It was on the sixth day that she found the split cedar. She had been working the northern edge of the property, clearing brush around one of the felled pines she needed to limb and cut for the upper courses. When she noticed the fallen tree lying parallel to the property line, half buried under years of accumulated needles and debris. She almost walked past it. Then something in the grain stopped her.
The way the light hit the exposed end where a section of bark had peeled back, showing wood so straight and tight it looked almost artificial. She crouched down, which took her a moment, and ran her thumb along the grain. Cedar, old growth blown down in some past storm, lying there, slowly going back to the earth. She stood back up and looked at it for a long time. She thought about shingles.
She thought about the roof and the west slope, and the problem she had been carrying in the back of her mind since she first walked the property, that her cedar stock was limited, and the grain in what she had was not ideal, and a poor shingle would not hold a Montana winter. And here was lying at the edge of her own property the best shingle-making material she had ever seen. Henry would have known immediately. She knew immediately too, which was not the same thing as Henry knowing it, but it was close enough to make her throat tighten just slightly, which she noticed and did not pursue. She went back to work, but she was lighter after that.
In the way a person is lighter when they have found something they needed without quite realizing how much they needed it. Amos Caldwell came back on the ninth day. She heard the horse at the same moment she heard it before, too late, because the creek noise covered the approach, and looked down from the second course to find him at the edge of the clearing, sitting the gray ran with the particular stillness of a mountain man, who does not move unless he has already decided where he is going. He looked at what she had built. He was quiet for long enough that she went back to her work because she had learned in 9 days that waiting for the mountain to make a noise was not a productive strategy.
Five courses by tonight, she said before he could offer what she expected, which was some version of a man explaining a thing she already understood. He dismounted without saying anything. She heard his boots on the ground below, then nothing, and then his voice from the south corner. That notching on the south wall. A pause.
That's clean work. She looked down at him. He was not performing inspection. He was genuinely looking the way Henry had looked at things with the particular quality of attention. That meant a person was actually seeing rather than looking at what they expected to see.
She had learned to read that difference in a face and it was in his. Thank you, she said. Who taught you? My husband. He nodded slowly.
He was not a man who said things quickly. She was coming to understand. He waited until the thought was finished before he let it out, which was either discipline or temperament, and she had not yet decided which. He was a carpenter, a good one. She set the ads down across the log and looked at him steadily.