I stood on that road for a long time. Then I walked back to the cabin.
I do not know exactly why. Perhaps it was pride. Perhaps it was the memory of my mother, who had survived pneumonia for 2 winters before it finally took her, who had never complained even when she was too weak to stand. Perhaps it was Silas’s note, the child who still asks why. I was still asking, and I had not found the answer yet.
That afternoon I reread Journal 12, the construction plans for the winter throat. Silas had laid stone footings at the cave mouth. He had measured the porch boards and found that 14 of them were the right length for the corridor walls. He had sketched a doorframe and a baffle vent and a ceiling system using lime mortar and linen strips. He had done everything except build it.
I looked at the porch, the porch that was already falling down, the porch that was made of boards that were exactly the right length. I picked up the hammer I had found in the cabin’s single cupboard. I walked outside. I stood on the sagging porch and looked at the boards under my feet. Then I started prying them up.
