William Rosewood's Arc

Chapter 13 of 20

Snow came in the night. William woke to a white world and went straight to the woodshed. The overhang had failed. Wind had driven snow under the open front, and the outer rows of firewood wore a wet crust. He pulled a log loose and pressed his thumb into it. Damp. Wet wood would not burn, and a cold hearth would kill his children faster than any storm. Eddie came out behind him, breath white in the air. He looked at the soaked rows and did not soften it. "Half of it's wet," he said. "The middle's still dry." "For now," William said. "More snow and we lose that too." He needed a cover, and he needed it before the next fall. He had no planks. He had used every board on the house and its door. He stood in the cold and looked past the shed to the tall pine at the yard's edge. Its lower boughs hung wide and thick with needles, weighed down but shedding the snow off their edges. "Boughs," William said. "We lay them over the wood. Thick, like thatch. The snow rolls off." They worked the morning through. William climbed and cut the low branches with his axe. Eddie hauled them across the yard and passed them up. Tommy came out with cord and stood by the stacked wood, watching how the branches fell. "Lay them slanted," Tommy said. "Butt end up. Then the snow slides down and off, not into the wood." William looked at him, then at the pile. The boy was right. He shifted the first bough and set it at a slant across the outer row. The next he overlapped below it, like shingles. Eddie tied each butt end down with cord so the wind could not lift them. By midday the wet rows were hidden under a green roof of pine. William stacked the dry middle wood higher, close against the shed wall where the boughs met the timber. He carried an armful of the driest logs inside and set them by the hearth to dry through. Cecily stood in the doorway of the stone house. She watched the fire take the dry wood and hold. "It's warm," she said. Nothing more. She went back to the children. William stepped out and looked at the covered woodpile. The pine boughs shed the next flurry as it came, the flakes sliding off and dropping to the ground. The wood beneath stayed dark and dry. But he had counted the dry logs by the fire. Enough for two weeks, no more. The wet rows would dry slow, some not before he needed them. And the pine he had stripped stood bare at the bottom now, its lowest boughs gone. Eddie stood beside him and looked at the same pile. "It'll hold the snow," he said. "It won't dry the wood any faster." William said nothing. The fire would burn. But he did not yet know if it would burn long enough.