Marriage Marks
	Stefani Farris

When they made love on those deep, icy nights in the winter before they built their first house Maureen's mind flared with the unlikeliest images. A hand cupping a rabbet plane. A hard dark peg of purple heart. Even the snow beyond the bedroom turned, in her mind, to curled shavings falling from a workbench. Were they reading too many homebuilding journals, she wondered, cutting out too many pictures? Were they obsessed? She was thirty and had no idea what to expect. Early on, when they were still talking about what kind of house they wanted, Ben had told her about a style known as "timber frame." His hand flashed madly across a piece of graph paper as he explained how the main frame was comprised not of two-by-fours but of timbers that were often the size of whole trees, traditionally joined without nails or bolts. "When it's finished," he had said, "the entire frame is visible from the inside. It's really something." Ben's sketch and its straight, precise lines had looked to Maureen wonderfully simple and clean. And she was intrigued by the sense of permanence this kind of house seemed to promise. A home built from nearly whole trees would, she thought, settle firmly into the earth, find a natural footing against disaster. So in the evenings that winter, after the dim northern daylight had been swallowed up, they sat together on the couch and read articles on joinery and wood strength. They created a glossary for themselves and quizzed each other on the strange terms: Jowl. Jetty. Kerf. They acknowledged that building a timber frame would be difficult, that it would demand a lot from them. "Mainly blind faith," Ben joked. Later, when they made their way to bed, Ben would reach for her beneath the heavy quilts and Maureen would turn her body to him, but her mind still hummed with all she'd just read. He ran his hand over her neck and breasts and she imagined he held a square of fine-grained sandpaper. Or she moved above him and saw herself in parts, a series of surfaces to be worked and finished. *  *  * They broke ground on a foggy day in June as soon as the earth thawed. The rain from the night before had stopped, but the air was damp and cool. Maureen stuffed her hands in her slicker pockets and rocked on her heels as Ben climbed into the cab of a borrowed backhoe. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" she called. He grinned and swung into the seat. The yellow machine spat a cloud of smoke and evened itself out. It looked ancient, a hungry, roaring dinosaur. Ben moved the bucket so it was poised over the center of the leveled ground, then gave Maureen a thumbs-up. The machine took its first cold bite of earth. They were building fifteen miles east of the Parks Highway. On the deed their property was part of Ash, a community in the wide Fletcher River Valley from which the shimmering hulk of Denali was visible to the north. The center of Ash was a gravel pullout off the highway with a Tesoro station at one end and a steel shed housing the municipal offices at the other. Fletcher Creek delineated the northern boundary of their land. Most of the year the creek was narrow and slow, but in the spring it leapt to life. Ben said that some years it swept two or even three novice anglers from its shore in the same day. Most could find a slow spot where the current turned back on itself, but not all. Ben was a backcountry guide and had grown up near Ash, racing sled dogs, hunting moose. He was from this valley in the same way Maureen was from nowhere. The backhoe growled. Ben slipped so easily into work like this, Maureen thought, into labor. The machine's movements were just extensions of his own, measured and smooth. He seemed to understand intuitively its operation; he raised and lowered the bucket gently, deposited the fresh soil before her like a gift. She took a deep breath. The soil smelled good, metallic and clean. *  *  * At first, Maureen had not meant to stay in Alaska. She'd taken a teaching position at a junior high in Anchorage-her first offer out of graduate school-with the idea that it would be transitional, a way to pay on her loans until she made some decisions. Middle-schoolers, so fiercely unpredictable, were not her first choice. She hoped one day to teach juniors and seniors who might be more stable. She met Ben the first week of class when she agreed to chaperone the school's fall backpacking trip. He was hired as trip leader and had an instant rapport with the students, who sensed in him a kindred spirit rarely found among adults. They could joke without making him angry. On the bus to the park, between their persistent questions about grizzlies and avalanches, Ben asked her what she thought of Alaska. Maureen was twenty-four then, but this was the first time she'd paid such attention to the place she lived. She was from a Navy family and home to her had always been wherever she unpacked and arranged the dolls her father brought back from deployment. The immediate views out the windows of her youth were indistinct: the pale siding of the next duplex over, an American flag dangling above a porch. Sometimes she could see the base's playground from her bedroom, hear the creak of the swings. But