Young Henry pulled himself upright against her shoulder, wobbled and held. She put her hand behind him and waited. He stood there unsteady, effortful, entirely determined in the cabin his father had dreamed and his mother had built on the ground that had been fought for and won. In the territory that had underestimated her and would not make that mistake again. The creek ran outside in the last of the mountain light.
The door stood open. She had built something real, and it was going to last. The morning after, Amos Caldwell rode away the first time. Clara Whitmore was already back at the logs before the sun had cleared the eastern ridge. She had not slept well, which was not new.
She had not slept well since Henry died. But the sleeplessness before had been the kind that hollowed a person out. All grief and no purchase. This was different. This was the sleeplessness of someone whose mind was running calculations that had nowhere to stop.
She had four courses up. She needed 14 to reach the wall plate height she had settled on. She was working against a deadline that did not care about her circumstances, and she understood in the particular cleareyed way of a woman who had run a household on a carpenter's wages, and knew what it meant when the numbers were tight, that feeling sorry for herself was a luxury with a cost she could not afford. So, she did not. She picked up the ads and she went back to work.
The corner notching was getting cleaner. She could feel it not in any way she could have described to someone who had not done it, but in the specific physical knowledge of when a tool is moving through wood the way it is supposed to move, when the resistance is right and the angle is right and the cut will be true. Henry had tried to explain it to her once years ago in his workshop in Kentucky while she handed him chisels and asked questions he always answered. You'll know when it's wrong, he said. Wrong has a feeling.
He was correct. Wrong had a feeling. So did right. She was beginning to know the difference in her own hands. And that knowledge felt like something she had earned with her blood and her blisters and two ruined logs in the kindling pile.
By midm morning, she was sweating through her dress. And the child was making her aware of gravity in ways that required her to stop and breathe and reset her stance every 40 minutes or so. She had worked out a system for this, a rhythm of effort and recovery that was less efficient than she would have liked and more efficient than anyone watching from the road would have predicted. She was aware that people watched from the road. She had been aware of it since the second day.
Men passing on their way north, slowing their wagons or their horses, looking at the big woman with the axe and the pregnant belly and the 40 acres of raw timber. She could feel the shape of what they thought from 50 yards away. She did not look at them. She did not wave. She swung the axe and let them think what they wanted and kept the corner plum.