16. PORCH REBUILD
sixteen
"PORCH REBUILD"
The thaw came on the ninety-second day, the false reprieve that arrives once in a northern winter and fools nothing that has lived through one, and Casey took the gift of it and put Hannah to work on the porch.
A board had rotted through under the kitchen window, soft as bread where the snowmelt had pooled against it for years, and a man could not let a hole in his own porch go once he'd put his boot through it.
So they had the warm hour, maybe two, before the cold came back, and Casey ran the saw and Hannah held the level, and the dogs lay in the wet melting yard and watched two people argue about a quarter inch.
"Your spacing's wide," she said. She had laid the level across the new deck boards as a straightedge and was sighting the gaps between them, and she was right, and she knew she was right, which was the part that made him set the saw down.
"These two. You've got a quarter inch of gap here and a hair there.
Water'll find the wide one first. You'll be back under here in three winters. "
"Quarter inch lets the wood breathe." He came and crouched and sighted along the boards beside her, their shoulders nearly touching in the thin warm light. "Tight boards cup. You want a gap."
"I want an even gap. I don't care which gap you pick.
Pick one and give me all of them the same.
" She tapped the level. "You measure a thing once and trust the number, or you eyeball every cut and tell yourself you've got a good eye.
You've got a good eye. But a good eye's a thing that gets tired by the fourth board, and these are the fourth and fifth boards, and they're wide. "
Casey looked at the boards. He looked at her.
Then he picked up the pencil from behind his ear and made a mark, and reset the stop block on the saw to a number instead of a memory, and cut the next board to the mark and laid it in, and the gap was even, and he did not say she was right because he had already said it by changing the cut.
She had learned to read that in him. The concession was in the hands, never the mouth, and she had stopped needing it to be in the mouth.
"You'd have made a fair carpenter," he said, which was, for Casey, a sonnet.
"I'd have made a terrible carpenter. I just know how to make a man measure twice." She sat back on her heels, pleased, and the old dog chose that moment to commit a crime.
Mose had been lying by the toolbox with the patience of an old foreman supervising a slow crew, and he rose now and ambled over and took the screwdriver out of the open tray, delicate as a gentleman lifting a fork, and carried it three feet and lay down on it with the deep satisfaction of a dog who has improved a situation.
He put his chin over his prize and looked at them both, daring anyone to require the screwdriver back.
"He does that," Casey said. "Takes the one tool you're about to reach for. He's done it eleven years. I think he likes being needed."
"Don't we all." Hannah went and negotiated with the old dog, who surrendered the screwdriver in exchange for both her hands working his ears, a trade he plainly considered a swindle in his own favor.
They worked on through the warm hour, and Hannah found she liked it, the plain labor of it, the holding and the marking and the handing-up of boards.
She had spent eight years in rooms where the work was watching people leave.
Here the work was making a thing that would hold, a floor a person could stand on through three winters and not put a boot through, and there was a rightness in it she had not felt in a long time.
She did not say so. She suspected Casey already knew, because he kept finding small jobs to hand her, the level and the pencil and the box of screws, keeping her in the work, and she understood that this was a man courting a woman by building a porch with her, which was the only dialect of courtship either of them spoke without an accent.
"You're enjoying this," Casey said, handing her the next board.
"I'm enjoying being right about your spacing." She set the level to it. "Don't mistake it for enjoying manual labor."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He marked a cut. "Hold that end."
"I am holding that end. I've been holding that end for an hour. You're the one who keeps wandering off to admire your own saw."
"It's a good saw." Sawdust drifted off the blade into the thin warm light.
"It's a fine saw," she allowed, "and a worse carpenter than the woman holding your boards."
"The woman holding my boards has been a carpenter for forty minutes."
"And I've already caught two cuts you'd have buried under here. Imagine me by spring."
He almost laughed, which from Casey was a standing ovation, and cut the board to the mark.
At noon they ate Bauer's late wife's soup.
Joshua had pressed the recipe on Hannah at the archive weeks back, written out in a careful hand on an index card gone translucent with kitchen grease, Esther's, underlined twice, a widower handing a thing forward because Hannah was a person you handed things to.
She had made a pot of it that morning in the bunkhouse, barley and venison and a great deal of pepper, and they ate it standing in the half-finished porch with the thaw dripping off the eaves, and it was the soup of a dead woman a grieving man had loved, eaten by two people building a porch, and Hannah thought the whole afternoon was made of things like that, the living carrying the dead forward by doing ordinary work in their recipes and on their behalf.
When they set the bowls down Casey did not pick the saw back up right away.
They were standing at the new porch post, the one good upright he'd sunk that morning, and the thaw was in the air, and he reached out and took the level out of her hand and set it down, slow, telling her what he meant before he did it so she could step back if she wanted to, which was the whole of how he did everything.
She did not step back. He put his hand at the side of her jaw, careful, the same hand that had set a quarter-inch gap, and he kissed her at the porch post in the dripping thaw, and it was nothing like October.