never anything farther than that, never a living, breathing landscape. Her father was the one who flew clear around the world, returning with evidence of places she couldn't begin to see in her mind: sweaters from Iceland and soaps from Spain and great glass jars from Greece that her mother dutifully lined along the kitchen counters. "It's too much," she told Ben on the bus that morning. "I'm not sure where to look." He'd considered this seriously, as if he hadn't heard the same thing dozens of times from the tourists he led through the mountains. He twisted a patch of his reddish-brown beard. "Start small," he told her. "This weekend, you'll get to know a stretch of the Eagle River" -- he pointed to the water out the bus window -- "and next weekend, if you want, we could find another place to explore." She did want this-to begin to know where she was. The following Saturday he picked her up and they drove the winding road along Turnagain Arm. They got out at one point and scanned the sparkling water for belugas while the wind snapped their jackets. The chalky shapes moved in and out of the bay, going about their lives in plain view of the cars that drifted along the Seward Highway. This fascinated her. The next weekend they drove to Homer. From the car they saw a black bear rooting around in a meadow, and later, on the way home, a bull moose knee deep in water, antlers dripping. Ben whistled softly at the sight of it. Maureen discovered that an entire life here had not dulled Ben to the place. If anything, it had only sharpened his love. They began to plan longer trips, leaving Friday after school, returning Sunday, driving as far as the constraints of pavement and time allowed. They went to Valdez and Fairbanks and places whose names Maureen could not pronounce. They slept on beaches, in meadows, burrowed together against the cold autumn air. One night, from a silty riverbank near Talkeetna, Maureen saw the ghostly fingers of the northern lights stretching across the sky, and she began to cry quietly. When Ben realized, he gingerly reached around her shoulders. He must have thought she was crying for the beauty, but that wasn't it. She sensed something else in the luminous, electric night. It crackled in the air around her. Invitation. Opportunity. It scared her. Ben shifted and set a hand on her leg. "What is it?" he asked. She wiped her face and apologized. "No," he said. "It's all right." The truth was that Maureen sometimes felt like a ghost herself, weightless and unsettled. An effect of her uprooted life. She drifted above the earth's surface, touching nothing too deeply. Until now she hadn't considered there might be other ways to live. But these lights, and the fact that they'd been bending and rippling off and on for all the years she'd been alive, made her wonder. What other important things didn't she know? What else had she missed? Ben leaned against her. "I'm glad you're here," he said. It was then that all of it -- the strange glowing sky, the river that poured past their feet, Ben's voice and his solid, ursine body -- all of it began to feel right to her, not overwhelming but steady. To be of a place. To have its stories pulsing through you in all their forms, serving as ballast. Maybe this was what people ought to strive for. *  *  * The fog burned off by noon and the sun emerged in patches. Ben came down from the tractor with his water bottle and Maureen unzipped her slicker and hung it from a willow branch. "The mountain's out," she said, pointing to the wide swath of blue sky to the north. Ben took a long drink of water and followed her gaze. Denali rested like a massive jawbone on the horizon, pearled and white. It was impossibly high. "Better get used to that view," he said. He handed the water bottle to her and went to the bushes to relieve himself. Maureen set the bottle on the ground and took a firm clump of clayey soil in her hand. A week earlier it had been frozen. "We are going to live here," she told herself, squeezing the clay in her fist. She conjured the rooms that would take shape. The kitchen would go here, the bedroom up there. They would eat delicious, sustaining meals in this house. They would raise children. They would grow older and then they would grow old, all right here. She let the clay fall and brushed her hand on her jeans. It felt good to do this, she thought, to craft a whole life out of the thin, damp air. *  *  * A man arrived at the property in an old pickup while Maureen and Ben were starting to work on the forms for the foundation. He pulled in next to the brush pile and stepped out, leaving the door open and the engine idling. A young woman and two small children waited in the cab. As he walked toward the sawhorses where Ben and Maureen hammered, he removed his ball cap and let it hang from his fingers. His bald scalp gleamed. "Neal Peters," he said as he approached. "I live in the cabin up the road." He offered a hand to Ben. "I know the place," Ben said. He introduced Maureen. "Welcome." The man swept his arm out in a wide arc. Ben explained that they lived in Anchorage now, but that he'd spent most of his thirty years in the Fletcher Valley. "A real sourdough," the man said, clearly impressed. His