then, quite clearly:
"Get the nine year olds first."
And Shyla said, "You did."
And after that he did not say anything else, and at about half past three he stopped breathing, and the room stayed exactly as it was for a long while.
They buried him outside the wire.
There was an argument about that, briefly, because the wire had not been a wire in twenty years and the graves outside it were a long walk from anywhere and there were four hundred people who wanted to be able to visit.
Shyla ended it in one sentence.
"He goes next to the dog," she said.
So they put him beside Brill and Corlett and Oates and Teague and a slab that Pike had cut without being asked in the fourth year, which said only YAK and which most people under forty had always assumed was a person.
Two thousand people came. They came from fifty-three settlements and four valleys and one man walked from the Junction in nine days at the age of seventy.
Pike's grandson cut the stone.
Shyla gave him the words and she thought about them for a week and they were shorter than anybody expected.