He looked at the barn wall. I said things, he said. About you. And about He glanced briefly toward Evan. About the arrangement.
You said them, Caleb said. That's done. This is now. Hutchins turned the mall over in his hands. He was a man who had spent his adult life being the authority in every room he was in, and what he was being asked to do was walk into a room where the authority had been built by someone else and trust it.
That was not a small thing for a man like Hutchins. "All right," he said. "All right," Caleb said. Hutchins looked at Evan, who had been sitting his horse through all of this with the quiet watchfulness that was becoming, Caleb thought, as natural to the boy as breathing. "You ride well," Hutchins said.
"My mother taught me," Evan said. Something that was nearly a smile crossed Hutchins' face and didn't quite make it all the way. "That figures," he said, in a tone that had lost most of its edge. Then he went to get his coat. The proposal, if it could be called that, being less a formal proposal and more a practical reality that Caleb gave a name to it the right moment, happened 3 days after Hutchins arrived.
They were in Caleb's barn, seven adults from the five families standing among consolidated livestock in the particular close warmth of a crowded barn in winter, and the conversation had reached the point that conversations among practical people under pressure always eventually reach. The point where someone has to say what everyone is already thinking. Caleb said it. "We need a system," he said. "Not just for now, through March, maybe into April if the roads stay bad.
A system where everybody knows what they're contributing and what they're getting back. And where the decisions about the combined resources are made by everyone together." He laid out what he had in mind. It was not complicated because he didn't believe in complicated when simple would work.
Shared livestock management. The cattle of all five families treated as one herd, fed from a common store, maintained by rotating labor. Shared food resources, not equally divided but allocated by need with Mara overseeing the kitchen operation because she was the best person for it, and everyone present already knew it, including Hutchins, who said nothing when Caleb named her. Shared security, night watches rotated among all men capable of doing them, which now included the two Kellerman boys who were 16 and 14 and both capable.
Shared labor on the properties that needed the most immediate work, beginning with Hutchins barn wall because a broken barn wall in January was everyone's problem whether the cattle inside it were Hutchins or not. He laid it out and he stopped talking and looked around the barn. Reuter said, "I'm in." The Kellerman husband nodded.
Birch took a little longer. He was a man who thought carefully before committing, which Caleb respected. Then he said, "How do we handle disputes if there's a disagreement about allocation or labor?" "We talk it out," Caleb said. "All of us.