“What chisel?”
“From over there,” I said, pointing at the workbench.
“You put it in the fire?” She pushed herself up farther. “Get it out!”
Which I did, quick as I could, my hand wrapped in a hearth rag.
The blade was black with smoke and heat.
“Hang it so it doesn’t warp,” she said quickly. “Don’t lay it down. Hang it.” She sounded like she might cry.
I did as she said, careful not to burn myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to help you.”
“I know,” she said, dragging one thin hand over her face. “I know. It’s all right.”
I watched her settle, settle, sigh herself calm.
“What do you make?” I said. “With all those tools?”
“They aren’t mine,” she said. “I don’t make anything with them.”
I wanted to ask something else, but before I could she craned her neck and said, “I would be obliged if you would bring me some water.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” And I was. It must have been some time since she’d had anything to eat or drink.
“There’s a spring just past the biggest spruce at the far edge of the clearing. Coming out under the rock there. Not much to it, so high up, but enough.”
I took an empty jar from the shelf and went out into the yard, where I was surprised to see that the day was still just an ordinary spring day—night still waiting far beyond the curve of the world—that the trees were no taller than they’d been, that nothing much had changed while I was inside that cabin.
Such a lot had already happened on this one ordinary spring day—so much of it extraordinary—that I felt a little dizzy and unreal as I crossed the yard and went in search of the spring. And found it, just where she said it would be.
She was right—it wasn’t much of a spring. But when I pushed the jar flat in the moss where the water bubbled out of the rock, a pool rose and flowed into its mouth, as if the jar were the thirsty one.
The water was cold and clear and, as I sampled it, delicious. Like poured winter. Fresh. Perfect.
I carried the jar into the cabin.
“Good,” she said. “A girl who can tap a spring.”
“Any girl can do that.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “I know.”
With one hand, I cradled her head and lifted it high enough so she could drink from the jar without choking.
Her tears came back as she drank, as if the well of her had dried but was now full again. And I felt some light in her now, too, where all I had felt before was darkness.
“So good,” she said, sobbing a little, when it was all gone.
I laid her head back down and smoothed the hair off her hot forehead.
And asked her another of my hundred questions. “Did you carve that fawn? Or that squirrel?”
“Oh, child, if I could do that, I most certainly would. But I can’t. And I didn’t.”
“Then who did?” I said.
She looked at me for another long moment, as if trying to decide something. “If you’re lucky, he may come this way in time for you to see for yourself.”
He. So my carver was a he. I had thought maybe so. “Come this way from where?”
“From somewhere else,” she said, suddenly sharp.
So I asked something different. “Why do you have so many books?”
She squinted up at me. “Let me guess. You think an old woman living on a mountaintop can’t possibly read.”
I wasn’t surprised by the bitterness in her voice, but I didn’t much like it. “I don’t think that. I just don’t know anyone who has so many. Have you read them all?”
She looked past me at the books on their shelves. “Some of them many times. I don’t know if I could have stayed here otherwise.”
I thought about why she would choose to stay in such a place, books or not, though it was better than what we’d had when we first came to the mountain.
I figured any refuge could be a home if that’s what it felt like.
“Do you want me to help you to the privy?” I said.
She huffed again. “Haven’t got one.”
Which startled me. “Everyone has a privy.”
“Not up here. Not for me. Animals make water. Animals make dirt. So do I. Just like they do. In the woods.” She lifted her chin. “And a person who says anything about that is a person I don’t care to know.”
She sounded queenlike.
“Do you want me to help you outside, then?”
“No