Suspicion was how people out here managed the things they couldn't explain. And suspicion left alone became something worse. He didn't know what to do about it yet. But he thought about the way she'd looked at that train platform and the letter she'd covered with her hand and the trunk that hadn't left her room. And he thought about Elsie with her repaired doll and the golden thread catching fire light.
He wasn't going to ask. He wasn't going to push. But he was no longer pretending to himself that the thing she was carrying wasn't real or that it might not eventually arrive at his door in some form he wasn't ready for. The lesson about firewood almost broke her. And that was the word he'd use for it later.
Almost. He had been cutting and stacking for 2 weeks, building the supply that needed to be in place before the serious cold arrived. He'd shown her the stacking method, the importance of keeping it off the ground, the way you needed to cover it, but leave air movement to prevent rot. She'd nodded and helped where she could. Then, on a Tuesday afternoon, she'd tried to split a round of wood on her own.
He'd shown her the technique once, and she'd apparently decided once was enough, and the hatchet had glanced off a knotted section and taken a piece of bark clean off the stump 6 in from her boot. He'd been watching from the porch. He came down, and she was standing there looking at the hatchet and at the stump and at her boot, and her face had the specific look of someone who has just understood a thing in their body that they'd only understood in their head before. Give me that," he said, not meaning it as harshly as it came out. She gave him the hatchet.
She watched him work for a moment. Then she said, "Show me again. I just showed you last week. Show me again. " He looked at her. She was serious and she wasn't making it about pride or embarrassment.
She was just asking because she wanted to know. And something about that stripped away the irritation. He handed her the hatchet back, adjusted her grip and her stance with a few short directions, and let her try again. The second strike was better. The third split the round.
She looked at the split wood with an expression that was not triumph exactly, but something quieter and more durable than triumph. Again, she said, they spent an hour at it. She didn't talk about being tired or cold, and she wasn't good at it by the end, but she was better, and she'd built more wood than she'd split, which was something. He picked up the round she'd struggled with and split them himself, and she watched and tried to read what he did differently. And then she tried again.
"Why does it matter to you this much? " he asked when they were stacking the finished wood. Not accusatory, just actually curious. She thought about it before she answered, which she always did. Because everything I don't know how to do here is something I depend on you for and I don't she stopped set a piece of wood down and picked up another I need to know how to do things myself that matters to me he thought about that while they finished the stack he thought about what it meant the specific flavor of independence she was describing the need to not be dependent on any single person for survival that wasn't just frontier practicality that was something someone had learned the hard way the need to be capable capable of going it alone. He didn't pursue it, but he heard it.