even tell what they wanted, much less what he should do about it. But Len had gassed up the truck and drove the six hours to find out. He held Willow’s gaze and then broke from it to turn a bewildered eye toward the boy. That was what he’d brought back. That one, there, inert and lying quiet on the couch. It was all the answer he could give. “It’s late, Willow. I could drive you home.”
She smiled and shook her head. Her yurt behind Bow Farm was an easy walk away. “I’ll see you, Len.”
“All right, then.”
The open door let in a gust of night air. Len went to the closet and drew out an extra blanket and opened it over the boy, and then he went in to the bedroom and lay down beside his wife and fought for sleep.
A man alone can operate a sawmill if he’s smart. Len lay on the narrow strip of bed Meg didn’t take up the next morning, and let his mind wander slowly toward waking. Len had done it himself; but he’d had to be smart, Len thought, and he’d had to be careful. With winches and pulleys and roller tables a man could maneuver the logs into place, he could lift the chainsaw carriage and position it onto the timber, adjust the settings to skim the bark slabs first, then quartersaw the log so the wood smell—sharp, sweet, intoxicating—leapt into the air and gave him strength. There was Engelmann spruce in these woods, here and there cedar, lodgepole pine, the strong and stringy Douglas fir. There was redwood, too, but Len left that alone. It took more than one man to handle a redwood, and something about the tree spooked him, the big crowns casting the forest floor in a kind of twilight gloom and the wind in the dead branches above sounding like a dry hinge on a barn door.
A good part of the year it was too wet to get in to the forest. Len worked on the vehicles, then. Patched the roof of his house. Sharpened the sawteeth. The forest here was wet and deep, and ferns grew tall as a man in places. In winter the creek jumped its banks and flooded the road and only the tallest vehicles could downshift and get across. Then everybody dreamed of the desert. Dreamed of being someplace they could dry out. They plodded along and listened for the suck and rumble of mudslides. They stoked their fires with Len’s cordwood and watched the flames for prophetic gestures. Mud caked on their boots six inches thick. They met at the Grange Hall for pancake breakfasts and played top this. These past years, though, too many families had a son in that other wet place, the one they watched on the evening news. Or a son had gone to Canada to sidestep the war. Len had signed up himself in ’44; they sent him to basic training and then called the war off and he was dispatched with his buddies to MP in the Philippines. He didn’t know what he would tell a son of his to do. A son of his? Len remembered the kid on the couch and swung his legs over the side of the bed, dressed, and went in to restart the fire.
The scatter of blankets had shifted. They were bundled up now in a tangle on the armchair, and through their soft bulk Len could pick out an elbow, the dome of the boy’s head, and sticking out of the bottom a bare foot. He stared at that. It was as long as the palm of Len’s hand. It would need socks. It would need shoes. It would need flippers for swimming lessons at the Y and basketball sneakers and lace-up oxfords for catechism and how on earth did you size a thing like that, anyway? The kid came with a trash bag half full of who knows what. Len would have to go through that. But not now. He stepped out of the door and the sun poured magnificently over the stoop and he heard a warbler singing hard enough to burst and he was happy.
By ten o’clock Len was gasping for air. Pistol-whipped by noon. Knocked-down defeated by three in the afternoon.
Not that the kid was bad. Not exactly. But there was no way a person over three feet tall could keep up with a thing like that. He had speed on his side