7. Crack
Crack
The weather turned warmer over those days, and the last of the snow and ice went with it, the patches that had held on in the deep shade of the woods and behind the big rocks gone to runoff. Somewhere out of sight, snowmelt trickled down toward the low ground.
Out across the rolling hills, the first faint green showed through the brown.
Kain put the days that followed to good use. He went out to the place of the man from the Kettle, whose name he still hadn't gotten and who still hadn't offered it, and gave him a day of cedar clearing.
It was hard, plain work, the cedar every bit as stubborn as the man had promised, and the two of them barely spoke and got the patch dropped between them. When the trees were down, the man showed him how to cut the notches into the posts, so the rails would seat without splitting the wood.
It held them clean, and it would last.
Some days after the last of the firewood went up, Kain was back in town early, and he pulled the cart up in front of the Kettle and went in through the front. Sasha was behind the counter wiping it down with Matthew on one hip.
She looked up, and he nodded.
"Came in for some supplies." Kain set his hands on the bar. "Today's your ale day, isn't it?"
"It is." Sasha leaned into a stain that wouldn't come up. "Thank you, like always."
He went through the bar and out the back and down into the Kettle's root cellar. The place was enormous, which made sense for a kitchen that fed half the village on a busy night, and the size of it caught him every time he went down.
It would have kept one man fed through a couple of winters. Several empty kegs stood by the foot of the stairs, and he carried them up one at a time and set them in the pushcart.
He set off across town toward the brewery at the far end of it, the place that kept the Kettle and most of Tillamore in ale and beer. Sasha's order stood ready when he got there, and he traded the empties out for the full ones.
A full keg was no light thing, and even B-rank arms made work of wrestling each one up onto the cart.
He took the load back slow, because every rut in the road threatened to put the whole cart over, and the ale sloshed and shifted with each one. He kept it upright, kept it moving, and got it back to the Kettle.
He carried the first keg into the kitchen and set it on the counter with a solid thunk, and Sasha looked up from the stove.
"Good. The rest can go down in the cellar."
"I'll get it down there."
He hauled the second keg down the cellar stairs and carried it back to where they went, beside the barrels of salted pork. Setting it down, he caught a dampness in the air that hadn't been there.
He set the keg down on the dry side of the cellar instead and went back to where it should have gone. He crouched there, pressed his fingers flat against the floor, and they came up wet.
That was a problem, and not a small one. He went back up the stairs and into the kitchen.
"Something wrong?" Sasha asked as he came in.
"Maybe." Kain stopped at the counter. "I need a lantern."
"On the hook there."
She watched him take it down with a crease starting between her brows, and he didn't blame her for it. He lit it on the way back down and worked the light slow across the cellar floor.
The floor was wet across half its width, with a clean line down the middle where the water gave out, and the dry half was no trouble. He went to the wall where the stores stood, the salted pork and ale and flour and sugar, and found the floor and the wall there not just damp but soaked through.
He ran his fingers along the stone and felt the cracks, thin enough to hide from the eye but wide enough to catch a fingernail, running the length of the wall.
He started moving the kegs and barrels off to the dry side to get a clear look. None of them had taken any harm, which was something.
The trouble was the rest of it: sacks of apples and dried fruit and grain stacked against the wet wall, the kind of thing that drank water straight up, and the strings of dried vegetables hung from the rafters, potatoes and onions and peppers that the seep wouldn't reach but the damp air would, given a few days to turn them.
He sat at the bar with a pencil and pulled a sheet of butcher paper off Sasha's workstation, wiped the last of the pork-chop grease off it, and started laying the cellar out on it. Sasha came around and looked over his shoulder.
"Do I want to know?"
"Probably not. There's a crack in the wall of your cellar."
"Oh, no." Her hand went flat on the counter. "Is it bad? It's only ever seeped a little along that wall. Barely anything."
"It's more than barely anything now." Kain marked the line of the crack on the paper.
"My father talked about fixing that for ten years."
"I'll have it fixed in ten days."
"He said the same thing." Sasha turned back toward the kitchen. "Charge whatever you need to the Kettle. I'd never have caught it in time. I've been down those stairs a dozen times this week."
"I'd lay it on the thaw." Kain ran a hand along his jaw.
"All that melt working down into the ground.
What I don't like is how fast it's come on.
" He looked the sketch over. "You got somewhere dry to put everything that isn't sealed up?
All of it, really. I'll have the whole floor torn up before this is done. "
"There's the storeroom. I keep the spare tables in it."
"That'll do. Give me an hour or two and I'll have it cleared down there."
For the next while he worked. He hauled every sack and barrel and string of vegetables up out of the cellar and packed it into the storeroom among the spare tables, until the room was jammed so full that anything at the back was as good as lost, but it would hold.
Then he went over the rest with a measuring rule and his own two feet, the crack and the wall and the ground outside.
The crack ran about fifteen feet along a wall that ran twenty. That was bad enough. Outside was worse.
The ground along that side of the building sloped down toward the wall, so every bit of runoff and melt ran straight at the stone and sat there with nowhere to go. Water that couldn't drain had soaked in, and the freeze and thaw of it through the winter had worked the wall apart.
It meant a hard rain would put water into that cellar fast, and a hard rain in spring was a matter of when. He would have to cut a drainage ditch to carry the runoff off somewhere else and make it some other patch of ground's problem, and then tear the wall out and lay it up new.
Patching a crack that long was a waste of good material. Where there was one crack hidden in the stone, there were others.
He wrote it all out into a list and walked it down to the general store.
Sam looked up when he came in with the butcher paper in his hand.
"Kain. What can I do for you?"
"Not me. The Kettle." Kain laid the paper down on the counter. "What do I need to put a root cellar wall back together? Tools, materials, all of it."
"You'll want quickite," Sam said.
"Quickite?"
"Powder. You mix it with water and slurry it up, and it sets harder than the stone it's holding. Holds a sight better than rock and mortar. How much wall are we talking?"
"Most of one wall. A good deal of it."
"Start with three bags and we'll see. This is going on Sasha's tab, I take it?"
"It is."
Kain would have covered the cost himself if there were any way to it, but fifty copper to his name and fifty silver owed to Martinson left him no room at all.
"I'll get on it. I can send the quickite back with you now, and I'll put together the tools you'll need. Might be I can borrow some off the farmers around here, save Sasha the coin, but that won't be today."
"Appreciate it."
He took the bags of quickite and started back up the street toward the Kettle. There was a wall to tear out and a ditch to cut and a cellar to keep from flooding, and the work of it sat ahead of him, plain and heavy and his to do.