He collected his horse without ceremony and rode north along the creek line and was gone before she had climbed back to the third rung of the ladder. She thought about him that evening while she ate beans and hard bread, the same thing she had eaten for 6 days because variety was not the priority. Trying to decide what kind of man he was and coming up mostly short. She had two categories for men with adjacent land and a general opinion about what should happen to hers. Amos Caldwell did not fit cleanly into either one.
The observation about the corner work had not been flattery. She had been watching for flattery which men deployed the way they deployed apologies as a mechanism to get something dressed up as a gift. There was no flattery in what he had said. It was assessment, clean assessment, the kind Henry gave to other men's work when he thought it was good, which was not frequent, but was always meant. She decided she would watch.
She would keep building. She would send word about the wall plates when she was ready and not before. And she would see what happened when the two men arrived. The following 10 days were the hardest she had worked in her life, which was saying something because Clara Whitmore had been working hard since she was 8 years old, helping her mother put up preserves in August heat in a Kentucky farmhouse with no shade and not enough jars. She cut the sill logs to length and moved them with the rope and rolling pole system she had worked out, which was slow and required thinking three moves ahead and resting between each one.
She had to stop more often than she wanted. The child was sitting lower now, a solid, consistent pressure against her pelvis that changed the way she moved and made standing upright for long periods something she had to think about rather than something that happened naturally. She stopped when she had to. She kept count of every log moved, every notch cut, every course fitted and leveled. She did not keep count of the time she sat down in the dirt and breathed and told herself she was going to get back up in one minute and then got back up because those did not need counting.
They were just the work. The fifth course went up on a Thursday, and when she checked it with the level and found it plum, she did something she had not done since the first corners came out square. She sat on the top log with her legs hanging over the side and looked at the clearing from that height and let herself have 30 seconds of feeling something that was not grief or calculation. She was not sure what to call it, something that was in the same territory as pride, but quieter than that, more private. The land below her and the timber framing under her and the mountains in the distance and 40 acres of Colorado wilderness that had her name on a piece of paper in a territorial office and she had built five courses of it with her own hands.
Henry would have found the notching on the second course slightly shallow. She knew that she had known it when she cut it and had considered tearing it out and decided the structural integrity was sound enough to let it stand. He would have argued about it. She could hear the argument. It made the 30 seconds feel inhabited.
Then she got back down and kept working. She sent word to Amos on a Saturday, 10 days after he had offered. She sent it with a supply rider passing south. A single line, the cabin location, the words wall plates ready, and her name. She did not know if the man would deliver it.
Did not know the logistics of Caldwell's ranch operation. Did not know if the offer was still standing. She sent it anyway because the wall plates were ready and she had to trust something. The two men arrived Monday morning before she had finished her breakfast. Jesse was the older one, somewhere in his mid-40s, built lean and angular with a working man's economy of movement that told her immediately he had done timber work before and knew what he was doing.