If this keeps up through tomorrow, the far cattle aren't going to find their way to the feed. I know, Bramwell said. Take Denny and Calhoun and bring them in before noon. Leave the south pasture for now. That fence line will hold.
He looked up when Miriam came in. Mrs. Hensley, I need to talk to you about the root cellar. She said now it won't take long. She told him what she'd found when she'd done a complete inventory 2 days ago.
The quantities, the gaps, what was going to run short first, what needed to be preserved before it turned. We need to spend about 3 days doing nothing but putting food up for me in our Nell and Samuel to help me in the kitchen and give me one of the hands who isn't needed with the cattle. Take Ferris, Bramwell said immediately. Ferris was 45 and had a bad knee that made cattle work in deep snow genuinely dangerous. He knows how to smoke meat.
He helped my wife. He stopped briefly. He's done it before. Good, Miriam said. Also, I need to move the bean stores to the lower shelf.
The temperature fluctuation on the upper shelf has been too high, and you're going to lose them if they freeze. Bramwell looked at her for a moment with an expression. She'd started to recognize a slight narrowing of attention that meant he was revising something he'd previously assumed. "What else?" He said.
"That's the urgent part," she said. "The rest can wait until tonight." She turned and went back to the house and behind her she heard August say something quiet that she didn't catch and Bramwell's response which she also didn't catch. She told herself she wasn't curious about what it was. She was a little curious.
She didn't go back to find out. The three days of preserving were hard, grinding work of the kind that left you with aching shoulders and smelled permanently of woodsmoke. Ferris turned out to be exactly who Bramwell had suggested, a quiet, unhurried man who knew what he was doing and didn't feel the need to explain it unless someone asked, which Miriam respected. Nell threw herself into the work with her characteristic intensity, and Samuel was useful in the way that 10-year-old boys could be when they decided something was worth being useful for, which was to say inconsistently, but with occasional bursts of genuine competence. By the end of the third day, the root cellar was reorganized, and the smokehouse was properly stocked, and Miriam had a written inventory of everything they had, and how long it would last, and what would need to be replenished first.
She was satisfied in the way. She was satisfied when a system worked not triumphant, not relieved, just functionally settled, the way you felt when you'd solved the problem in front of you and could move to the next one. That evening, Bramwell looked at the inventory she'd left on the kitchen table and then looked at her across the table. You've done this before, he said. Run a household through winter?
Yes. Not just that. Managed a large operation. He gestured at the papers. This is how you run a supply chain, not just a kitchen.