The Nameless Method

Chapter 8: The Seventeenth Batch

The column stopped.

It stopped from the front, one rank at a time, so that the boys at the back walked two more steps into the boy ahead of them before they understood. Hollis was at the back, where he had been since the fork, and he heard it come back down the line: boots, then no boots, then the low talking going out along the column.

Then a voice from up front.

"Ward. Two days."

The man who came down the road to meet them was old, and his face was red — not the red of a walk, the red of years. He wore the same dark coat as every other man they had passed, the same plain buttons; the one thing different was a band of stitching at the collar, the same color as the coat, visible only where the light caught it.

Ward walked the last forty feet of that road differently than he had walked the rest of it.

He stopped two steps short. "Hall Master."

"Two days late," the old man said.

"Yes, sir."

The old man waited.

"The delay is mine," Ward said. He did not say anything after it.

"Mm." The old man let him stand in it a beat longer than he had to.

Then: "How many does this bring us to?"

"Seventeenth, Hall Master."

"Seventeenth," the old man said back to him.

Then he looked at them.

He went along the front of the line, slow, then back the other way, and then he did it to Ward, from the boots up to the collar, and Ward stood for it. His eyes stopped on the biggest one, at the head of the line, standing with his feet apart and his arms down.

"That one's past the age."

"His papers are in order," Ward said.

The old man held him another second. "Then it isn't a problem."

Hollis heard it and kept his face where it was. On the road he had heard that the Calloway boy was thirteen and that it did not matter, on account of a cousin of his who had married somebody with a say up here, and he had not believed the whole of it, because in Sourwood nothing ever came out that even. Here it was in four words between two men, and neither of them had raised his voice.

"Low hill," the old man said. "One night. Let them sleep. The Choosing starts at first light, and I want it started at first light." He looked down the line once more. "The ones who don't pass go down the same day. I don't want them up here long enough to learn a rule, let alone break one."

"Hall Master," Ward said, and nodded once.

The line started up.

Hollis went with it, near the back, and did the arithmetic while he walked, the long way, twenty-nine into seventeen batches, carrying as he went: four hundred and ninety-three. Four hundred and ninety-three boys had come up this same road in seventeen batches and stood in a line like this one while the old man with the red face looked them over, and Hollis was one of the last twenty-nine of them.

The road up was steps.

Somebody had cut them out of the rock a long time ago and then let them alone. The edges had gone round, and in two places the rock had come down across the treads and somebody else had laid boards over it, and the boards moved. They went up through the trees and then above the trees. Water was running somewhere the whole way and was never where it sounded like it was.

Nobody on the steps talked above a murmur. They had been loud for five days, all of them, the whole way from the fork, and they went up Redcliff in a column that got quieter with every switchback, because every one of them had been told at home what the top of this mountain was for.

Every man they passed wore the same dark coat. Some had a knife on the belt, some had a longer blade slung across the back, and a few had their hands empty and something heavy under the coat on one hip, so that the coat hung wrong and the eye went back to it. Hollis did not know what was under there. He did not ask.

He counted the points on the way up, because counting was what his hands did when there was nothing in them. Thirteen, from the bottom of the steps to the top. Some of them were a stand with a board nailed to a post and a man sitting behind it; some were only a man standing in a place where nobody stands unless he has been told to.

Ward knew people.

Two or three times on the way up, somebody ahead said his name and he said theirs back, and there would be a few sentences, and the column would walk past, and then it would happen again. Twice Hollis saw something go from one hand to another — nothing you could make out from ten feet, just two men meeting and then not meeting. Once a man coming down stopped Ward with a hand on his arm, said something with his head down, and Ward said something back with his head down, and the man let go and went on past them with his face loosened.

Near the top, a man sitting behind one of the boards said, without getting up, "Yarrow keep you at the bottom of the road, then?"

"He kept me," Ward said, and went on by.

Hollis put the name away with the number of batches and the two days. The old man at the bottom of the road was Yarrow.

