What Warm Water Can Grow

By the time Graham had the stove drawing and the coffee on, his right knee had loosened enough to let him cross the cabin without favoring it. His back was taking longer. He worked around both the way he had worked around a bad tool for most of his life, which was to say he stopped expecting either one to improve and planned for it. He bent from the hips to feed the firebox, sat down to work his boots on, and let the first cup cool a little before he lifted it.

He drank it at the window. The clearing lay white and still under a bright December sky, and the snow on Henry's old roof sagged a little more than it had the week before. The new cabin held heat well. He had built it to do that, and it did. Living in it was another matter.

His coat hung over the back of the one good chair because there was nowhere else for it to hang. When he reached for it his elbow caught the chair and sent it scraping across the boards, and he grabbed the coat before it slid to the floor. His boots had left their usual wet patch by the door overnight, a dark shape about the size of a dinner plate, and he had already stepped through it twice on his way to the stove. The boards would want scrubbing again, though he had scrubbed them only yesterday.

"Not ideal," he said. Ted lifted his head from the hearth, considered the remark, and put it back down.

Breakfast meant the tool chest. The bacon sat on the shelf behind it, a shelf Graham had built before he had thought through what else would need to live in that corner, so getting to the bacon meant shifting the chest a few inches, reaching past it, and putting it back. He set it exactly where it had been. Leaving it crooked would have bothered him for the rest of the morning, and he knew himself well enough by now not to pretend otherwise.

The table rocked when he put the skillet down. It was the same corner as yesterday and the day before. He found the folded scrap of leather that belonged under the short leg, which had worked itself loose in the night as it always did, and pushed it back into place with the toe of his boot. He had been meaning to fix that joint for two weeks. He ate standing up, looking over the room while he did. The tools belonged somewhere else, and so did half of what he had brought up from Alderwich, set down wherever there had been room when he moved in, to be sorted out later. Later had arrived.

None of it was serious. The room was warm, dry and sound, the stove drew, the glazed windows kept out the wind, and the patchwork roof of tarred sheet, salvaged shingles and canvas had come through every storm so far. Those had been the first things that mattered, and he had been right to see to them first. It was only that every small job in the room needed one other small job done before it, and the minutes added up before he had finished his coffee.

After breakfast he put on the coat and crossed the clearing to Henry's old cabin, where most of the winter stores still sat in crates and sacks along the back wall. The cold caught him across the face as soon as he stepped out. The snow was firm enough to crunch, and the trees on the far slope carried white along their north sides. Behind him the new cabin stood on its rise, sixteen feet by twenty, a little untidy on top but tight against the weather.

Henry's cabin smelled of old timber, dry earth and burlap. He waited at the door for his eyes to adjust, then stepped around Henry's workbench to the back wall. The flour was behind a box of nails, and the beans were under a crate of spare lamp parts, so he moved the crate, then the box, and stood there a moment with a sack in each hand. He had kept the stores here because the old cabin stayed cool and because there had been no proper place for them in the new room. But putting on boots and a coat and crossing a clearing every time he wanted to cook a meal was needless effort, and Henry's shelves along that wall were half empty and badly arranged, which was his own doing and not Henry's.

He did not need to move everything. A week's worth on a shelf by the stove would save him most of these trips and leave the rest where it kept best. "There's a list getting longer," he told the empty cabin, and carried the sacks back across the snow, tucked against his ribs so his knee would not have to balance a shifting load.

Ted was waiting at the door with the patient, particular look that meant he wanted out. Graham set the sacks inside and opened the door wide enough for him. The dog stepped into the snow, tested the air, and went west along the edge of the clearing with his nose down, angling uphill where the timber thickened. It was the same way he had gone most mornings that week, and his tracks from earlier still ran along the tree line in a single beaten path, out and back. Today's trail joined it without hesitation. The dog always came home when he was hungry, no worse for wear, and Graham had never thought much about where the path went. He watched him until the trees took him, then shut the door and went to find a place for the flour that was not the floor.

The flour fit beside the coffee tin if he moved a stack of folded cloth. The beans fit underneath if he moved the spare auger, and the auger, after some looking around, ended up on top of the tool chest, which was not where it belonged either. That would do until he found a better arrangement. It was the answer he had been giving himself since the day he moved in, and he noticed how often he gave it.

An hour later, more or less, Ted scratched at the door. Graham opened it and stepped back, and the dog came in wet to the belly, with dark mud packed along both back legs and smeared up one flank. Small clumps of it dropped onto the clean boards.

"Where in the world," Graham said, "did you find mud?"

Ted stood inside the door with his tail moving slowly, pleased to be home and no help at all. Graham crouched, which his knee did not care for, and touched a patch of it on the dog's leg. It was cold and dark and smeared easily across his fingers, with no ice in it anywhere. He rubbed a little between finger and thumb. The ground at Frostback had been frozen hard for days. He had tried a spade on the north side of the cabin two days earlier, meaning to true up the drainage cut, and given it up after the first few blows jarred his wrist. There was no mud here in December. There had not been for weeks.

