Natural and unhurried. The next week passes in the hard arithmetic of physical labor. She cuts the sill logs to length and moves them with a rope and rolling pole system she works out from something Henry described once about moving heavy timber. It is slow and requires planning each move three steps ahead. And the child's weight against her muscles makes certain efforts genuinely painful.
She stops when she needs to. She eats when she needs to. She rises before first light and keeps going. The corner notching is the part she has worried about most. Log cabin joinery is not complicated in principle.
The logs are notched at each end so they lock at the corners, carrying the weight of each successive course down to the foundation, but the notches must match, which means measuring against the log below, transferring the curve, cutting to the line, fitting tight. Henry had notched corners the way a calligrapher writes specific sequence, never guessing, always measuring twice. She can reconstruct the sequence in her head. What she cannot reconstruct is the feel of it, the tactile knowledge of when the ads is cutting correctly. She ruins two logs before she finds it.
She uses them for firewood and learns from both mistakes. By the third corner, she is cutting with something close to confidence. When she fits the first two courses and checks them with the level and finds them plum and square, she sits on the ground next to them and is still for several minutes. It is the first thing she has built, hers. She presses her palm against the top log, bark rough and warm under her hand, and does not allow herself to cry.
It is a near thing. Amos Caldwell comes back on the ninth day, early morning before the heat has settled. Clara is up on the second course cutting notches when she hears the horse. She does not stop working. "You've got four courses up," he says from below.
"Five by tonight," she says. She does not look down. She hears him dismount, hears his boots on the ground below. Then that corner notching on the south wall. That's clean work.
She looks down at him. Then he is standing at the corner actually looking at it. Not performing an inspection. Genuinely looking. She has learned to tell the difference between men who look at things and men who perform looking.
Thank you. Who taught you? My husband. He nods slowly. He was a carpenter.