Page 1 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

one

Faye

The gate is padlocked and the fence is down twelve feet to the left of it, so I go over the fence.

It’s eight in the morning, minus two degrees, and I am dressed for a city four hundred kilometres and one mountain range away. Frost off the top wire melts on my palm, and I stand in the ditch grass on the wrong side of my own property line and think: sixty-one acres.

I've never seen it. My grandmother held this ground her whole life, lived twenty minutes from me in Victoria for the last thirty years of it, and asked me to come up with her every single May — and I have looked at it exactly once, in a satellite image, on a laptop, on a ferry.

It was never a no. It was always next year — a licensing exam, then a project, then a project going sideways, then a whole calendar full of colours.

So I walk it, because I'm not signing anything I haven't stood on.

It goes up. Cottonwood, alder, nettle gone to rust, and then the ground firms and lifts. It’s flat, maybe twelve acres, dry underfoot after a wet week. I put my fingers in the soil out of professional reflex. Good drainage. South-facing. In eight years I have never been handed a site this obliging.

The aspens along the top are going. Not turned — going, that ten-day window where they're more gold than green and the whole stand moves at once when the air does. There's a creek at the far edge running clear over rock, loud out of all proportion to its size.

And halfway along it, something I read before I understand it: a rectangle of settled ground, thirty feet by twenty, and lilacs. Four of them, ancient, gone feral, in a line no weather makes. An apple tree twenty paces off with a trunk like a fist.

Nobody plants lilacs in a straight line by accident. Somebody had a door there.

I make a note in my phone and keep walking, because that is apparently the kind of person I am.

October up here smells like woodsmoke and cold ground and sap. Nothing in Victoria smells like that.

And then I hear it.

A long rising whine, mechanical, close, and it doesn't stop. It settles into a working pitch and holds. I follow it to the lip of the bench and look down through the trees.

There's a mill directly below me.

Steam coming off the yard where the sun's got at the frost, a man in a hi-vis vest running a forklift through it. The timber is stacked in a way that stops me — sorted by species and dimension, ends painted, stickers laid between every course so the air can move. Somebody built those piles the way other people build sentences. Nothing's leaning, nothing's wasted, and function done that well is a kind of beauty, which is the argument I've been making to clients for eight years and losing.

I go down the hill.

The office is a low building of hand-milled cedar going silver at the corners. Inside, it smells like sawdust and burnt coffee. There's a counter with a live edge and a hand-planed face, oiled so many times it's gone the colour of brewed tea.

I put my palm on it before I can stop myself.

"Nineteen fifty-two," a voice says behind me. "My grandfather's."

I turn.

He fills the doorway from the mill floor, and I mean that literally — shoulders inside the frame with an inch to spare either side. Six-three or four, easy. Canvas jacket, sawdust in the seams of it and caught in the dark of his beard. Late thirties. Forearms bare to the cold, roped with muscle.

He takes his gloves off one finger at a time. Slow. I watch him do it and my thighs quiver.

I've met a hundred men on job sites. I know how to hold a clipboard and a line and not be moved. This is not that. This is my whole body noticing him before my brain finishes the paperwork: the size of him, the calm, the deliberate way he handles his own hands. It arrives all at once, it doesn't ask, and I have to look back down at the counter to reset my face.

"Faye Corrigan," I say.

"Gideon Marsh." He sets the gloves down. "You look like her."

I know who he means immediately. "You knew my grandmother?"

"Everybody in this valley knew Ada Corrigan." He crosses to the coffee pot, considers it, decides against it on my behalf. "She told me once I stacked my cedar wrong."

"Do you?"