"Hold still," he said, and fetched the old rag he kept on the hook by the stove. Ted stood and let himself be wiped down, the way he let himself be fussed over generally, as a thing that happened to dogs and was best endured. The mud had worked between the hairs around his feet, and getting it out took longer than Graham liked. On the belly it was thinner, as though the dog had walked through something shallow and soft rather than lain down in it.

"You're not telling me," Graham said, working on a hind foot. "I know that. Doesn't mean I'm not asking."

Ted's tail swept once across the boards. Graham looked at the rag when he was done. The soil on it was fine and dark, darker than the ground around the cabin, and he had spent forty-five years with his hands in soil of one kind or another. There were plenty of reasons one patch of ground might stay soft when the rest had frozen: a sheltered hollow, a seep, water moving somewhere under the frost. He could think of several without leaving the cabin. Finding one on a mountain in December was another matter, and the dog had been going west and uphill all week, toward rougher country he had not walked since the snow came.

He could go and look. His knee, which was still complaining about the crouch, made a reasonable case against climbing an unfamiliar slope over frozen roots this morning. "Whatever you've found," he told Ted, "it can keep another day." He mopped the floor, hung the rag over the edge of the bucket, and let it go, though not entirely.

He poured the last of the coffee and sat down with it while Ted circled once on the hearth and lay down with his clean paws stretched toward the stove. The window was bright with reflected snow. For a few minutes Graham did nothing at all, which was rare enough lately to notice.

He had come up here to finish things, not to start them. That had been the whole of the plan, as much as there had been one: close out his working life on ground that was his own, keep a warm cabin and tend some land, and spend whatever good years he had left without asking too much of them. He had assumed there would be some, though not many. A man did not reach sixty with a knee like his and a back that argued every morning and count on a great deal more, and he had not minded that. Forty-five years at the Fenner nursery had been good years, and he had been good at the work. Near the end, he had noticed his hands refusing things they used to do without being asked, and Frostback had been his answer to that.

He was not disappointed in it. The place had already given him more than he had expected when he first walked into the clearing. But he had not come all this way to spend his mornings moving a tool chest to get at the bacon.

He set the cup down. The table rocked against its scrap of leather and sent a ripple across the last of the coffee, and he caught the cup before it tipped. "All right," he said, and pushed himself up, waited for his back to straighten, and went to look at the wall beside the door.

It was bare, a little more than six feet of sound log before the corner. He had left it empty while finishing the cabin so there would be room to bring big things in before the road closed. Now it was the obvious place for a row of pegs and a boot rack, if it would answer for all the things such a spot required. It needed to be close enough to the door that he would not track wet boots across the room, and far enough from the hearth that nothing hanging there would be at risk from a stray spark. It also needed to be warm enough that a wet coat would be dry by the next morning.

He opened the door and watched where its edge traveled across the floor. A rack right against the jamb would catch the swing every time he came in, so the first stretch would have to stay clear. He shut the door, put his back to the jamb, and paced the wall heel to toe. At three steps the heat from the stove reached well enough to do useful work on wet wool, and the hearth was still a safe distance off. He went back and walked in as though his arms were full of firewood, turned, and reached. He would have to pivot a little to reach the pegs, but nothing would be in the way of the door, and no mud would travel past the second board. His work gloves could hang from the end peg, where they would dry stiff by morning instead of staying damp in a coat pocket. The coat would go above the boots, so whatever dripped off it would land in the rack and not on the floor he kept scrubbing.

He crouched again, more carefully this time, and ran his hand along the base log at that stretch. It was solid, with no rot and no give under his thumb, and the floor beside it was sound. The rack would want a slatted bottom so the mud could fall through and the air could move, and something under it to save the boards. He would hang the pegs on a separate board rather than drive them straight into the wall, so he could move them if he found he had judged the spacing wrong. Henry had always left himself room to correct an arrangement, and Graham had come to think that was most of what good arrangement was. There were offcuts under the eaves from framing the door, too good for firewood and enough for the job if he was careful with them.

His knee objected when he stood, and he kept a hand on the wall until it settled. The rack would come first, then, ahead of the table and the shelves and the flour. A dry place for boots and coats would improve every morning that followed it, and he was tired of scrubbing the same patch of floor. He looked once more at the door, the stove, and the length of wall between them.

"Here," he said. Ted let out a slow sigh through his nose, his chin pressed flat between his paws, without opening his eyes. Graham rested his palm on the bare log where the first peg board would go and left it there a moment. The boards could wait under the eaves a little longer, and the drill could stay in its box. He had the spot.