Page 6 of Rough Cut Mountain Man

"I hate the voice."

"So does she."

He reaches over and takes something out of my hair. A maple leaf, half a handspan across, red going brown at the tips. He looks at it, then hands it to me instead of dropping it, which is a small thing and lands like a large one.

"You're cold," he says.

"I'm fine."

"Your hands are purple."

"They're always like that."

He takes one anyway. Turns it palm up in both of his and rubs the heat back into it with his thumbs, methodically, the way you'd work oil into a board, and he does it looking down at my hand and not at my face. His hands are enormous and rough at every contact point and warm all the way through.

I stand in a driveway full of wrecked leaf piles and let a man I've known nine days warm my fingers, and I don't say anything, because if I open my mouth I'm going to say something I can't take back in front of his child.

"Other one," he says.

I give him the other one.

Rue yells that we're wasting daylight, and he lets go, and my hand stays hot for twenty minutes.

Later — Rue inside with a bath and a book and the specific outrage of a child sent in while it's still light — he takes me through the mill.

The saws are off. That matters. In the quiet, the building has a smell like a church that got into carpentry: cedar, fir, chain oil, cold concrete. He walks me down the length of the carriage and the light comes through the high windows full of dust.

"Grandfather put this up in '52," he says. "Head rig's newer. Everything else is his or my father's."

"You were the second family up here, then."

"Third." He says it like a man handing over something he assumed I already had. "Corrigans cleared that bench in 1911. Your great-great-grandfather. There was a house on it before there was a mill down here — my grandfather milled the shakes for its roof in '58 and got paid in beef."

I stop walking.

"There's a rectangle up there," I say. "And four lilacs."

"That's it."

"I thought it was a barn."

"Your grandmother was born in it." He turns to face me. "Ada lived up there till '94. Your grandfather got sick — something they could only treat on the coast — so they went down to Victoria for the winter and he died in the spring and she never came back to live. House stood empty nine years and went in under snow load in '03. Came back every May regardless. Walked the line and went home."

Thirty-one years. She kept a collapsed house and a fence line she couldn't do anything with, and she drove eleven hours round trip every May to look at it, and she asked me to come the entire time I was old enough to say yes.

I was born three years after she left. I have never once thought about that as a fact with a reason attached.

"She never told me any of it," I say.

Gideon doesn't fill the silence, which is the kindest available option.

I run a hand along a beam. Hand-hewn. Old growth, tight-ringed, the kind of wood you cannot buy now at any price.

"You can't get this," I say.

"No."

He stops at a stack of slabs against the far wall, pulls the top one out and stands it on edge with one hand like it weighs nothing. Live edge, maybe four feet across, figured through the middle in ripples. "Big leaf maple. Off the Dunlop place before they logged it. Been drying six years."