She understood from his tone that this was not a casual observation. Mr. Caldwell says, "You've got roofing timber cut," he said. "The rafters go up myself," she said. Jesse looked at her with the expression of a man doing a calculation that keeps coming out different than he started expecting.
He was not skeptical exactly. He was recalibrating. All right, he said. They left before sunrise. She stood at the edge of the clearing in the gray pre-dawn and watched them ride south along the creek line.
And when they were gone, she turned back to the structure on the rise and looked at it in the earliest light. Four walls, wall plates level and true. Corners square, the whole thing standing against the mountain sky like it had been there longer than it had, which was the thing you wanted a structure to look like when it was done right. She went inside her canvas leanto, lay down on the bed roll, and was asleep in 4 minutes. She started the rafter work that afternoon and did not stop for 6 days.
The ladder she built from two straight poles and rungs she lashed with rope was not elegant. It functioned. She had never been interested in elegant when functional was what the situation required, a preference she had developed somewhere in the middle of a childhood that had not given her many opportunities to prioritize the decorative. The rafter work required her to be up the ladder and down the ladder and back up again more times than she counted. And each time she went up, she moved more slowly and more deliberately because she was now deep enough into the pregnancy that a fall was not a theoretical risk.
And she treated it accordingly. Deliberate, careful, up and down, down and up and down, and the rafters went in one at a time, and she checked each one for plum before she moved to the next. Amos Caldwell rode by twice during that week. The first time he did not stop, slowed at the edge of the clearing, looked at the structure, and moved on. She was on the ladder both times and did not wave, and he did not wave, and that was a satisfactory exchange.
The second time he stopped for perhaps 3 minutes, and she could feel him calculating something from below. She did not look down. She kept her hands on the rafter she was seating, and her weight where her weight needed to be. The ridge beam was the problem she had been deferring. The ridge beam ran the full length of the cabin at the apex of the roof, and every rafter pair would connect to it, and it had to be level and true before any of the rafters could be properly seated.
She had known from the beginning that the ridge beam was a two-person job. She had known it the way she had known the wall plates were a two-person job. Not because she was incapable, but because there were physical limits to what one person could hold and position simultaneously, and pretending otherwise was not determination. It was a different kind of stupidity. She had been working on a rigging solution for 3 days.
It was possible. She had constructed the theory of it from what she remembered Henry describing about lifting heavy timber in his uncle's workshop in Kentucky. A system of rope and leverage and a temporary support post that would hold one end while she moved the other. She had the materials. She had the theory.