eyes were small for his face and deeply set. His brow jutted above them like a hard pink outcrop. "How about you?" Maureen asked. "Where are you from?" She looked to the woman and the children in the truck. They sat with straight backs and squared shoulders, staring patiently ahead. Even the littlest, in a car seat, did not squirm. He said he'd come from Illinois five years earlier. "For the peace and quiet." They all agreed this was the place for it. They continued to make small, neighborly talk until finally the man asked what he'd come to ask: if they might have a job for him. "I've worked concrete for years," he said, pointing toward the new trench. "I could have that done for you in no time." He pulled a folded paper from his back pocket and handed it to Ben. "My references." He rubbed his bare scalp with his knuckles, then flipped his ball cap on. JESUS SAVES was embroidered in tall white letters on the front. Ben looked at Maureen. She shrugged. "We'll call," she said. The man shook his head and crossed his arms. Veins snaked beneath the skin, disappearing up under his sleeves. "Won't work," he said apologetically. "We don't have a phone." "We could stop by," Ben suggested The man agreed to this. "Sounds like you know where to find the place." He shook their hands again and he returned to the pickup. The truck retreated down the rough dirt track, the heads in the cab jostling. Ben and Maureen could use the help, especially now, with the concrete to be finished and the timbers scheduled to come any day from the mill in Haines. The next morning Ben stopped to ask for an informal bid and Maureen stayed in town to call the numbers he'd left. Everyone she talked to said Neal Peters was great, that he did exceptional work. She and Ben agreed to have him come on Monday. *  *  * Near the end of that week the timbers arrived by barge and were trucked the last ninety miles, from Anchorage to Ash. When they came, stacked and bundled on the flatbed, full of scent, Maureen was stunned by their size. The smallest were ten feet long and six inches across; others were twenty and even thirty feet long and a foot wide. They would be changed, of course, pared down. Every surface would be reduced. Mortises would be chiseled, tenons cut. Edges would be chamfered. Still, the timbers would remain huge. Maureen fingered the pale rings at the ends of the wood and realized that she was drifting ahead of herself again, trying to channel the sturdy future through these felled trees. Ben walked over and gave the stacked wood a hearty slap. "This is going to be it," he said, turning to Maureen and grinning. "This right here is going to be it." For a moment she thought he was envisioning the finished house, too, but she realized he meant they were getting into the soul of the project now, the real joy, the work he'd been most looking forward to. He let out a jubilant howl that soared through the trees. *  *  * Neal came on Monday morning. Maureen was sitting on a stump with a cup of coffee when he got out of his truck. Ben had gone down to the creek for water. She waved to Neal, but he didn't see her. His green ball cap was pulled tight over his bare skull. He closed the pickup door with a hard push and leaned into the bed to lift out his tool belt. He slipped his muscled arms through the straps of his suspenders as if he were pulling on a dress shirt, adjusted the straps at the shoulders. He evened out the leather pouches at his hips. He fed the frayed tongue of the belt through the buckle at his waist, folded it back, cinched it tight. Maureen felt she was witnessing a series of gestures ordinarily reserved for lovers or family. She remembered the woman in the truck, the children, thought of their stiffness. She wondered about the four of them together in the tiny cabin up the road. Ben came up the hill. He and Neal shook hands and patted each other on the back. They seemed an unlikely pairing-Ben stocky and relaxed, reaching up to stroke his russet beard, looking like a young bear, full of a kind of ambling gracefulness; and Neal, four or five inches taller, bald and bare-faced, shoulders squared, hawk-like and less at ease. They crossed their arms and nodded intermittently as, Maureen imagined, they discussed what needed to be done. They inspected the timbers. Neal ran a hand along the top of the stack; Ben squatted at the end of a long beam and sighted down its length as if to line up a shot. The men's intimacy surprised Maureen and she felt a brief stab of envy at the thought of what they had acquired in their lives -- an entire body of knowledge she would never possess, even after building her own house. There wouldn't be the time. Ben caught her eye and smiled. She finished her coffee and stood to join them. *  *  * Neal's references had been right. He did a fine job. He showed up just before eight and worked straight through to noon. They all gathered around his truck for lunch. Neal sat on the tailgate with a small cooler by his hip. Each day before he ate he set his cap on the cooler and recited a brief, inaudible prayer. When he finished he slapped the cap back on and fished out a sandwich. He was a lay preacher, he told them. Sometimes he went with a pilot