Page 3 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

She stops and examines me. "Dad." She doesn't look away from my face. "Is this the tree lady?"

Gideon makes a sound in the back of his throat that might be a cough. "This is Ms. Corrigan."

"Faye."

"Faye. Do you know about trees?"

"I know about where to put them."

Her eyebrows go up. "That's a job?"

"That's a job."

"Dad."

"I heard it," Gideon says.

He's looking at his daughter with something I want to describe as pride and can't quite, because it's both bigger than that and quieter. I notice he doesn’t have a wedding ring.

And then he looks up and catches me watching him, and neither of us moves for a beat longer than is strictly necessary.

The saw starts up out on the floor, a long rising whine, and the sound goes through the boards under my feet.

"Take the week," he says again, and this time it isn't about the land.

I walk back up the hill to the car.

Sixty-one acres. Twelve of them on good ground. A closing date I could have inside a fortnight if I stop being difficult is about thirty thousand dollars I don't know if I deserve. I drive out the long way, down past the mill and the timber stacks, and every one of them is square to the world, and I can still feel exactly where he was standing.

two

Gideon

Two years I've been writing to a lawyer in Victoria about that creek. Culvert rights, setback, the whole file in a folder in the office with a rubber band round it. In two years the family never answered a single letter, and I built a picture of them out of that silence — people on the coast who inherited something and couldn't be bothered to look at it.

Then a woman drives up my gravel and puts her hand on my grandfather's counter before she says her own name.

She's on the parcel most of the week. I see her through the mill office window in the mornings — a blue coat moving along the fence line, stopping, crouching, standing again. Slow work. She walks that ground like she's listening to it, and I have to make myself go back to the order book more than once.

Thursday she comes down to the yard to ask about the survey pins, and Rue materialises out of the ether the way she does, and I lose forty minutes to it.

Not lose. That's the wrong word.

I'm stacking two-by-tens at the edge of the landing and they're on the tailgate of my truck twenty feet away, and Rue is asking her questions the way Rue asks questions, which is one on top of another with no gap for breath.

"How do you decide where a tree goes?"

"You look at where the sun comes from," Faye says. "And where the water goes when it rains. And then you think about how big the tree wants to be in forty years, not how big it is at the nursery."

"Forty years."

"That's the job. You're planting for somebody who isn't born yet."

Rue absorbs this. "So you won't even see it."

"Mostly not."

"Then why do it?"