8. Gideon
Next October...
Rue carries a red maple leaf across the mill yard with both hands, the way she used to carry the jar of sawdust. She sets it on Faye's desk like it might break into a thousand pieces.
The desk sits in a twelve-by-sixteen outbuilding at the edge of the yard.
I milled every board in it from the fir that came off the bench last November.
There's a plaque on the door that says CORRIGAN LANDSCAPE DESIGN, and under it, on a smaller piece of cedar screwed on crooked at a seven-year-old's eye level, one that says (AND RUE).
First client was our expanded yard — six acres, done, planted, the maples along the road approach going gold for the first time this month.
Second client was the woman who runs the bakery on Main.
Third was the community hall. By July Faye had a waiting list and had to turn somebody down, which she did badly, over the phone, hands shaking after.
I watched her hang up and stand there for a second before she laughed at herself.
I've never seen her this busy. Or this sure of what she says yes to.
The pressed leaves are Rue's department. She decided in the spring that important documents need them, and now every proposal that leaves that office has one taped inside the back cover. She grades them. There's a shoebox system. Faye's not permitted to touch the shoebox. Neither am I.
"That one's for the Tomlinson yard," Rue says. "It's a good one. Don't waste it on a small job."
"It's a big job," Faye says.
"Okay then."
Rue's eight now. Taller by an inch and a half, and she measures it against the door frame of my office, in pencil, on a board I cut myself.
We got married in April, at the mill.
Twenty-two people, the saws off, the big doors open on the valley with the snow still on the top third of it.
Faye wore green because her grandmother wore green.
I wore a shirt I ironed myself, badly, and she said nothing about it, which was its own kind of kindness.
Rue walked her the length of the carriage in boots because there was mud, carrying the rings in the mason jar with the graded sawdust in it — she'd emptied it for the occasion and refilled it after, in the same order.
There's a photograph on the office wall now. Twenty-two people outside the big doors, snow on the mountain behind them, everybody squinting because the light came in sideways at four o'clock and nobody thought to move.
In May, Faye walked the line. The whole thing, the way her grandmother used to — out at seven with a sandwich, down the west fence to the creek, up over the rock, back along the top with the aspens in new leaf.
Took her most of the day. I offered to go with her and then didn't. That was the right call, and I made it without her having to ask.
She told me after that she sat down in the middle of the old lilacs at the foundation and said a few things out loud that were nobody's business. Then she walked home, which takes twenty minutes now, because home is at the bottom of the hill.
She's the reason it happened in April at all.
"Before the leaves fall again," Rue told her last November, arms folded, immovable. Nobody argued with her. Nobody was going to win.
The big leaf maple slab sat on the mill wall for seven years and I never knew what it was for. I know now. It's the table in our kitchen. I cut it in February, finished it in March, and it took four of us to carry it through the back door.
There's a mark on the near edge where Rue put a hot pan down in June. I went to sand it out, but Faye stopped me.
"Leave it," she said. "It's on the record now."
This morning Faye's out in the yard with a roll of drawings under her arm and a coat that's finally, after a year, given up on being a city coat. Rue's ahead of her, walking the fence line the way her great-grandmother did, pointing at things and issuing instructions.
Sixty-one acres. Twelve of them good ground. The creek runs clean off the bench and joins mine at the culvert, and there are frogs in it come summer.
The saw starts up behind me, the long rising whine of it, carrying out across the valley on the cold air the way it has every October since 1952.
Out on the fence line, my wife stops and turns and finds me across the whole yard, the way she always does.
She lifts a hand. I lift mine.
Then Rue yells something about the north corner, and Faye laughs, and the two of them keep walking.
I stand in the doorway of my grandfather's mill and let myself feel peace.
THE END