The Nameless Method

Chapter 7: First Class

The carriage stopped at a crossroads where there was a*****e and a pump, and then it went on without them.

The carriage was small and black and shut, and it smelled of oiled leather, and there was a window he could lay his palm flat against, and since Oxbow he had been the only passenger. Ward sat in the other seat and did not say anything to him for the whole of a day.

What waited at the crossroads was this: a long wagon under hooped canvas, boards laid down both sides of it for benches, and men handing boys up over the tailboard, one and then the next.

Twelve, the wagon had been built for. Eighteen were in it when they put Hollis up.

He took the corner at the tail, on the left, before anybody had turned around to see what was worth taking. It was the corner no one else had wanted. The canvas sloped low over it, so he rode with one shoulder bent, and the boards had been set for a man's legs, so his feet did not reach the floor. He made no noise about it, and then he sat still and watched.

The wagon smelled like a barn in wet weather. Horses on the front of it, hay, canvas, boys, and under all of that the other smell, the one that gets into hair, which came off the straw at the back, where one of the small ones was sick most mornings for the first while. When it happened, whoever sat nearest slid along the bench without looking at him, and later somebody pushed the straw into the corner with his boot. Nobody said anything about it.

He sorted them by what each of them cost.

There were three kinds in the wagon, and they had not mixed.

At the middle bench, up under the good part of the canvas, where the wind came through and the rain did not, sat a boy the rest of them called Bryce.

He was thirteen. The boys up front said it the way you say a thing that has already been taken out of your hands — thirteen, and the Order took them from seven years old to twelve, and even so it was not a problem.

The reason came out in the first hour and never again. A cousin on his mother's side had married into the Order, into a family with a say in how things were run. His father kept a fighting school in the county seat, and there was money in the house, and Bryce had been taught since he was big enough to stand up.

Hollis had never been taught anything. What he knew about fighting he had got off his brother Dale behind the woodpile — elbows, weight, and the understanding that you stopped when Dale said stop and not before — and that was the whole of it. Bryce had had a man paid to teach him, and years to work at it, and Hollis watched him a while and did not think the teaching had come to much. It would not have been close either way.

Around Bryce sat the ones who had come in off the towns.

Their people kept shops, or worked in shops, or had a trade, or had a man they answered to and a wage at the end of the week. They had grown up on streets with other people on them. They had learned to read a face before they learned to read anything else, and they used it.

One of them had Bryce's bundle off the bench and stowed on the boards underneath before Bryce had finished turning his head — done without being asked, and without any look on the boy's face that said he wanted something for it, which was its own way of asking.

"Bryce," from the bench in front.

"Bryce." Behind him, a boy leaning out around two others to get the name into the open.

"Hey. Bryce," from the other side.

Bryce did not turn his head. He sat back into the canvas the way a man sits back in a chair he has bought, and he said the name back — once, low, the same size it had come in — and the boys around him laughed, and the one who had leaned out around the two others laughed first.

Which of them was the oldest had never been said out loud, and by noon of the first day it had settled anyway, and after that the wagon arranged itself around him, water finding the low side of a floor.

Then there were the ones at the back, with Hollis.

Five of them, counting him. They came from up the creeks and back of the ridges, and any one of their families lived off whatever was nearest to hand — a little ground, a little timber, whatever ran or grew on land that nobody with money had bothered to claim. None of them had a trade. None of them had a wage.

They were the quietest people in the wagon, and they stayed that way. When the middle of the wagon laughed, they laughed too, half a beat behind, and then looked around to see whether it had been the right thing to laugh at.

Hollis turned his eyes back up the benches and finished the arithmetic.

The boy on the front bench had shoes with no c***k in them anywhere. The two beside Bryce had coats with every button still on. The one who had moved the bundle had a knife on his belt with a handle turned on a machine, and it stood off his hip half an inch further than the knives in the wagon that somebody's uncle had made out of a file.

And there was one more difference, and it did not take him long to have it. When a boy from a town said something, the boys around him put down what they were doing to hear it. When a boy from the back said something, nobody put anything down.

Twice in the first days, somebody up front asked down the rows where a boy was from. It was taking inventory. By the time it came to the back of the wagon Hollis had his face turned out the back of it, watching the road go the other way, and the boy asking went on past him to the one beside him. After that the inventory went on without him.

There had been some talk early on about a black carriage — somebody had seen one stopped at a crossroads, shut, with a man up on the box — and by the second day there was nothing left to say about it. Hollis had ridden in that carriage for a day. He said nothing about it and stayed in his corner.

The wagon went west and stopped where it stopped — at a mill, at a*****e with one pump and a porch with no roof on it, at a fork in the road where four boys were standing with their bundles tied, watching the wagon come down at them.

Every stop put more in. By the last morning there was no floor left to sit on, and the smallest ones rode with a leg down either side of somebody else's knee, and the one in the straw was sick every morning still, and nobody moved away from him anymore, because there was nowhere to move to.

At the second stop a man with a board counted them, moving his finger along the rows and writing something down. At the third stop he counted them again and wrote something else.

Early on, somebody got up the nerve to ask Ward how far it was.

"West," Ward said. Nobody asked him anything after that.

At the last stop the man with the board counted them one more time and wrote the number at the bottom and put the board away. Twenty-nine.

On the fifth day the light began to go, and the wagon came around a last bend and stopped, and the tailboard came down, and they got out onto the road one at a time, stiff and slow.

They were at the bottom of a valley with walls on both sides of it, and the walls were rock, and the rock came up out of the trees until Hollis had to put his head back to find the top of it, and then it went on up behind the trees anyway.

Two of the Order's men had come down off the box and were standing off at the edge of the road with their backs to them, talking about the line and the county and whether the old name was still the one on the paper.

Hollis heard all of it, because he had learned somewhere on the road that men do not stop talking for a boy standing ten feet off, so long as the boy keeps his hands still and his eyes somewhere else.

One of them pointed up the valley with his chin.

"Old maps have it as something else," he said. "It's on paper as Redcliff now."

"Named for the color," the other one said.

"Named for the color, in the evening," the first one said. "The one who started us stood at the bottom of it one evening and named it, and the ones after him put it on paper, and nobody has come up here since unless we brought them."

"Mm," the other one said, and went back to the line.

The sun was down at the far end of the valley, and the last of it had come up under the cloud and laid itself along the whole face of the cliff, and the cliff was red.

Not a red anybody had painted. It moved. It came down the rock as the sun went, the way light moves on water, and where it left off the rock went grey and then darker than grey, and the red went on moving above them the whole time they stood there.

Twenty-nine boys who had not been quiet for five days, and not one of them made a sound.

Hollis stood with the bag in his hand and looked at it. For as long as the light lasted he did not do anything else — not the arithmetic, not the count of who was standing where and what they had on. The bag was leather, cut down from an old coat and stitched by his mother with a needle she held over a lamp so the holes would come out straight. It was worth nothing. He had both hands on it.

Then a voice came off the road behind them.

"Move."

Ward's, and not loud.

Nobody moved.

They stood in the road with their bundles and their bags, all twenty-nine of them, brought here for the same thing, and not one of them would be the first to put a foot on it.

Somebody in front of Hollis moved. Then somebody on his left, and then the whole line of them started up the road, and it was while they were going — with the bag in his hand and the red still coming down the face of the cliff above them — that Hollis saw he was the last of the batch still standing where the wagon had set him down.

He started after them, last, and did not hurry to catch up.