We Vote after Supper

Anka took the bowls from the meeting benches and carried them back to Sevrin’s kitchen.

“Eat first,” she told him. “Nobody can make good decisions hungry.”

“I’m trying to feed them.”

“Not in the meeting room.”

The soup was ready. The people were ready. Anka, who had run the settlement since the roads closed the previous autumn, was not ready to stop running it.

Sevrin had helped her start it. He was forty-four, had cooked in two schools and one very bad hotel, and had thought that a woman who understood pumps was better than a man who gave speeches. Anka understood the pumps. She also understood how to make a meeting happen later.

The first growing season had ended three days earlier. Everyone had helped bring in the crop. Under the agreement they had made at the beginning, every adult could now vote for a council of three. Until then, Anka had been their emergency leader.

The agreement hung by the kitchen door. Sevrin had helped choose its words. It was not something Dax had found in a forgotten drawer.

Dax drove the settlement’s cart. He had spent the morning setting benches out and checking the list of adults with Ora, who kept their shared accounts. The two had been chosen to count the votes a month earlier. Six people, including Anka, had put their names on the candidate list the day before. The vote would happen after supper.

Anka put the bowls in a stack.

“We still haven’t counted all the grain,” she said. “People will vote for an extra share before they know what we have.”

“Then tell them that.”

“They need to understand it.”

Sevrin looked at the pot. If they waited until Anka thought everyone understood everything, the soup would be cold and he would be dead of old age.

He did not say this. Anka had stayed awake three nights when the first pump failed. He had fed her at dawn, and she had eaten without knowing what was in the bowl. He remembered that too.

Dax came in.

“She’s asking people to wait,” he told Sevrin. “Lock the store until we vote. That will bring them in.”

“No.”

“It’s our store.”

“And it’s our supper. I’m not using one to make people do the other.”

Dax pointed toward Anka. “She is.”

“Then find a different idea.”

Sevrin took the bowls back outside. He put them at the serving table, away from the benches. He called people by name as they came. A gardener whose knee was swollen took two portions home, one for herself and one for her brother. Nobody had to attend the meeting to eat.

Anka stood beside the door. She ate last and did not speak to Sevrin.

When the pot was empty, he sat on a bench near the back. Dax and Ora were counting the people against their list. There were thirty-one adults living in the settlement. Three had stayed home. Ora had visited them earlier to ask whether they wanted the election held today, and to record their order of choice among the six candidates. The agreement allowed that, since people could be sick on election day too.

Anka stood in front of the benches.

“I propose that tonight’s vote be limited to those who brought land or equipment,” she said. “Until we know the reserve.”

A woman in the second row asked whether her year’s work in the garden counted as equipment.

“No,” Anka said. “That isn’t what I mean.”

“Then you need to mean something else.”

There was laughter, but not much. People had lived through a winter together. They knew exactly who had brought a truck and who had brought nothing except their hands.

Ora read the short line from the agreement: every adult after the first growing season.

“I am asking you to change it,” Anka said.

“Before we elect people who could say no to you,” Dax replied.

“Before you promise a feast from grain we haven’t counted.”

Sevrin looked down at his empty hands. He had intended to vote for Anka. She was clever and had kept them alive. He did not think those things had become false because he disliked what she was saying.

He stood.

“If we don’t know the grain count, none of us should promise a feast,” he said. “But we agreed who gets a vote. I want mine.”

Anka looked directly at him.

“You think they can run the pumps?”

“I think they can hire you to run them.”

Her face changed. Sevrin wished he had said it less sharply. He did not sit down and take it back.

Ora asked the adults whether they wanted to delay the election. She and Dax counted the raised hands separately. Six people favored waiting; the other twenty-five did not, including the three choices Ora had brought from home.

Anka remained standing while Ora read the candidate list. She confirmed she was standing. So did the five others. Each spoke briefly. One wanted to repair the north road. One wanted to begin by counting grain in front of everyone. One wanted the cart driver to stop leaving the harness in the rain.

Dax said that last proposal was unfairly specific.

They used three rounds of voting to choose the three members, as they had agreed a month earlier. Each adult chose one candidate per round, and the winner came off the list before the next vote. Ora read the absent adults’ highest remaining choices during each round. She and Dax checked their totals in front of the benches. Anka did not win a seat.

The three chosen members were Ora, a gardener called Fen, and the woman who had objected to her labor being left out. Her name was Jory. She had arrived in autumn with one bag and no equipment.

Anka folded her arms. Nobody asked her to approve the result.

The new council did not own the settlement. The land, stores and pump parts still belonged to all of them. The people who had voted controlled their own work and would have to keep showing up. Sevrin could see how many arguments lay ahead.

Fen asked Anka whether she would continue the pump checks for the same weekly food credit that other skilled work received. There would be a public grain count the next morning before anyone changed the shares.

“Now you want to pay me for what I did for nothing,” Anka said.

“Yes,” Fen told her.

She looked toward the pump shed. Then she said she would think about it.

By breakfast, she had decided. She came into the kitchen for two pieces of bread, asked where Fen was, and went to the shed to show him the loose fitting that needed watching.

Dax arrived soon afterward with six onions.

“A feast,” he said. “For the first council.”

Sevrin looked at the onions. Then at the ordinary breakfast pots waiting to be washed.

“If the council sets aside food and people to cook it, we can talk.”

“It wouldn’t be very large.”

“Then it won’t need very much help. You can wash that pot while you decide.”

Dax took off his coat. Sevrin pushed the pot toward him and went back to serving breakfast.