She was not entirely certain she had the physical capacity given that she was now 8 months pregnant and the ridge beam weighed more than she did and her margin for error on the ladder had narrowed considerably since she'd started. On the third morning of the second week, she was at the top of the ladder with one end of the ridge beam, trying to work it into its temporary seat, and it was not going. The beam kept rolling. She was holding it against her shoulder, and the altitude sweat made everything slick, and she had tried twice, and the third attempt was starting to feel like the kind of thing that ends badly when she heard boots on the ground below. And then Amos Caldwell's voice, level and close, from the other end of the beam.
What angle do you need it? She did not answer for a second because she was focused on not dropping the beam. 15° from vertical, she said. Right end seats first. Right end, he said.
And then she felt the far end of the beam lift and the weight redistribute and the roll stopped and the beam became suddenly a thing she could actually manage rather than a thing that was managing her. Ease your end down about an inch, he said. She did. The beam slid into its seat with the particular solidity of wood finding wood the way it was cut to find it. Good, he said.
She held it. She could feel the seat was correct. She drove the temporary peg with three strikes and stepped back from the ladder top and stood there for a moment with her hand on the beam and her breathing finding its way back to normal. Then she came down the ladder. I was already below looking up at the beam, eyeing it for level with the same eye she had seen Jesse use on the plate timber.
He was correct in his assessment before he said anything. She knew it was level. She had set it level. "Thank you," she said. He nodded.
He looked at the structure for a long moment in the particular silence of a person taking stock of something real. "You're going to make the deadline," he said. I know some people wouldn't have. He said it without ceremony. He was not flattering her.
He was stating an assessment the way he would state the depth of a well or the quality of a fence line, which was the only kind of assessment she had any use for. Some people would have had more help. She said something moved in his expression then. Something she had not seen before and did not look at too directly because she was not ready to look at it directly and she knew it. Something beneath the surface of a face that was generally not a face that showed much on the surface.
He started toward his horse. "Send word if the roofing is too much," he said. She did not answer. She watched him go, and she thought, climbing back up to check the ridge beam with her own level that she was not going to have to send word. The roofing was not going to be too much.