Tommy came too, less formally than Amos, but more frequently in the way of a young man who has attached himself to a situation and considers his presence self-evidently welcome, which in his case it was. He arrived one December morning with the carved wooden horse he had made himself, the legs slightly uneven, the body rougher than he clearly wanted it to be, and presented it to young Henry with the ceremony of a man offering something real. He's 3 months old, Clara said. It's for when he's older, Tommy said. She looked at the carving.
The proportions were off in the body, but the ears were right, and the tail had a curve that told her Tommy had looked at an actual horse and tried to put what he saw into the wood rather than what he assumed a horse looked like. That was the difference between a person who was going to learn something and a person who wasn't, and she recognized it because Henry had told her about it once, years ago, and because she had been that person herself on her first morning with an axe. When she had stopped and actually looked at the pine before she swung rather than swinging at what she thought a pine was. He'll like it when he's older, she said. Tommy put the horse on the shelf where young Henry could see it from the cradle and appeared satisfied and went outside to split wood without being asked.
She watched him go and thought about what it meant to have people come through your door, not because they had to, not because circumstance had brought them there, but because they chose to be there. She had lived for so long in the compressed solitude of a woman with no permanent place that she had not fully understood what she was missing until she had a door of her own and people chose to come through it. In January, a letter arrived from Kentucky. She recognized the handwriting before she saw the name. Henry's older brother, Will, who had helped them plan the journey west and had not written since she sent him news of Henry's death 8 months ago.
She had not expected a reply. She had written because it was the right thing to do and because Will had a right to know, not because she expected anything to come back to her. Will's letter was three pages, cramped and a little breathless. He expressed grief for him in the particular awkward uneven way of a man who had loved someone and did not know what to do with it now that the person was gone. He told her she was brave.
He told her about his own life in ways that were elliptical and suggested difficulty. He was not quite naming. At the end, he wrote, "Henry always said you were the strongest person he knew. I didn't understand that until now. I think he was right." She folded the letter and held it for a moment and looked at the window, the glass window Amos had sent Tommy to install that changed the room that let the light in differently and thought about the word strong and how often it was used as a substitute for seeing a person clearly.
People called her strong when what they meant was that she was managing something that impressed them. People called her strong when what they meant was that she was doing something they did not want to have to think about too carefully. People called her strong the way they called a thing useful, acknowledging the function without attending to the cost. But Will was not using it that way. Will was using it the way Henry had used it, which was to say, "I see what you are carrying, and I see that you have not put it down.
That was different. That was worth something." She wrote back that evening, longer than she usually wrote, and she told Will about the cabin and the legal dispute, and young Henry, his nephew, who had his uncle's dark hair, and was at 3 months old already attempting opinions about his circumstances, that he expressed with considerable volume and conviction. She told him that Henry had been right about the land. That 40 acres of mountain ground was something a family could build something real on, that the building had been harder than either of them had imagined, and also more possible than she had known, and that she thought about his brother every day. In the way you think about the person who started something, you are still in the middle of finishing.