friend to a village in the interior to give a sermon or a baptism. His wife was expecting their third child, so he hadn't been up in a while. He was staying close to home. "We don't deal with doctors," he liked to say. "They interfere with the natural order of things." This baby, he explained between bites, would be born at the cabin like the first two had. Neal avoided too much eye contact as he talked, apparently preoccupied by a splinter in his thumb, but his tone was proud and sure. He reminded Maureen of her adolescent students -- awkward and shy, but desperate to reveal something of themselves to her, desperate to be known. *  *  * While Neal worked on the foundation, Ben and Maureen prepared the timbers. They rented a planer from a framer in Girdwood, an industrial machine that looked out of place surrounded by fireweed and ash. Ben developed a system to lever a heavy timber up onto the long set of rollers that stretched like wings from either side of a central opening. Once the timber was up on the rollers, he leaned his body into and forced it through the square opening, which was fitted with a series of blades. The noise of the blades against the wood was excruciating, a high and constant whine. Maureen stood at the other side, receiving the planed beams from the jaw of the machine. As she worked, Maureen found herself checking and rechecking the rollers for sturdiness, obsessively scanning the ground around the planer for anything that could turn her ankle. She became fiercely alert to the placement of her fingers and hands as she guided the beams across the rollers. For the first time since the project started, she found herself wondering about its scope, about the physics of it. As she and Ben grunted to lower a finished timber to the ground using a crude system of pulleys and levers, she wondered if they were foolish to believe that thirty thousand pounds of wood could be pieced together with only small wooden pegs -- as if by magic, really -- and hoisted into the air. The weight of the wood continued to astound her. She had been so drawn to the allure of working with her lover in the far north, of shaping the material that was to become their home, that she hadn't anticipated the level of concentration the massive timbers would demand, or the sheer exhaustion -- physical and mental -- that would wash over her so early. They began to camp at the property so they could work late. It seemed the sun never set. When they crawled into their sleeping bags near midnight it hung swollen and low in the northwest and when they emerged again around six it appeared to have skidded sideways, straight east. If the sky darkened even a shade on those late June nights, if the sun dropped at all below the horizon, it happened in the few hours they slept. So for weeks this was all. They forced one quarter-ton timber after another into the mechanical jaw of the planer, day after day. When a surface was smooth, they turned the beam and sent it through again, and again, until all four faces were finished. The machine's steel shriek rang across the valley. It began to etch itself deep inside Maureen's head. Long after they shut off the planer and she removed her earplugs the noise continued, relentless as the sunlight. It seemed to emanate from within her skull, high and shrill and unbearable. *  *  * In July the rain came. The ground turned greasy and soft. At first they tried to work through it but Ben's foot slid in the mud one morning while he was moving a smaller timber and he caught his temple on the edge of the sawhorse. They lashed tarps over everything and headed back to Anchorage to wait it out. Secretly Maureen craved the details of a break from building -- -- a shower, their bed, time to let her mind unfurl. Back at the apartment, she lay under a quilt and thumbed through a new magazine while the rain beat steadily against the roof. But Ben paced. He shuffled between rooms and flipped on the TV every few hours to check the weather. "Stop," Maureen said from the couch. He was peering through the beaded window, trying to see the sky. His restlessness grated at her. "Relax." Ben rubbed a circle on the glass with his fist and squinted at the rain. The small band -- aid near his eye, from where he'd hit the sawhorse, wrinkled. "The frame's got to be up by winter," he said. Maureen refused to think about working on the house. She refused to let him diminish the peace she meant to take from this break. "It's a few days," she said. Her voice was sharper than she intended. "It won't matter." He didn't answer, squinted harder. "Get out," she said. "Go for a run. See a movie. You're making me crazy." She took her magazine to the bedroom to read. Instead, he stayed in and began to cook. Waffles, omelets, hissing pans of bacon in the mornings; elaborate pasta and salmon dishes at night. The meals steamed the windows and filled the apartment with scent. They were ridiculous. Maureen told him so after the third night of his food. He was standing at the freezer, trying to wedge a Tupperware container between two frozen salmon fillets. "No," he said, shoving the food and shutting the door quickly. "We'll be glad it's here later. You wait." She shook her head and turned