Her work. The cabin was rough. She knew that the logs were sealed but not finished, and the floor was packed earth, and the window was covered with oiled paper because glass was expensive and could wait. But the corners were square, and the roof shed water, and the door hung true, and it was hers. She pressed her hand flat against the wall.
The wood was warm from the afternoon sun, the way a living thing is warm, and she stood there with her palm against the log she had felled and limbmed and notched and stacked and chinkedked. And she did not cry. It was a near thing. But she did not cry because the child needed her upright and because the work was not finished, and because the 30 seconds on the fifth course had been enough, she had used up her 30 seconds. There would be more of them later, and she would take them when they came.
She had built a cabin. She had done it in 51 days, 7 months pregnant at altitude alone. Oh, she had done it right. She went inside, lay down on the cot she had built into the north wall, and listened to the wind come down off the mountains, and moved through the timber on the northern boundary. She thought about the west slope.
She thought about the child, whose movements had been lower and more deliberate all week, in the way that a woman who has read enough about pregnancy comes to recognize as a repositioning, a preparation. She thought about Henry. She put her hand on her ribs where the child had settled for the night. "Your father would have liked this location," she said, "to the ceiling, to the dark, to the cabin walls that were hers and hers and hers. He would have found the notching on the second course a little shallow." He would have been right, and he would have helped me fix it.
After he was done being right about it, she fell asleep with her hand on her side and the wind outside and the roof over her head that she had put there herself. The storm came 3 weeks later, and it came the way the storms come in the San Juans in late August. Not gradually, not with warning, not with the decency to wait until a person was rested. It gathered all afternoon and hit at midnight and hit hard, and Clara woke to the sound of the west slope beginning to lose. She knew the sound immediately.
She had been listening for it in the back of her mind since she sealed the last shingle on that side. It was not a dramatic sound, not a crash, not a sudden catastrophe. It was a subtle wrongness in the percussion of rain on Cedar, a gap in the rhythm that meant somewhere in the upper courses the alignment had gone and water was finding a way through. She was on her feet before she had fully decided to be. She found the ladder in the dark, which took longer than it should have because she was moving by feel, and the rain was already heavy enough to make the lantern less than useful.
She found the spare shingles under the lean to where she had left them, knowing she would need them, which was the kind of knowing that felt in the moment less like foresight and more like something she should have acted on a week ago. She got the bundle under one arm and the lantern in the other hand, and had one foot on the second rung of the ladder. When the wind hit from the north with the specific malice of a wind that has been building strength all afternoon and chose this exact moment to spend it, the ladder went sideways. She went with it. She had just enough time to throw the lantern clear before she landed.
Hands first, then knees hard into the mud. And the breath left her body in one complete exhalation. And she stayed on her hands and knees in the dark and the rain for a moment that felt longer than it was. Checking The way a person checks whether everything was still attached and functioning. It was the child moved once a protest.