There was not one man on the way up who did not have something small to say to Ward, and Ward had something small to say back, and after the two things had been said both men walked on easier. Hollis did not know what had been owed or what had been paid. Nobody explained any of it, and nobody had explained the two days either.

He had one more count going, since the fork: what Big Bert's money had bought. So far it came to a ride, a corner of a wagon floor, and no explanation of anything, including the two days. A man like Bert did not walk up to a recruiter's door for nothing, and Hollis had not been told the price or who had taken it.

At the top of the steps the way went along the mountain instead of up it, and then up again, onto a smaller hill that stood off to one side of the peak. There were houses on top of it.

Four of them, low and long, log walls with the c******g gone grey, roofs of split shingle, in a row along a strip of bare ground. One had a stovepipe. The windows were small and set high up, higher than a boy could see out of. It looked like something that had gone up in one season out of whatever was nearest to hand.

Ward put them inside with his hands. Thirteen of them through the back door into the second room — the biggest ones, and the Calloway boy, who did not carry his own bag; two boys from his end of the wagon carried it for him. The rest on the bunks down the long room, and it came out the way it had come out in the wagon: the ones from towns took the bunks nearest the stove. The five from the hills, who had not said anything for five days, took what was left, which was the wall by the door.

Food came in on a cart: bread, and a tin cup each of something thin and hot.

Hollis took the bunk nearest the door, put his bag down, then put it under his head, and lay on his back with his eyes open while the room went quiet around him. Somebody two bunks down talked in his sleep for a while in a voice Hollis did not recognize, and then stopped.

He dreamed about a coat.

It had buttons all the way down the front. Not four buttons — the whole front, horn buttons one after another. It fit him. And in the dream he had the knife, the one the men on the steps carried, with a handle that had come smooth out of a machine, the same every time, and he was standing on the road in front of the smithy in Sourwood, and the blacksmith's boy was there, the one who was fourteen and had put him in the mud every summer since he could walk.

In the dream the blacksmith's boy shoved him, and Hollis hit him once in the chest, and the blacksmith's boy went down on his back in the road and lay there looking at the sky and did not get up.

There were people along both sides of the road. Every one of them had seen it, nobody said anything, and the blacksmith's boy stayed down.

And then Hollis did not know what to do next, so — because the first one had worked and he had nothing else ready — he hit him again, and the blacksmith's boy went down a second time, which was better than the first.

He woke with his eyes still shut and went back through it twice, once quick and once slow, and he was on the second pass when the light came up in the windows high in the wall.

Nobody brought food.

For five days something had come every morning. A cart, or a man with a basket, or bread going hard at the edges that was still the best thing about the day. Hollis sat with his shoes in his hand and waited for it, and the room filled up with boys standing and waiting with him, and then Ward came to the door and said, "Out."

Hollis looked down the room to see whether anybody was going to make it into a thing. One of the town boys at the far end said something quiet to the boy next to him, about eating, and the other one shrugged, and that was the end of it.

He would have liked to say something too. He put his shoes on and went out with the rest.

They went down the hill on the side away from the steps, along the bottom of it, and stopped at a slope.

The slope had river cane on it. Not cane that had come up wherever it wanted: this was in rows, the rows the same distance apart at the bottom as at the top, which meant somebody at some point had stood there with a line and decided how far apart they were going to be.

Yarrow was there, the old man with the red face from the bottom of the road, standing at the foot of the slope with four young men Hollis had not seen before. They wore the coat like everybody else, and their boots were set: one had his sleeves rolled, one had his wrist wrapped in tape. On the way up Hollis had learned one thing about the coats, which was that the men inside them could read one another's at a glance, and he could not read any of them. He looked at the four and tried to work out which was which, and could not.

They had not been told where to stand. The boys spread out along the bottom of the slope in a line that never did get straight, and Hollis went to the end of it, where he had been for five days.

Yarrow looked down the line of them, one end to the other, and back.

He had not said anything yet.