on water for the dishes. Ben began to peel an apple. "What are you doing now?" she asked. "Apple crisp," he said, grinning. He cut a thin slice and placed it between her lips. "Ben." He dusted cinnamon over the apples in the bowl and turned to her, widening his eyes. He'd taken off his band -- aid and the bruise at his temple was a tiny yellow thumbprint now, halved by a faint red line. "Apple crisp," he said again, holding the bowl in front of his face and taking a deep breath. He was being silly, raising and lowering his eyebrows like a carnival hawker. She brushed a spot of flour from his beard. He leaned to kiss her, holding his warm mouth to hers so long she began to feel the familiar ache through her limbs, spiraling slowly toward her center. He turned back to the counter and began to stir. Okay, she thought, plunging her hands into the hot water. He needs this. For whatever reason, he was driven to movement in the way of a honeybee or an ant -- perpetually, unquestioningly -- as if moving could satisfy some instinctual urge. To work. Or maybe just to create. She would grant him this. At her side, he worked swiftly, spreading the spiced apples in a baking dish, searching the cupboard for oats and brown sugar. He unwrapped a stick of butter, rattled the drawer for a knife. With bare hands he mixed the butter into the sugar and oats. His fingers fluttered in the bowl, pinching the separate elements into something consistent, squeezing and coaxing until they came together. *  *  * When they returned to the property a week later the place was transformed. The grasses along the road were a hard, wet green and the fireweed blooms burned bright on their stalks. At the end of the drive Ben stopped the car and got out to unlock the heavy chain they used as a makeshift gate. He unwound the end from the post and let it fall to the ground. He had lightened again. Slowed. He was calmed by the promise of forward progress. They spent the day measuring the timbers to determine which would be used as posts, which as beams, braces, or ties. In the afternoon, Neal stopped by. He'd seen the gate down, he told them. He had some news. Maureen could see in his face that it was not good. The baby came early, he said. Emily Ann. He looked at his boots and awkwardly recounted the details: a nine -- hour delivery, a sluggish, quiet infant no longer than his forearm. "We all got to hold her," he said. "Even the girls. But it just wasn't her time." Maureen touched his shoulder. "Oh, Neal." "We'll be okay," he said. "It was out of our hands." Maureen nodded, but she felt her thoughts dividing like water along the spine of a mountain. No, she wanted to say even as she tried to fathom how a family would go about bearing a grief of this size: It might have been prevented. "I was able to baptize her," Neal said. "That's a comfort." They stood silent for a moment, surveying the building site. Neal spoke again. "I'll finish backfilling the foundation tomorrow. That's got to get done." "God, Neal," Ben said. "Don't worry about that." Neal lifted his hat and smoothed his head. His dark, recessed eyes were intense and pleading. "I'd like to keep going on it, if I could." Ben fiddled with his measuring tape, pulling it out a few inches and letting it recoil. "Are you sure?" he asked. Neal was. "Okay. Whatever you think." "Thank you," Neal said. He turned to go and Maureen called out to him. "If there's anything we can do -- " He paused at the door of his truck and lifted his palm to her, letting it hang there a moment. Then he climbed inside and was gone. That night, camped on the ridge above Fletcher Creek, Maureen had trouble falling asleep. The thin tent could not block the sunlight. She lay on her back, staring at the pale nylon walls surrounding her. The tent was like a womb. Curled up beside her, sleeping soundly, was Ben. Her womb mate, she thought, a twin. She remembered the two girls she'd seen in Neal's truck that first day. Because of their parents' choices, their baby sister had died. What would they take from that, carry into adulthood? She recalled Neal's admonishment of doctors, his word for their role: interfere. She wondered if doctors always seemed like interferences to Neal's wife, too. Or, Maureen wondered, were there times when a deep, primal fear -- either for herself or for the babies she carried -- overtook her and she craved reassurance from something more tangible than God, someone who might put a steady hand on her belly and say Now take a deep breath? *  *  * After he finished the foundation, Neal was hired for a drywall job in Wasilla. Ben and Maureen worked alone through July and August, laying out the timbers and cutting the joints. Layout, Maureen discovered, was the most complicated part of the whole project, though it happened mostly on paper. For every joint -- and in a house this size there would be dozens -- they had to determine first which timbers would comprise it. Then they had to figure out where on the timber the cuts would be made, keeping track of how cuts on one length of wood would align with cuts on another. A single timber might have three or four joints in it; the timbers connecting to it might have two or three of their own. And so on. They