Part 7
He read the whole brochure standing in the yard, with the ruined cabin at his back and the cold coming up through his boots. The raised garden beds. The smiling couple. The shuttle to the clinic twice a week.
Then the price per month, which was more than he spent on groceries in a year.
He read it twice. Then he slid it back into the folder and held it out to her.
“Your aunt wanted to build up there,” he said, and pointed past her, up the slope, to the gravel shelf two hundred feet above the creek where the spruce thinned out and the morning sun came first. “The first summer. She stood on that bench and said, this is the spot. I said it was too far to haul water.”
Dana looked up at the bench, then back at him. “It is too far to haul water.”
“It is.” He kept the folder held out between them. “I put the house down here because it was easy. I’d like to put the next one where she wanted it. I’m seventy-one, and my knees are going to hate that hill, and I can’t do it by myself. I know what I’m asking you.”
“What are you asking me?”
“To help me build it. And to quit carrying this thing around in your sled bag.”
She didn’t take the folder right away. Her eyes went to the shelf of gray ice inside the open door, then up to the bench again.
“You’d send me the temperature every night,” she said. “Not just OK. The actual number, so I know you walked out to the shelter and didn’t just push the button from bed.”
“Every night.”
“And when I tell you the trail’s too bad to come down in February, you don’t come down.”
“That one I’ll think about.”
She laughed, short and surprised, and wiped her nose on the back of her mitten. Then she took the folder and buttoned it inside her coat, flat against her chest.
They broke ground on the bench in May.
Dana came up on her days off. The second weekend she came with Hollis and Marcus and the camp’s small loader, which they had walked six miles up the creek road on its own tracks. Hollis leveled the pad in an afternoon without being asked, scowling the whole time as if it were a punishment.
“You didn’t have to do this,” Lyle told him.
“I know.” Hollis backed the loader around and dropped the bucket. “My wife wants to meet the bear guy. I said it’d cost me a Saturday.”
The weather service sent a new shelter crated on a pallet. Lyle started the first of June in the same thin green ledger he had carried down to Kettle River inside his coat, and he left the January column of times where it was.
He hauled water uphill in two buckets on a sled, and his knees complained about every trip. The nightly messages got longer than he had ever meant them to. -12, Sadie ate a vole. 38, rain, roof holding. Dana wrote back every time.
The first real snow came the second week of October, four inches of it overnight. Dana drove up that Friday after shift and slept in the new loft, which smelled of fresh spruce and still had a crooked stair Lyle meant to fix.
At five the next afternoon he handed her the pencil.
“Your reading,” he said.
“I don’t know how.”
“It’s the same as yesterday, with numbers that are different.”
She read the maximum and the minimum, the snow board and the stake, frowning at the thermometer the way she frowned at a load chart. Lyle stood on the porch with the binoculars and looked across the valley at the east shoulder, where the light was going orange on the high rock.
Something was moving up there, far above the timber. He watched a while before he said anything. It was a dark shape against the new snow, digging steadily, with gravel and dirt flying out behind it in brown sprays. Every so often it stopped, lifted its head, and looked around at the valley as if checking that it was still there.
He passed her the binoculars without a word. Dana found the spot and held still.
“Is that him?”
“Hard to see the ear from here.”
“Is that him?”
“It’s him.”
They watched until the light was gone. Then Dana went inside and sat at the table under the lamp with the ledger open in front of her. She wrote the numbers carefully in their columns. She hesitated over the wide column on the right, then bent and wrote in it, slowly, in a hand that leaned forward the way her mother’s did.
When she had gone up the crooked stair to bed, Lyle pulled the ledger over and read it.
4 in. new snow. Bishop digging in on the east shoulder, high up. Uncle L. pretending he wasn’t watching.
He held the pencil over the page for a while. Then he put it back in the spine, closed the book, and set it on the shelf by the window that faced the shoulder.