But I'd like to know, she says, whether you're going to keep riding this creek line or whether one of these mornings you'll just come in the front way and say so. He holds her eyes for a long moment. The front way, he says. If that's all right. It's all right, she says.
Winter arrived the way winter arrives at altitude. Not gradually, but as a decision. One morning, the world made a choice about itself, and there was nothing to do but adapt. Clara adapted. She had prepared for it with the same methodical attention she gave to everything, the firewood, the food stores, the remaining wall gaps re-chanked with fresh clay.
A second insulation layer under the floorboards where the cold came up from the mountain earth. The cabin was warm. Not luxuriously warm, she kept the fire lower than she would have liked to preserve wood, but warm enough and dry. The window glass Amos had given her made the room different in winter light. The snow outside turned the clearing luminous and strange, and the lamplight through the glass in the evenings made the cabin look from the outside like something inhabited, like something chosen.
Amos came three times a week now. No pretense. He came in the front way. He fixed things because there was always something in a structure built under time pressure by a person learning as she went. He replaced two wall chinks letting in cold air.
He reinforced the lean too. He looked at the chair joints she knew were substandard and said carefully, "Do you want me to?" And she said, "Yes, but I want to watch how you do it." They sat on the floor together with the chair upside down between them. And he showed her and she did the second chair herself while he held the work steady. Your husband taught you well, he said, watching. I taught myself, she said.
He provided the education. There's a difference. Amos considered this. Fair point, he said. Tommy came too with his carved wooden horse, rough work, first attempt, legs slightly uneven, and presented it to young Henry with the somnity of a man offering something he had spent real time on.
"He's 2 months old," Clara said. "It's for when he's older," Tommy said, slightly defensive. She looked at the horse. The ears were right, and the tail had a curve that showed he had looked at a real animal and tried to put what he saw into the wood. Thank you, she said.
He'll like it when he's older. Tommy put the horse on the shelf where Henry could see it from the cradle and appeared satisfied with the arrangement and went to Split Wood without being asked. She watched him go and thought about what it meant to have people come through your door. Not because they had to, but because they chose to be there. In January, a letter arrived from Kentucky.