measured relentlessly, adjusting when they encountered knots, factoring in stress and shear loads. Once the layout of a particular joint was determined, each timber had to be marked in such a way to indicate its placement in the final frame. The marks -- marriage marks, they were called, according to Ben and Maureen's glossary -- could be anything so long as they were clear. A timber-framer's nightmare, Ben had heard, was to lose track of where the posts and beams needed to go. Maureen found this work excruciating, harder even than moving the heavy wood. The theory was simple enough, similar to assembling a paper glider or folding box: Tab A into Slot B; C into D. She was reminded of the logic tests she'd had to take in college, where you were asked how to fold a series of oddly connected squares into a tidy three-dimensional cube. They'd made so little sense to her then. She always knew precisely how the squares should go together; she could imagine taking them in her hands and just doing it. But the means -- the necessary steps -- of getting to that point eluded her, existing dreamlike at the very edge of her brain, so that to try to capture the process and explain it was to dissolve it entirely. It was the same now with the timbers. While Ben made rapid calculations and penciled marks swiftly up and down the beams, she stood in front of the wood with her pad of paper, writing numbers and erasing. One day she spent forty minutes on what should have been a straightforward joint -- the connection between a cross-tie and a rafter. She worked until the pencil grew dull and finally she hurled the pad at the timbers. Ben came over from where he was working and retrieved the paper. "Need help?" he asked. Maureen said nothing. "It's confusing," he said. He sat with the pad on a stump, thinking. Maureen watched him work through it like an easy math problem, watched him tug gently at his beard, watched his forehead furrow and then relax as the solution came together in his mind. He began to pencil the marks on the ends of the beams, referring occasionally back to the paper. Of course he could do it. Maureen felt her inadequacy swell like a balloon. "Don't be condescending," she said sharply. Ben stopped marking the wood and turned, astounded, to her. "What?" "Acting like it's confusing when really it's a simple thing." "It is confusing." "For me, Ben. Not for you. Don't act like it's hard for you just to make me feel better." She knew she should stop. Ben looked at her for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was coiled and tight. "No, Maureen, it's confusing for me, too. I've just had more practice with this sort of thing." "You've had more practice with everything, haven't you?" she snapped. She felt like a child, like one of her spoiled students. She wasn't even sure what she meant. She wanted, with a child's vengeance, to hurt Ben, to crack his calm. It was her turn to refuse him peace. Ben set down the pencil and stared at her. "Why are you doing this?" She pretended not to understand. "Why do you want to fight?" "What I want," she said calmly, "is for you to stop acting like we're equals in this. You know perfectly well that I don't know what the fuck I'm doing." Ben snatched up the pencil and made furious marks on the wood. Maureen walked to the creek. She sat in the damp weeds. They smelled faintly of fish. She felt the dampness seep through her pants and chill the backs of her thighs. A cluster of mosquitoes came to hover in front of her face and she slapped at them, trying to knock them from the air. She couldn't even decide what was wrong. It had something to do with the reality of building this house, the discrepancy between that and what she'd been picturing all along. She had been so full of stupid, blind hope -- imagining how light would fall through the windows, thinking about how, because she and Ben were in love, the project would simply go and she'd know everything she needed to know to make it work. She hadn't considered the frustration, or the brutal, daunting risk. She'd also not foreseen her own irrelevance. And this, she thought, was the worst. The oversight seemed so obvious now. *  *  * Later, when she climbed back up the hill, she found Ben sliding a hand plane over a brace. He looked up, but didn't speak. "I'm sorry," she said. "Okay." The plane swept across the wood, away and back, away and back. "I'm sorry, Ben," she repeated. "I believe you." Away. Back. Away. He got like this sometimes when he'd been hurt -- quiet and sullen. It was a terrible punishment. Finally he said, "What was it about?" Now she was quiet. She watched the passes of the plane, Ben's compact, familiar hands. "I guess I'm scared," she said. "I don't know if I can do this." Ben stopped planing and rubbed the new surface with his palm. He didn't look at her. "Why not?" "It's so huge, Ben. How will it ever come together? Especially with me working on it?" He set the plane gently on the wood and turned to her. "We're doing fine," he said. "It will work out, the way things always do." That optimism. She felt it drawing her again toward rage, so she spoke carefully. "Surely you don't believe that, Ben. That everything just always, magically, works