He looked at me over his spectacles. “Because there are other hollows, Miss Ren, other families living in cabins pressed against limestone bluffs, other people who might survive a hard winter if they knew what you know.” He smiled. “And because I’m a teacher. Teaching things is what I do.”
I said yes. What else was I going to say?
By spring, Professor Quarrels’s circular was being read in 3 counties. By summer, I had visitors from as far as Lewisburg and Hinton, people who wanted to see the cave house, people who wanted to understand how it worked.
That autumn, the wells all ran full. The woodpiles all looked tall. The harvest came in thick and heavy. Nobody in Mercy Crossing had any idea what kind of month was coming.
Part 3
The warning came on February 2, 1899. A trapper named Owen Cypes stopped at my door just before dusk. He was half frozen, his beard stiff with ice, his eyes wild with something that was not quite fear but was not far from it.
“Ma’am, there’s weather coming,” he said. “Blue northern sky, pressure dropping like a stone. I’ve been trapping these mountains for 30 years, and I’ve never felt the air go this wrong this fast.”
He looked at my cabin, at the corridor, at the cave mouth beyond. “You’re the Ren girl, the one with the cave house.”
“I am.”
“Then you might be all right. Everyone else—” He shook his head. “Everyone else better pray they’ve got enough wood to burn for a month.”
He left before I could offer him food or shelter. He had miles to go before dark, he said, people to warn. But his words stayed with me through the night. Blue northern sky, pressure dropping like a stone. A month.
The next morning I tore down what was left of the old porch. I had been meaning to rebuild it, to make a proper entrance to the cabin instead of the bare doorframe that led directly into the corridor. But now I needed those boards for something else. I needed to finish the outer section of the corridor, the part that connected the cave door to a proper exterior entrance, the part I had been planning to build next spring. I did not have until next spring. I had hours.
