William Rosewood's Arc

Chapter 12 of 20

The pigs were fed and the roof held, but the house still gaped. William stood in the doorway the next morning and felt the wind pour through it. The stone walls stopped the cold. The open gap did not. He put his hand on the frame where a door should hang. Nothing was there. The first hard wind of winter would blow straight into the room where his children slept. Eddie came to stand beside him. He looked at the empty gap, then at his father. "We have no planks," he said. "We used the elm on the roof." "I know," William said. Tommy crossed the yard and stopped at the woodshed. He pulled the wide door open on its old hinges and looked inside at the stacked firewood. Then he set his hand flat on the shed's own door, the thick one of weathered timber. "This one," he said. "It's already made. It already fits a frame." William followed him and looked at it. The shed door was sound. Broad boards, iron bands, good hinges. It would hang in the house well enough. But the woodshed held their winter firewood, dry and out of the snow. Take its door and the wood sat open to the weather. "The wood needs cover," William said. "The overhang covers most of it," Tommy said. He pointed at the broad side roof that hung past the stacked logs. "The rain won't reach under there. Snow might, on the edge." Eddie was already lifting the wood. "We move the driest to the middle," he said. "The rest we stack tight. It'll keep." William stood a moment. He did not like trading one shelter for another. But a wet log still burned once it dried by the fire. A cold child did not warm so easily. He chose. "Take it down," he said. They worked through the morning. William knocked the pins from the shed hinges and eased the heavy door free. Eddie and Tommy hauled the firewood back under the overhang and packed it in rows. William carried the door across the yard and stood it in the house frame. It was a hair too wide. He shaved the edge with his knife, then hung it on new pins he cut from oak. The door swung shut. William pushed it and heard it seat against the stone. He put his back to it. The wind hit the far side and stopped there. Inside, the room went still and the cold stayed out. His children would sleep warm. Tommy stepped in behind him and looked at the door in its frame. Then he looked back through the small shuttered window toward the woodshed. "The shed's open now," he said. "And the snow's coming heavier by the week." William looked at the firewood stacked under the bare overhang. He had closed his house. He had opened his winter fuel to the storms.