out." He looked at her a moment and she could see the care he was taking, too, measuring out his response. He nodded slowly. "I suppose not," he said. "You're right." They were silent. He crossed his arms and leaned against the sawhorse, sighing. "Look, Maureen. I'm sorry you're scared. But we'll get this done. You just have to believe we will." She didn't answer. "It's all we can do," he said. "I don't know what else there is." *  *  * September came. A wash of yellow trembled in the aspens and great lines of geese stretched across the sky. A handful of fuchsia blossoms clung to the tips of the drying fireweed stalks, the last stubborn embers of summer. Maureen returned to school. Back in her classroom, she was struck as she was every year by the intensity of her teenage students and their complicated emotions. They swung violently between love and hate -- of music groups and clothes, of each other -- and it was difficult to keep up with their surging passions. In years past, the transition from her quiet summer into the frenzy of her classes had been jarring and Maureen had needed a week or two to adjust to the tempo. But this year she found her students' volatility strangely reassuring. She watched girls alert as wild animals, frantic to be noticed or to remain unseen; she watched boys dribble invisible balls through the hallways, taking shots at nothing, as if they could sink their own confusion and leave it in the air behind them. This year, Maureen's students reminded her of what, as an adult, she often took for granted: the relative steadiness of her own heart. Ben camped at the property during the week. On Friday evenings, Maureen drove up to join him, taking along one of his extra meals from summer, warmed and wrapped in foil to keep the heat. A chill hung over the valley and they built fires those nights and ate their food in its warmth. The joints were finished in October and Ben began assembling them. Neal offered to help on the weekends. When Maureen asked how he and his family were doing, he poked the brim of his hat and said, "Okay. We're getting through it." The three of them pieced together the first of the bents -- the largest sections of the frame. They assembled it flat on the ground like a giant puzzle, using the marriage marks to line up the joints. With heavy rubber mallets, they knocked the tenons into the mortises and drove the pegs into place. And somehow, miraculously, everything fit, each piece of drying spruce shouldering into another as if this were the form they were all meant to come back to. The finished bent, even prone in the dirt, was beautiful in a way Maureen had only guessed at. The curve of the braces and the simple flourish of their bevels, the lines of the beams meeting posts, all combined to make something lovelier and more solid than any one timber had done on its own. Perhaps, Maureen thought. Perhaps this will be done. *  *  * The raising was to take place on a Saturday in the middle of the month. On Friday night, after they'd joined the last section, Maureen and Ben crawled into their tent on the ridge above the creek. The moon was close to full and the air was cold and filled with the odor of earth and fallen leaves. Winter was closing in. For a long time they lay on their stomachs with the tent flap open, watching the moonlight play over the dark body of Denali. Somewhere far off wolves howled, then were quiet. In his sleeping bag, Ben moved closer to Maureen. "Hard to believe this is ours, isn't it?" In the open air his voice was reduced, engulfed. "Mmm," Maureen mumbled, teetering at the edge of sleep. She was resting her chin on her fists, struggling to keep her eyes open. "It is." "Is it what you wanted?" Ben asked. "What you want?" She turned on her side. Ben's face was caught in shadow. "I think so," she said. "You?" He waited. "Yes." They were silent. Ben unzipped his sleeping bag then, the sound a soft tearing in the night. Maureen felt him reach for her bag; she heard its zipper drawn down, too, and felt a rush of cold and then his hand on her arm. He drew her to him. His body was hot -- he gave off so much heat that some nights she had to move to the far side of the bed to be comfortable -- but tonight, outside, it was good. She pulled her nylon bag over both of them, trapping their heat, guarding it from the air. She stayed on her side and he moved his hand to her thigh, her hip, her elbow. She touched her fingertips lightly to his stomach and felt him draw a sudden breath, then exhale slowly. "It's going to be good, Maureen," he said. She felt him brush against her neck, her ear. She traced her fingers up his stomach. "We've done the hard part." She felt another rush of cold air surge in like water, felt his mouth now at her collarbone, her sternum, in the valley between her breasts, his heat like a physical substance against her skin. "Yes," she said. "We have." She dragged her fingertips as far as her arm would reach, past his navel, his hipbone, the hard length of his quadricep, stopping finally just inside his knee, lifting it. Overhead the moonlight, too, reached across ridges and slopes, and below, the creek slid over rock and weed as it reached toward the river. Everywhere, Maureen