Jonah looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at the boards lying in the dirt and the stone footings and the cave mouth with its lintel waiting for a door.
“You’re trying to build his winter throat.”
“I don’t know what I’m trying to do. I just know I’ll die if I don’t do something.”
He nodded as though that were a reasonable answer. “Your granddaddy wasn’t trying to heat a whole house like a furnace. He was trying to borrow steadiness. Let the mountain do some of the work.” He bent down slowly and picked up 1 of the boards. “You need frames first, vertical posts. Tie them together at the top, then nail the boards across horizontal.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“I know.” He straightened, the board in his hands. “That’s why I’m here.”
Jonah Beal became my teacher. He came every day for the first 2 weeks, walking the mile from his cabin in the early morning and leaving before dark. He brought his tools in a leather satchel: a square, a level, an auger, a fro, a mallet. He showed me how to split straight posts from poplar trunks, how to set them plumb using the level, how to frame a wall so it would stand against wind and snow. He never did the work for me. He showed me once, then watched while I tried. When I got it wrong, he told me why. When I got it right, he nodded and moved on to the next thing.
“Your granddaddy could read about anything and understand it,” he said 1 afternoon, watching me drive a peg into a mortise. “But he couldn’t make his hands do what his head knew. That was his trouble. He understood the cave. He just couldn’t build the thing that would let him use it.”
“But you could.”
