6. Cedar
Cedar
"Timber."
Kain stepped back as the hackberry came down, a slow lean that turned into a rush at the end, and it hit the frozen ground with a crack he felt through his boots.
It had stood at the edge of the little stretch of woods behind the house, one of a handful he meant to clear so he could push his planting ground out that way in time.
The tree lay there a moment, its bare branches still shivering. His axe hung heavy in his hands, but he didn't stop.
He set the axe into the trunk a couple of feet up from the base and went to work. The sun had come up not long before, throwing long flat light across ground that was still half-frozen, and he chopped the trunk down into rounds a section at a time.
When he had most of it cut up, he split the rounds where they lay. His arms burned with it, but he kept on until the work was done.
He finished around midday and stepped back to look it over. The tree had come apart into a scatter of rounds and split halves across the frozen yard, sawdust and pale chips worked down into the snow among them.
He leaned the axe against the side of the barn.
Around the far side of the barn he found the old cart that had come with the farm, mended over the summer and light enough to pull on his own. He drew it out and brought it around to the wood.
Roan caught sight of the cart and balked, sidestepping hard against the rope and tossing his head.
"Easy. Whoa, now. None of that." Kain crossed to the pen, lifted the rope latch, and got a hand on the halter. "Come on. You've pulled it before."
He led the horse over and hitched him to the cart, and Roan settled once the traces were on and there was somewhere to go. The fence still wanted finishing, and soon, but other things kept getting in front of it.
Kain loaded the wood until the cart held about half a cord. It wasn't much against the three more Sasha would need to see the Kettle through to spring, but it would do for a start. He climbed up and took the reins.
Roan was glad of the work once they were moving, and they went up the road at a good pace, the cold whistling past while Kain paid it no mind. They came up on the Kettle and he pulled around back, and he hauled open the door of the woodshed. It stood near empty.
He started in unloading, stacking the split wood the way Jeremiah had shown him, bark side up to shed the water and a hand's gap around each piece for the air to move and dry it.
The wood thunked into place as he worked, the rhythm of it plain and easy, the kind of work that asked nothing of him but to keep going.
He had about half of it stacked when the back door opened and Sasha came out with Matthew in her arms. The baby stretched his hands out toward Kain, and Kain set down the wood and took him. "There you are." He bounced him once. "Getting big."
Matthew got hold of a wood chip caught on Kain's shoulder and brought it up to look at, and Sasha stepped in and plucked it out of his fingers. "No. You're not eating that. You're not a beaver."
"Wouldn't hurt him." Kain shifted the baby onto one hip and worked the wood with his free arm. "You should've seen what Mark and I put in our mouths when our mother wasn't watching."
"You remember being a few months old, do you?" Sasha gave him a look.
"Not a bit of it. This was later. Mark couldn't have been more than six, and I was twelve and should've known better." Kain almost smiled. "We'd dare each other to eat things. Rocks. Grass. Whatever was lying around."
"Boys," Sasha said.
"I'm only saying."
"There's a wide gap between a half-grown boy chewing grass on a dare and a four-month-old gnawing a wood chip." Sasha raised an eyebrow.
"Might help his teeth come in." Kain held the baby back out toward her. "But your mother knows best on that, Matthew. She's got the right of it about what goes in you and what doesn't. You listen to her."
He passed Matthew back, threw the rest of the wood up onto the stack, and climbed onto the cart. "I'll bring the next load up before long. Have this filled in again in no time."
"I appreciate it, Kain. Thank you."
"Anytime," Kain said.
He brought a second load up that afternoon and a third behind it, enough to put a cord and a half in the shed. The rest of it came slower.
Roan got himself loose one morning and cost Kain a few days on the fence, and then the wind came through one night and laid flat the run he'd just stood up, so it was a good while before he hauled the next cord and a half up the road.
When he finally set the last of it in the shed, Sasha came out again. Matthew was nowhere in sight this time, and she handed him a mug of something that steamed in the cold. He took it and drank, and it was apple and cinnamon, hot enough to scald going down.
"Good," Kain said.
"Made a batch this afternoon." Sasha nodded at the shed. "Is that the last of it?"
"Ought to see you through the rest of the winter." Kain pulled the shed door shut. "Assuming Jeremiah's got the right of it about when winter quits. Some things he knows cold. Others I'm not so sure."
"That's an old-timer for you. You'll be just the same when you get to be his age."
"Maybe. We'll see." Kain drank off more of the cider.
"Come in out of it. I put a plate aside for you."
Kain followed her inside, where a plate waited on the bar, a heap of mashed potatoes and a cut of steak with a dark sauce spooned alongside it. He sat down and started in, and Matthew lay in his bassinet close by, awake, taking the room in with the slow gravity of a baby with nowhere to be.
"How long before he's crawling, you figure? Or talking?" Kain cut into the steak. "All I know about babies is that they exist and they drool."
"Honestly, I don't know." Sasha moved back and forth behind the bar, working a couple of other orders. "Every woman I've asked says something different. One says five months, the next says eight. I think it just goes how it goes, kid to kid."
"Makes sense." Kain dragged a bite of the steak through the sauce and found it good, tangy with a sweetness running under it. "Where'd this come from?"
"Some trader passing through. Said it came up from down south. Bar sauce, he called it." Sasha shrugged. "Better than passable. I wish I'd got the recipe out of him before he left, but who knows when he'll be back through."
Kain went back to his plate while the regulars down the bar talked low over their drinks, and one of them looked over at him.
"Heard you're putting up a fence for that horse of yours. I can show you how to notch the posts, if you want. Easy to split the wood out if you go at it wrong."
"I'd take the help." Kain looked up from the plate. "I can bring the posts by. I've been cutting them out of the hackberry around my place, about the right size."
"You don't want hackberry. It'll rot out from under you inside a year or two.
" The man shook his head. "Cedar's what you want.
Holds up, though it'll near take your arms off cutting it.
I've got a stand of it behind my place I've been meaning to clear.
Come help me drop it and I'll see you get your posts. Call it square."
"I'll be there," Kain said.
The man nodded and turned back to his drink, and Kain finished what was left on the plate.
It was full dark and still bitter when he drove the cart home, the lantern swinging on its hook and Roan's breath smoking out ahead of them.
Sasha's shed was full and would hold her to spring, and somewhere behind another man's place stood the cedar that would finally give Roan a fence he couldn't walk out of.
A man could ride home on worse than that.