Part 2
“You’re speaking to my foreman, Wade.” Clara took the loose stake out of his reach and drove it back into the ground. “If you have a question about the work, ask him.”
Daniel stood with the post driver between his boots. He had been on the property three days; she had given him a week. Sam looked from her to his father, waiting to see whether either of them would correct her.
Hollis brushed dirt from his glove. “You’ll still be hauling feed over my freight road after your experiment’s buried.”
“Send me your terms in writing.”
He rode off without saying goodbye. Daniel waited until Sam had watched him over the rise, then handed the boy another stake. The boy held it without setting it down.
“Could he be right?”
“About the snow? Yes.” Daniel moved the stake a little farther from the barn. “We’ll watch where it goes.”
The first squall gave them their answer. Daniel had tied cloth strips to the frame, expecting them to show where the screen needed strengthening. Instead, the strips behind its middle section thrashed toward the ground, and blown snow began collecting along the approach he was trying to protect.
Then a woven panel tore loose.
Mabel, Clara’s oldest milk cow, backed out of the new passage and shouldered the gate hard enough to bend its hinge. Across the fence, two of Hollis’s hands stopped their wagon to watch.
“Hold the team, Ben,” one called.
Ben Cole had already leaned forward on the wagon seat, laughing. Daniel heard him as he caught the gate before it struck Sam. He sent the boy inside, then took his cutters to the screen.
He had packed the branches too closely.
With some of them removed, the wall stopped taking each gust like a sheet of lumber. Clara stood behind it, watching the cloth, and held a fresh willow diagonally across the opening.
“Try them this way.”
He wanted to finish what he had started. She waited with the branch in her hand until he looked properly at the angle. Then he took it from her and began weaving again.
They worked through the afternoon, shifting the screen where the little drifts showed them they had misjudged the ground. When the next gust came, the strips moved more gently on the barn side. Daniel crouched beside them instead of announcing that the problem was solved.
Mabel still refused the passage. Clara walked it herself and stopped at the sharp, dark turn Daniel had built for the wind. “She can’t see what she’s walking into.”
They widened the corner and moved a lantern where its light reached the floor. This time Clara brought Mabel through without hauling on her halter. At the stall the old cow turned and nosed Clara’s empty hand, expecting compensation. When Daniel asked where she’d learned to handle Mabel, she told him Dr. Henry Foster had taught her to help with difficult births.
“She charges more than you,” Clara told Daniel.
He laughed before he could help it. His wet sleeve had frozen stiff at the wrist, and there was still a gate hinge to straighten, but Clara was smiling at the cow. He found he could stand there another moment.
A week later, Arthur Reed rode in to examine what people in the basin had begun discussing. The stock inspector had no opinion about willow walls until he had seen this one. He did have questions about everything Daniel was trying to keep warm.
“Where does the wet air leave?” he asked inside the barn.
Daniel showed him the ridge opening. Reed checked it, put his hand into the bedding, and had him uncover the hay crib. Together they looked for trapped moisture and heat, then followed the water run to its outlet.
“And if you hang a curtain indoors, keep it well away from the stove,” Reed said. “Warmth isn’t much use if you burn the place down.”
Clara took the pencil out of her ledger. “What do you want us watching?”
For three weeks, Reed wanted morning and evening temperatures, feed, milk, firewood, damp bedding, and every time they had to break ice. Near the trough he tapped the exposed metal joint with his pencil. Daniel promised to protect the pipe where it passed through the wall; Reed tapped the farther joint again before he left.
Daniel hadn’t forgotten that second tap when he boxed the wall crossing. He tested the drain and believed the remaining metal would empty. He had other work waiting, and let that belief stand.
Clara hung the new ledger by the kitchen door. Sam copied the first thermometer reading with both elbows on the table, while Lucy slapped at the moving pencil from Clara’s lap. When Daniel asked whether the inspector had approved anything, Clara shook her head.
“He said to write down what happens.”
What happened first was that Daniel’s new chinking cracked. After two cold nights, he could feel air against his knuckles where he had packed the seams. He got out the scraper before Clara came to look.
She rubbed a broken piece between her fingers. Her father had kept sheep, she told him; Thomas had learned to seal a shed from him. Daniel had used too much clay for this mix.
She brought out straw and saved animal hair and worked beside him through the afternoon. When his arm tired, she took the scraper while he carried water. On the next cold morning, the fresh seams stayed against the logs.
Looking for more cloth in the loft, Daniel unrolled the canvas he had carried on the handcart. Anna’s leather stitching ran along its edge, close and slightly uneven where she had turned a corner. He put a finger into the fold where she used to keep a needle tucked.
Clara came up to help him carry it down. He measured the doorway between the sleeping room and the kitchen, then reached for his knife. She laid a hand on the extra width.
“We can fold this back.”
They hung it whole. He remembered Anna fitting it across their quarters at a freight camp, keeping a child warm with whatever she could make. Once he began talking, he told Clara about the leather seals Anna could sew and the way she checked a sleeping child’s wrist before adding wood to the fire.
Clara held the last fastening while he drove it in. Afterward, she stood by the stove and told him Thomas used to set out two tin cups before she came downstairs, even when they were too busy to sit.
Daniel waited, the hammer loose in his hand.
She reached toward a shelf, then left the cup there.
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