Chapter 17: The Barn

Stellan turned his back on the Council table.

He walked across the grass to the fence and crouched beside the old woman's wheelchair.

"Nobody goes over that line alone," he said, loud enough for the whole field. "Not her. Not one of you."

Nobody stopped him.

He wasn't anybody they had to stop anymore.

The ranch was a mile past the pack line, on the county road, where the national forest gave out into hay fields.

Stellan had bought it ten years ago with his own money.

"For when I stepped down," he said, as we pulled into the yard at noon on Sunday. "I thought I'd be sixty."

"You're thirty-nine."

"I'm aware."

There was a farmhouse with half its windows boarded.

There was a red barn with the paint gone pink.

There was a windmill that squealed every time the wind turned.

Lucille got out of her truck, looked at all of it with her hands on her hips, and said, "Well, hell."

By three o'clock, thirty-one strays had come up the county road behind us.

They came in pickups and on foot and in one case on a riding mower.

The new moon was two weeks off.

None of them had waited.

"Where else would we go?" the kid with the stitched hand said, dropping his duffel in the yard. "You're here."

We built the clinic in the barn.

The old trucker hauled two steel exam tables up from a scrapyard in town and wouldn't say what he'd paid.

The motel sisters scrubbed twenty years of pigeon off the floor with bleach and a radio going.

Lucille took the tack room for a pharmacy and lined the shelves with everything we'd saved from the fire, which was one red cooler.

"We'll start small," she said.

"We'll start very small," I said.

The ranch hand who'd testified came on the second day.

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