thought, as she turned onto her back and pulled Ben inside her, is this seeking of the familiar, this insistent coming together. Everywhere is this moving toward home. *  *  * It was Ben's idea for Maureen to run the loader that would raise the first bent. He wanted to stay on the ground to help Neal guide the posts into place. They'd rented the machine for the weekend and he spent the morning teaching her how it worked. Its operation was not complicated. This had surprised her. From the cab she watched Ben and Neal attach a heavy chain to the section of frame. The bent, laid flat on the ground in front of her, in position to be lifted upright, was shaped like a tremendous three -- sided square: two parallel posts and the perpendicular cross -- tie connecting them at one end. Chamfered braces arched gracefully across each of the two corners, pinned to the posts and the beam with dark red pegs. What would be the top when it was raised -- the cross -- tie and braces -- was closest to the loader. The square's open end was pointed away. The bent would drawn upward -- cross -- tie first -- from prone to vertical, until all that touched the ground were its "feet," the bottoms of its two parallel posts. Ben and Neal would guide those into concrete footings and brace them off with metal plates. Neal finished wedging a steel pipe under the cross -- tie, levering it just far enough off the ground that Ben could get the long chain around it. The chain was hooked at either end. Ben passed it under the beam once and then again, then slipped one of the hooks over the chain itself. He fastened the other hook to a bar on the loader's bucket and gave the chain a tug. Satisfied, he stepped to the side. He held his thumbs up, Maureen's sign to go. Across from him, Neal stood ready. Gently she pulled the lever toward her, sensing the strain when the bucket took up the chain's slack. The cross -- tie lifted off the ground. Through the plexiglass windshield she could see the tautness in the chain, see the men's postures change as they readied themselves to brace the posts. Carefully, she brought the bucket higher, feeling -- or imagining she felt -- the tug of a ton of wood. Like someone standing to address a crowd, the bent rose before her in one slow, fluid motion. It towered. And for a long, suspended moment it was close, the wooden frame as near to upright as it could be without being all the way there. The sight was stunning, a series of lines and angles meant, it seemed, only to stand. Automatically Maureen filled in the details: four sturdy walls and a solid roof. Stories. Lives. But Ben had made a mistake in how he fastened the chain. They would decide later that he set the hook wrong, which allowed it to slip out of place. Now, though, Maureen knew only that something tremendous was giving way. And as it did her fears about the house and its risk were instantaneously distilled to the simplest possible facts. She feared losing Ben to the weight of those timbers. She feared losing herself. From her place inside the machine, it was an incredible thing to watch. Even afterward she would remember it as incredible: the sight of all that wood crashing down; the violent, upward jerk of the bucket when the chain let go, the bucket like a spring released; the cracking of the timbers when they hit first the loader and then the ground; the metallic clang of the slackened chain. Her muscles and nerves and skeleton would remember, too, how when the weight of the load was suddenly no weight at all it seemed her body would be pitched forward, out the windshield, following the trajectory of the wood, down, down. Her body would remember the jolt of the massive bent slamming against the bucket, kicking its own parallel feet out and away from itself, away from Maureen and toward Neal and Ben who were helpless to do anything but leap blindly out of the way and whose positions Maureen was just peripherally and yet intensely aware of. Maureen would recall, too, the final thud as the wood fell again to the earth, returning to the place it had started from, but with its braces loosened, its shape racked. This took only seconds. Afterward, the air reverberated from the force of wood and metal and earth. On the ground, Ben moved toward the machine, appearing to hurry though it looked dreamily slow. Neal was falling to his knees, lifting his face, clasping his hands in gratitude. They were okay. She could see this. She wanted to weep. Ben came toward her and hoisted himself onto the loader. Maureen felt again the insistence from the night before, pulsing through the air. It surrounded her. It was momentum, she realized, pure and unstoppable. She and Ben and even these tons of wood now were moving toward something greater than themselves, rearranging, refiguring. Ben's worried, familiar face appeared at the cab's door, the most familiar sight she could imagine. He reached for the handle. Viscerally, then, she knew that the damaged section of frame would be repaired and the house would be finished. Ben was right. There was nothing else to be done. The door swung open. She climbed toward him. From the ground, a man's small, grateful voice swept upward in prayer. It rose with the dust, around them all.