October had been the floor tilting. This was a man who had decided, who had measured it twice and was sure of the number, and she put her hand flat on his chest not to push but to feel that his heart was going as hard as hers, and it was, and that was the thing she would keep out of the whole day.
"That wasn't the case," she said, when they came apart, because one of them had to say it and she was braver about saying things.
"No," he said. "That was just me. I wanted you to know the difference between the once in October and this.
October was a thing that happened to us.
This is a thing I picked." He picked up the level and put it back in her hand, and the moment closed gently and held its warmth, and they went back to the boards, because the thaw was already going thin at the edges.
She bent back to the level with her face warm in the cold air and her heart still going hard, and let herself have it for one minute, the simple animal gladness of having been kissed by a man who meant it, before she put it away with the rest of the things that could be taken from her.
Young, she had learned that you did not get to keep what you loved, that the universe sent a sedan up your road and took your sister off a rim and asked you back to work on Wednesday.
Now, at forty-one, she was relearning it backward, board by board on a thawing porch: that some things a person was allowed to keep, if she was brave enough to want them out loud.
She was not quite that brave yet. But she was closer than she had been in October.
She did not bring him the bad news until the boards were down and the tools put up, because some news you do not hand a man with a saw running.
"Daniel's gone quiet," she said. They were in the kitchen by then, the cold coming back hard outside the dark window.
"Three calls, no callback. That's not Daniel.
Daniel calls back the same day, every time, even to say he's got nothing.
His daughter answered the last one and she was careful with me.
Polite and careful and finished fast." Hannah wrapped her hands around the warm cup.
"Somebody got to him, Casey. I don't know with what.
Money or worry or a quiet word about how an old man doesn't want trouble at his age.
But our one living witness has stopped picking up the phone, and he stopped this week. "
Casey went still at the counter.
"And the boundary amendment I pulled in November, the second copy I went back for to corroborate the camp dates, it's sealed.
Pending litigation, the clerk said, embarrassed, because there's no litigation.
A Brainerd law office filed to seal it eleven days ago.
" She looked up at him. "It's the same office that pulled our records behind us in November.
He's not just reading what we ask for anymore.
He's reaching out and shutting the doors as we walk up to them.
The witness and the record, both, this week.
That's not a man watching. That's a man acting. "
"He marked you at the rink," Casey said. "And then he started moving."
"He started moving the week after I sat next to his wife.
" She did not say it to blame herself; she had stopped doing that with him.
She said it because it was the true shape of the thing.
"The case is harder than it was a chapter of our lives ago.
The easy doors are closing one by one, fast, and the clock's still running underneath.
We've got the dog and the bedside voice and a June he can't account for, and we've got a man with the reach to seal a county record in eleven days.
" She set the cup down. "That's the room we're standing in now. "
"There's a thing in it that helps us, even so," Casey said.
He turned his cup a quarter on the wood.
"An innocent man doesn't seal a county record.
An innocent man lets a tired old witness in Hayward say whatever he remembers, because there's nothing in the old man's memory that can hurt him.
Every door Hagen shuts tells me we're standing outside the right house.
" He looked at her. "He's not covering for Matty out of kindness.
He's covering himself. It doesn't get us into a courtroom.
But it tells me, for certain now, the dog had it right and the paper had it right, and the man eight miles south knows we're close enough that he'll spend a Brainerd lawyer to slow us down. "
Casey took it the way he took weather. He did not rage at it.
He turned it over for what it would do under load and then he nodded, once, and said they would work the camp paper itself, the payroll and the cook and the fuel logs, the things too small and too scattered for a Brainerd office to find and seal, and that he'd drive to Hayward himself and stand on Daniel's porch like a neighbor, no pressure, just a face, and let the old man decide.
It was a plan. It was thinner than the plan they'd had that morning, and they both knew it, and they did not pretend otherwise.
She left for the bunkhouse near eleven. Crossing the dark yard she looked back, the habit of a woman who reads rooms, and through the lit kitchen window she saw him at the desk.
He had pulled the chair to the bottom right drawer.
He had it open. She stood in the cold and watched him lay his hand flat on the folder inside it, just rest it there, the whole of his palm on the thing he read once a year, and she watched him sit with his hand on it for a long moment in the lamplight, and then close the drawer without taking the folder out.
He did not look up at the window, but she did not mistake that for not knowing.
A man who heard a sedan crest the rise at half a mile knew where a woman stood in his own dark yard.
The curtain was open because he had left it open — he was letting her see the drawer he could not yet open, or at least not stopping her, which from Casey came to the same thing.
He had not read it. And Hannah, standing in the dark with her breath smoking, understood that his not-reading said more than the countdown on the wall ever could.
The folder was the wound he could not yet open even with her in the house and the thaw in the air and a kiss at the porch post chosen and meant.
A man with that much door still shut in him was a man who needed time she was not sure the clock would give him.
And eight miles south, a man who could seal a record in eleven days was learning the names of everyone the two of them had ever thought to ask.