BURNER
HE CAME OUT OF THE TREES AND KNELT DOWN
There was no date of birth because he had never told anybody and it had stopped mattering somewhere in the second decade.
Shyla spoke for eleven minutes.
She said the thing about the four seconds and the hole, because it was the truest thing he had ever said to her and because two thousand people needed to hear it.
She said the thing about the dog.
And then she made the argument he had told her she was planning, and she made it in front of two thousand people and he could not answer back, exactly as he had known she would,
and there were people in that crowd who laughed and cried in the same breath because they had known him and knew he had set it up.
She finished with the line off the school wall.
"The thing that beats a bad man is not a better man," she said. "It's that everybody talks to everybody. He said that in a shop frame in the fourth year with a stick in his hand and about ninety of us thought it was a speech."
She looked out at two thousand people from fifty-three settlements.
"It wasn't a speech," she said. "It was the plan, and it worked, and you are all standing in it."
Afterward, in the evening, when most of them had gone, Ada came and found her mother sitting on a drum by the old fence line.
The drum had been there for as long as anybody could remember. Nobody moved it. It had rusted through at the bottom in the twentieth year and somebody had put a new one in its place without being asked and without mentioning it.
Ada sat down on the ground with her back against it.
"Is it over?" she said.
Shyla looked out at the burned acres that had not been burned for thirty-three years and were two hundred and forty acres of stubble in the last of the light, and past them at the ridge, and past that at a country with two thousand people in it who all knew each other's names.
"No," she said.
"Good," Ada said.
Shyla looked down at her daughter, who was eight, and who had organized a vote of thirty children and insisted on a proper count.
"Say why," she said.
"Because if it was over," Ada said, "there'd be nothing to do."
Shyla sat very still.
Then she put her hand on the top of her daughter's head and looked out at the dark coming down over the valley, and she did not say anything at all, because there was nothing that needed saying,
and because somewhere in a school building behind her there were four hundred sheets of paper waiting to be printed in the morning.
Finis