Chapter 2 #3
Something moves across her face I don’t have a clean word for and don’t go looking for one. “And where do you sleep?”
“Floor,” I say. “I’m too big for it to matter much either way.”
She looks like she wants to argue that on principle, the size of me set against the size of any floor built for men half again smaller. Then she looks at me a second time, proper, and seems to decide arguing with a wall gets a wall nowhere. “All right,” she says. “Thank you. Truly.”
“Don’t thank me twice for one room.” I nod toward the box. “See your horse fed and watered. I’ve got work to do before that hive goes anywhere near a wall of mine.”
I fetch the spare box from the shed, two lengths of good ash, no crack in either.
Getting the frames across from the old box to the new one in near dark is slow work, the kind that wants patience over strength.
I go slower than I need to on her account, careful with my hands near comb I could crush without meaning to.
It only takes one breath of forgetting how much bigger my hands are than the wood they’re moving.
She works alongside me without waiting to be told, holding the lamp steady.
The whole while she says low things under her breath to the bees themselves, words I can’t quite catch.
I don’t ask what she’s telling them. Some things a man leaves be, out of respect more than lack of interest.
Twice my hand comes close enough to hers at the frame that I feel the plain difference in it, mine near twice the width of hers, knuckle to knuckle.
Both times I ease back before we touch, more from old habit than any thought behind it.
A man my size learns early which things break if he forgets where he’s put his weight.
I mind it. I’ve minded the chipped corner of my own tusk just as long, around anything small enough to catch on it. Both are old habits by now.
Once the last frame’s set and the lid’s down snug, I bank enough of the shop fire to keep it low through the night.
I show her the stair at the back, narrow, my own shoulders scraping both walls of it, always have.
I built it too economical with lumber, years back, before I’d have thought a second person might ever climb it behind me.
The room’s plain. Bed, one shelf, a window looking north into the dark line of the wood.
I’ve not lit a lamp up here in longer than I can place, past hauling green timber through to season.
It shows in the dust I ought to have swept and hadn’t thought to.
I wasn’t expecting company of any kind, this side of midsummer.
“It’s not much,” I say.
“It’s a roof and a bed and nobody making me pay in copper I don’t have yet. It’s plenty.”
She looks like she means that too, no less plain than the thanks she gave downstairs.
I find I believe her easier than I believe most people who tell me a thing is enough.
Most say it and mean the opposite. This one says it like she’s had a good deal less than this before, and knows the exact weight of the difference.
The goose rides up under one of her arms, already asleep or near enough. One orange eye cracks at me from the doorway, like it’s decided to reserve judgment till morning.
I leave her the lamp and take a stub of candle for myself. Then I go back down to the shop, to see about the split board before I let myself lie down on any floor.
The shop’s gone quiet with the particular hush it keeps past midnight, tools hung dark on their pegs, the last of the fire ticking low in the grate behind me.
I set the cracked board up on the trestle and run my thumb down the split.
I judge how deep it runs before I commit a new length of ash to replacing it.
Simple work. The kind I could do with my eyes shut, which is good, because half of me isn’t thinking about the board at all.
There’s a woman asleep two floors up, in a bed I built for nobody.
In the space of one evening she’s decided more things about my yard, my box, and my company than most people manage in a season.
There’s a goose in the corner by the banked fire that hasn’t stopped watching me since I set a bowl of water within its reach.
It’s waiting, I’d guess, for me to prove its opinion of me right after all.
And there’s the sill still sitting on the bench by the door, the one that wouldn’t take its mark no matter how I planed it.
It’s still carrying that strain I can feel plain as a pulse, and I still can’t put a single honest word to it.
I look at it once on my way past, the split board under my arm, and don’t stop long enough to make more of it than that.
It’s late. I’ve a joint to cut before I can rest, and a hive to keep whole till morning.
And a house that’s gone from mine alone to something else altogether in under an hour, before I’d so much as decided whether I wanted it to.
I bank the fire lower, set my own lamp by the bench, and get to work on the one thing tonight I know exactly how to fix.