Rough Cut Mountain Man (Autumn Harvest in Silver Ridge #3)

1. Faye

one

Faye

The gate is padlocked and the fence is down twelve feet to the left of it, so I go over the fence.

It’s eight in the morning, minus two degrees, and I am dressed for a city four hundred kilometres and one mountain range away. Frost off the top wire melts on my palm, and I stand in the ditch grass on the wrong side of my own property line and think: sixty-one acres.

I've never seen it. My grandmother held this ground her whole life, lived twenty minutes from me in Victoria for the last thirty years of it, and asked me to come up with her every single May — and I have looked at it exactly once, in a satellite image, on a laptop, on a ferry.

It was never a no. It was always next year — a licensing exam, then a project, then a project going sideways, then a whole calendar full of colours.

So I walk it, because I'm not signing anything I haven't stood on.

It goes up. Cottonwood, alder, nettle gone to rust, and then the ground firms and lifts. It’s flat, maybe twelve acres, dry underfoot after a wet week. I put my fingers in the soil out of professional reflex. Good drainage. South-facing. In eight years I have never been handed a site this obliging.

The aspens along the top are going. Not turned — going, that ten-day window where they're more gold than green and the whole stand moves at once when the air does. There's a creek at the far edge running clear over rock, loud out of all proportion to its size.

And halfway along it, something I read before I understand it: a rectangle of settled ground, thirty feet by twenty, and lilacs. Four of them, ancient, gone feral, in a line no weather makes. An apple tree twenty paces off with a trunk like a fist.

Nobody plants lilacs in a straight line by accident. Somebody had a door there.

I make a note in my phone and keep walking, because that is apparently the kind of person I am.

October up here smells like woodsmoke and cold ground and sap. Nothing in Victoria smells like that.

And then I hear it.

A long rising whine, mechanical, close, and it doesn't stop. It settles into a working pitch and holds. I follow it to the lip of the bench and look down through the trees.

There's a mill directly below me.

Steam coming off the yard where the sun's got at the frost, a man in a hi-vis vest running a forklift through it.

The timber is stacked in a way that stops me — sorted by species and dimension, ends painted, stickers laid between every course so the air can move.

Somebody built those piles the way other people build sentences.

Nothing's leaning, nothing's wasted, and function done that well is a kind of beauty, which is the argument I've been making to clients for eight years and losing.

I go down the hill.

The office is a low building of hand-milled cedar going silver at the corners. Inside, it smells like sawdust and burnt coffee. There's a counter with a live edge and a hand-planed face, oiled so many times it's gone the colour of brewed tea.

I put my palm on it before I can stop myself.

"Nineteen fifty-two," a voice says behind me. "My grandfather's."

I turn.

He fills the doorway from the mill floor, and I mean that literally — shoulders inside the frame with an inch to spare either side. Six-three or four, easy. Canvas jacket, sawdust in the seams of it and caught in the dark of his beard. Late thirties. Forearms bare to the cold, roped with muscle.

He takes his gloves off one finger at a time. Slow. I watch him do it and my thighs quiver.

I've met a hundred men on job sites. I know how to hold a clipboard and a line and not be moved.

This is not that. This is my whole body noticing him before my brain finishes the paperwork: the size of him, the calm, the deliberate way he handles his own hands.

It arrives all at once, it doesn't ask, and I have to look back down at the counter to reset my face.

"Faye Corrigan," I say.

"Gideon Marsh." He sets the gloves down. "You look like her."

I know who he means immediately. "You knew my grandmother?"

"Everybody in this valley knew Ada Corrigan." He crosses to the coffee pot, considers it, decides against it on my behalf. "She told me once I stacked my cedar wrong."

"Do you?"

"No." A pause. "But she was ninety and she was pointing at somebody else's yard, so I let her have it."

Dry as bone, delivered without a flicker, and I laugh out loud in a mill office at eight forty in the morning.

I came here braced and worrying about the worst case scenario.

