“Lord, Send Someone to Fix This Roof Before Snow,” She Whispered... Not Knowing He Was Behind Her
Chapter 2
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"There's a public house at Pine Fork. Four miles.""My mules won't make four."She looked at the mules. She looked at his boots, which were caked to the ankle, and at his wagon with its sagging tarp. Then she looked at her own roof, and her mouth tightened."The barn doesn't leak," she said. "I'd be obliged if you didn't go in the house.""I wouldn't.""Nobody puts stock in my barn for free, Mr. Colton. A dime a night for the mules. Ten cents. You can leave it on the post."He nearly smiled. She said it so fiercely, with her chin up, that it would have been an insult. "A dime's fair," he said."Then it's settled."She turned and walked up the porch steps, with her back straight under the carved lintel. She paused with her hand on the door. He could read the letters from where he stood, cut deep and square into the weathered pine: Except the Lord build the house.Willa Prior looked at the words for a moment, the way a person looks at a debt. Then she went in and shut the door.Ezra led the mules to the barn. It was a good barn, tight and swept, with a harness room and a row of stalls kept as neatly as a church pew. At the back, under a canvas tarp lashed down with rope, lay a long stack of pine bolts, each one the length of a man's arm, split once, and stacked with air between them to season.Those bolts had been cut and stacked by someone who knew exactly what he meant to do with them: they were shake wood. Someone had meant to reroof that house. Someone had cut the wood to do it, and then had not.He unharnessed the mules and rubbed them down and gave them hay. He climbed into the wagon bed with his blanket and his supper of cold biscuit. Through the gap in the barn door, he could see the lit window of the cabin, and a thin figure crossing it once, twice, with a bucket in each hand, emptying them out the back door into the sleet.He had not been asked for anything. He told himself so as he lay awake, listening to the water. But he had heard the prayer, and long after the last light went out, he found that he was still hearing it.Morning came up hard and clean, with ice on the puddles and the first sun lying along the orchard rows. Ezra put his dime in the twist of paper she had tied to the gatepost.She came out of the house with a coffee pot in her good hand and two tin cups hooked over her fingers. She put the pot on the porch rail and did not offer him a cup. She put it where he could see it and looked at the barn, and then at him."The dime wasn't a gift either," she said.