It doesn't have to be the same one." She went back down the hall, her small feet quiet on the floorboards. He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time. He looked at the place on the wall where the picture had been.
He thought about what it had been. A photograph. The only one he'd owned, taken in the summer of 1869, when he'd still believed that things would continue the way they were going. He'd taken it down 2 years after the accident because looking at it had cost him something every single morning that he couldn't keep affording.
He got up. He went to the bottom drawer of the dresser, the one he didn't open. He stood there with his hand on the drawer for a minute. He didn't open it.
But he stood there a little longer than he needed to before he went back to bed. It was the first night in 8 years that he'd thought about what used to be on that wall and not felt solely the need to look away. He patched the bunkhouse wall on a Saturday, and Evan worked beside him the whole morning without being asked twice about anything. That was the thing about the boy that Caleb kept noticing. He didn't need to be told the same thing more than once, and he didn't need to be watched to make sure he was doing it.
He just listened the first time and then did the work. And when he ran into a problem, he thought about it for a moment before asking, which meant that when he did ask, it was a real question and not just a way of avoiding the effort of figuring something out himself. Caleb had known grown men who couldn't manage that. They worked the north wall of the bunkhouse from the inside, identifying the gap, a split in the timber that had opened up from repeated freeze-thaw cycles over several winters, and packing it with oakum first and then driving a strip of split wood over the top to hold it. It wasn't beautiful work, but it would hold the heat.
That was what mattered in November. "My dad used to say the point of a repair is to fix the problem, not to make it look like there was never a problem." Evan said at some point, holding the strip in place while Caleb drove the nails. "Smart man." Caleb said.
"He was." A pause. "Most of the time." Caleb didn't push at that. He drove the last nail and stepped back and pressed his hand flat against the wall to feel for draft.
"Nothing." He nodded. "Good." Evan said. "Good."
Caleb agreed. They moved the family into the bunkhouse that afternoon, such as it was. Mara had done things to the interior that Caleb hadn't expected. There was a rag rug on the floor that he didn't recognize, which she said she'd found rolled up behind the feed barn and beaten the dust out of. There were curtains on the single window, cut from a piece of cloth she'd traded Margaret Danner for, apparently without Caleb knowing any transaction had occurred.