I'll send word when I'm ready, she says. He nods once, collects his horse, leaves. The two men arrive 10 days later. Jesse, the older one, has done timber work before and finds a working rhythm with Clara quickly. Tommy, the younger, not yet 20, stares at the walls she has built with an expression that is not condescension, but genuine bewilderment.
This is straight, he says, squinting along the south wall. How'd you keep it straight? Checked every course before I set the next one. Most men don't bother, Tommy says. Most men pay for it later.
Clara says the wall plates go up in a single day. Without Jesse and Tommy, it would have taken her three times as long and probably come out wrong. She acknowledges this privately and does not say it out loud. When they are done, she feeds them at the outdoor fire. Tommy talks more than the meal requires.
Jesse eats carefully and says the coffee is good, which she suspects is the highest compliment he usually gives. Mr. Caldwell says, "You've got roofing timber cut," Jesse says. "I'll put the rafters up myself," she says. Jesse looks at her with the expression of a man recalculating a figure that keeps coming out different than he expected.
"All right," he says. She puts up the rafters over the following week. Working from a ladder, she builds from two straight poles and a series of rungs. Not elegant, functional. The rafter work is slow because she is working alone and the pregnancy makes climbing complicated.
She is more deliberate now, understanding that a fall is a risk she cannot afford. Amos rides by twice. The first time he does not stop, just slows at the clearing's edge, looks at the structure, moves on. The second time he stops for 3 minutes and she can feel him calculating something. Then on the third day of the second week, he comes and dismounts without speaking and begins helping with the ridge beam without being asked.
She is at the top of the ladder with one end of the beam, working it into its seat, and it keeps wanting to roll. And she has already tried twice. He simply comes from below, catches the far end, and walks it up from the other side in silence. Ease your end down about an inch, he says. She does.
The beam seats. Good. He says. She comes down the ladder. He is already checking from below, eyeing the beam for level.