Two calls from this man's lawyer and one from a realtor, and I'd built a whole picture: a guy circling my grandmother's land like wolves, ready to tell me what a girl from the coast doesn't understand about the interior.

I brought comparables. I brought my flat voice.

"You want to sell?” he asks.

"I want to sell fast, at a fair number, and be back in Victoria by the end of the month."

He nods slowly. "Sixty-one acres. Twelve of it's the bench above my landing, good ground, drains right. The rest is bush and the creek and a lot of rock." He names a number.

It's fair. The comps in this valley are thin and weird and I've done the work, and his number is not the number of a man trying to take something from a woman with a dead grandmother and a loan balance she doesn't discuss at parties.

It's within four percent of my own valuation. Over it, if I'm honest.

I say a number thirty grand higher and I hear how it sounds — reflex, habit, the muscle memory of eight years of negotiating fee schedules with contractors who assume I'll fold. It comes out of me the way a hand comes up to catch something thrown.

Gideon doesn't flinch. Doesn't smile, either, doesn't do the thing men do where they perform being wounded. He looks at me for a long second, and I have the uncomfortable feeling of being read accurately.

"No," he says.

"No?"

"That's not what it's worth." He leans one hip against his grandfather's counter, and the wood takes his weight without a sound. "You know that or you wouldn't have said it that fast."

Heat comes up the back of my neck and it isn't embarrassment, or not only. He's close enough now that I can see the sawdust on his collar. Fine as flour. I want, absurdly, to take it off with my thumb.

"I'll think about it," I say.

"Take the week."

"I don't need a week."

"Take it anyway." He says it without any weight at all, which is somehow worse. "Land like that, you should walk it before you sign it away."

"I walked it this morning."

Something moves behind his face. "You walked to the top of it."

"I walked the bench and the creek."

"Then you've seen about a fifth. Your grandmother did the whole line every May and it took her most of a day, and she was eighty-nine the last time."

"I have a firm expecting me."

"Sure." He picks up his gloves with a shrug. "Offer's good either way."

And that's it. He's turning back toward the mill floor and I'm standing there with an entire folder of comparables I don't get to use and my pulse doing something I'd rather it didn't.

"Dad?"

There's a girl in the far doorway.

She’s about seven years old, wearing an orange rain jacket over pyjama pants over rubber boots, brown hair escaping a braid that somebody did with real effort and no talent. She's holding a mason jar in both hands like it contains something that might get away.

"Rue," Gideon says, and his whole voice changes. It gets warmer by about ten degrees, the way a room changes when someone lights the stove. "You're supposed to be doing spelling."

"I did spelling." She comes in sideways, eyes on me the entire time, and holds up the jar. Sawdust. Layers of it — pale, then reddish, then a band of near-white, packed in stripes like a jar of sand from a gift shop. "Cedar, fir, then the birch from Tuesday. It's a sample."

"It's a good one," I say.

She stops and examines me. "Dad." She doesn't look away from my face. "Is this the tree lady?"

Gideon makes a sound in the back of his throat that might be a cough. "This is Ms. Corrigan."

"Faye."

"Faye. Do you know about trees?"

"I know about where to put them."

Her eyebrows go up. "That's a job?"

"That's a job."

"Dad."

"I heard it," Gideon says.

He's looking at his daughter with something I want to describe as pride and can't quite, because it's both bigger than that and quieter. I notice he doesn’t have a wedding ring.

And then he looks up and catches me watching him, and neither of us moves for a beat longer than is strictly necessary.

The saw starts up out on the floor, a long rising whine, and the sound goes through the boards under my feet.

"Take the week," he says again, and this time it isn't about the land.

I walk back up the hill to the car.

Sixty-one acres. Twelve of them on good ground.

A closing date I could have inside a fortnight if I stop being difficult is about thirty thousand dollars I don't know if I deserve.

I drive out the long way, down past the mill and the timber stacks, and every one of them is square to the world, and I can still feel exactly where he was standing.