Chapter 195: One Stone, One Vote
James discovered that he liked the sight of it a good deal more than he had expected. In fact, he liked it enough to leave the platform and join the line himself, walking its whole length instead of standing above everybody like a governor admiring his handiwork.
The line ran the full length of the plaza and then kept going, doubling back along the chapel wall. Farmers stood shoulder to shoulder with whores fresh off their shift, and freed men exchanged complaints with sailors so drunk they could hardly remain vertical long enough to complain properly.
All Concordia seemed to have been pulled into one long, ragged rope of a queue, and nobody in it seemed particularly eager to get anywhere else.
James took his place at the very back. Some near the front spotted him and, from the force of old habit, began stepping aside to surrender their place.
James waved them back.
"Keep yer place, friends."
Ahead of him, one woman heavy with the child she was carrying, already had her answer prepared before anyone asked her.
"Whichever one gets me off these feet quickest has my vote."
She said, one hand braced against the small of her back. "I’ve swelled up like a ship’s fender standin’ here already. Whoever wins had better start buildin’ quick."
An old man a few places ahead wore a face like a dried fig and complained loudly to anybody within hearing, having apparently decided that corn, cane, and forges were all matters for younger backs.
He declared. "A man my age oughtn’t be made to stand this long while holdin’ his water. I’ve waited less time for a surgeon, and that surgeon was drunk like a piss-stained sailor."
Few places behind them, a Creek man explained in slow tongue he had traded at posts with scales and ledgers before. He saw no reason Concordia couldn’t manage the same, provided it had a harbor to work from instead of a beach and a dream.
Behind him, a sailor three sheets to the wind swayed gently where he stood and informed the entire line, with perfect sincerity, that he had already voted twice and intended to make it three.
"If only the woman mindin’ the jars would stop movin’ long enough for me to reach her."
When his turn finally came, two men had to take him by the shoulders and carry him toward the booth. He could no longer tell a stalk of corn from a coil of rope or a hole in the ground.
Near the booth, a clerk stepped squarely between the curtain and a boy who could not have been much past twelve. "Every soul of age gets a voice and a vote. You’re neither one, lad, no matter what ye think of yerself."
"I’m near enough a grown man! I’ve hauled line on the fishing boats twice already!"
"Come haul it a third time in a few years. Now off with ye."
A few places ahead, a man James didn’t recognize turned around and asked him, as casually as if he were asking about the tide, which way the captain himself intended to vote.
James grinned.
"That’d me my secret to keep lad, and yours to find out."
The line pushed him forward like it pushed everybody else, and before long it brought him to the booth.
He stepped behind the canvas alone, as every soul ahead of him had done, and found himself standing over three clay jars with one stone warm in his palm.
For one heartbeat behind that canvas, James saw how easy it would be to ruin the whole affair. One word to the people waiting outside, spoken loudly enough, and every uncertain soul in that line might have marched straight toward whichever jar he named.
He was half the reason the queue existed in the first place, that was the plain truth.
James let himself feel the weight of it for a moment before doing anything else.
Then he told nobody a thing, dropped his stone into the jar he had chosen and stepped back through the canvas looking, to every watching eye, exactly like the last man who had gone in before him.
The last few citizens went through soon enough, and when the final one stepped out, Whitlock let the canvas fall and sent his clerks to the boards. He meant to count the votes in full view of anybody who cared to watch.
It was the reasonable thing to do when half a town had spent weeks wondering whether the other half might cheat.
The clerks dumped the first jar onto a length of sailcloth and began to sort the stones into piles of ten. They worked fast, cutting a notch into a tally stick for every completed pile.
The whole plaza crowded closer. Before long, the people there were counting along under their breath, as though the stones might change their minds if nobody kept an eye on them.
"That’s four piles for the hammer already..."
"Wait for the rope, ye impatient bastard. Wait for the rope."
Rook and Twice pushed their way to the front, arguing before they had even arrived.
Twice held out his hand. "Long odds on the workshop, ye said. Yer own words, not two hours past. Pay up."
"It was long odds because no smart man puts his coin on a smith he only just met."
"And yet."
Rook dug into his pockets, grumbling about smiths, fools, and the injustice of a town that had the nerve to refuse to behave as a reasonable man expected it to.
Whitlock climbed onto the lowest step of the platform, tally board in hand, and raised his voice until it washed across the plaza.
"The workshop."
He let that sit for a moment.
"Four hundred and ninety-eight stones."
A ragged cheer burst before Whitlock had even finished the count.
"The marsh. One hundred and ninety-seven."
"The harbor. Sixty."
Whitlock looked up from the board. "That puts the workshop at sixty-six in the hundred, give or take, against the sixty-five the Code requires. The marsh comes a fair second at twenty-six. The harbor trails a long way behind at eight."
Isaiah gave one nod among his people.
"Then we’ve work to do."
That was the entirety of his celebration.
Bert gave the hall a small, formal bow, the kind a man gives after accepting a medal.
He looked so pleased with himself that a fellow might have thought he’d won the whole town rather than a vote.
Jim, meanwhile, had already gathered an audience. "Aye, that’ll be the Léogâne story that swung it, mark me. One bastard tells the truth plain enough and often enough, and before long a whole town starts listenin’!"
"Nobody believed a word of it, Jim!"
"Didn’t need to be believed, just needed to be heard."
Hobbs gave a single grunt of satisfaction. "About bloody time. Now maybe a man loses a limb right instead of havin’ it sawed off by inches."
Ned’s relief was quieter and much more honest. "No more crooked nails," he said, mostly to himself.
He looked like he had finally put down a burden he’d been carrying too long.
Hagar Cole needed only one word.
"Good."
Then she turned toward the half-built shell of the shipwright’s yard, her eyes set as she worked out where a forge ought to go.
Fenwick accepted second place for the marsh without much fuss, folding his arms.
"Ground’s not goin’ anywhere, it’ll keep till its own turn comes round."
Sawyer, for his part, looked almost relieved that he had lost outright. "Christ, I’d only just worked out where to put the priv, somebody else can worry about warehouses for another season or two."
Bonnet took third place easily enough.
"I confess I have never been so pleased to come in last. What a joyful democracy."
James stood at the edge of it all and watched his town take the result, winners and losers alike, without a single fist being raised.
He’d built stranger things in his life, yet none that could argue so hard, decide so cleanly, and forgive so quickly.