Six Rooms and a Stair

September 3

We voted to begin before anyone had counted the windows.

There were four, including the one in my house. Six rooms appeared on the drawing. When I pointed this out, Arlen said we could fit shutters until we found more glass. He drew two dark squares, neatly, as though they were a kind of window.

I wrote Six rooms and a stair on the front of the book. It was an old appointments diary from the dental surgery. A different family occupied each half-hour on its early pages, crossed out or circled according to whether they had turned up. After that, empty paper. The dentist had gone with the second evacuation, when there were still buses.

By our reckoning this was the fourth year. We kept the months because they remained useful, though Veda said our September might be part of August. The squash supported her. The mornings did not.

Seventeen of us lived around the old pump yard. For three winters we had patched separate houses, lost roofs, moved into smaller rooms. Last January the stove in the packing shed had been surrounded by mattresses. We slept with everyone’s feet near everyone’s face. No one wanted to do it again.

The pumpkeeper’s house had stone walls and a stair rising into open air. Its wooden upper floor had fallen with the roof. Arlen had examined what remained. His drawing showed a high new roof, leaving space beneath it for an upper floor next year. Six rooms eventually. This winter, a common room and two sleeping rooms below the empty upper space. The stair could stay.

I lived alone in a low house beyond the yard. Its roof did not leak, but last winter I had burned nearly all my furniture keeping it warm. This winter we had agreed to feed one stove. On the new drawing my eventual room was on the upper floor, facing south.

Arlen drew a little star in it for me. He was nineteen and could still do things like that without embarrassment.

His older sister, Iona, stood behind him, pulling a loose thread out of her sleeve.

“Tell them about the boat,” she said.

Arlen put down the pencil.

A freight boat from the lower settlements was expected before the end of the month. Its owner had offered them berths in exchange for Arlen’s work. He had repaired boats before the illness, beside his father. Downriver there was a proper yard, or the boatman said there was.

“We’ll leave you weather-tight,” he said.

Iona did not agree aloud. She had packed already.

We shook on it. There were enough hands for the lifting. Arlen would direct the carpentry. Veda, who had laid stone before any of us were born, would take the walls. I would keep the record and organize supplies.

My roof was our best supply of timber. Arlen had examined the parts he could reach. He said we would know what we truly had when it was down. I put my name under the list of windows before he could say more about that.

September 8

We took the doors off my kitchen cupboards. All morning things fell out because my hand kept closing a door that was no longer there.

Veda said the doors would make shelves in the new house. I had imagined walls going up and smoke rising from a chimney. At supper I sat looking at every plate I owned.

There had been twenty-three people in the yard when we first settled here. We did not say that we had lost six. Three were dead; three had gone west. Arlen and Iona would make five gone. I kept the figures in separate columns.

Iona asked to borrow the diary. She entered the cloth used to wrap the windows, then a bag of barley I had forgotten. She had small, upright handwriting. Mine leaned as though the page were moving underneath it.

“You can leave the boat out of the book,” I told her. “If you like.”

She looked up.

“I want it in.”

She wrote the expected date across the bottom of the page. Then she underlined it.

September 14

Arlen needed my roof down by the sixteenth. We had agreed this at the first meeting. The timber had to be inspected and prepared before it went onto the pump house; it could not pass straight from one roof to another.

I asked him to start with the old stable.

“That wood isn’t good enough.”

“Some of it might be.”

“We looked.”

Only from below. I said that. I had been saving it.

He stood in my doorway, turning a cup between his hands. He had walked over for tea and to tell me where we would stack the timber. I had made the tea strong because he liked it strong. Now that seemed like part of what I was doing.

“I’ll have nowhere to sleep,” I said.

“The packing shed.”

“Not until the new roof is on.”

His eyes went to my dry ceiling. He was sleeping in the shed already, beside Iona and Veda, with seven others behind a curtain made from flour sacks.

“We can’t keep both roofs up, Mara.”

“I know.”

I let him finish his tea. When he went, I wrote: Stable to be checked before dismantling house.

I did not write that he had said no twice. Nor that I knew how much he would hate leaving a roof unfinished.

September 17

Veda brought a piece of stable timber to my table. I could press my thumbnail into it. She waited while I did.

“Will you put that in?” she asked.

I wrote that the timber had proved unusable.

“That makes it sound as if we learned something new.”

Rain tapped on my window. Through the glass I could see the pump house wall, where their work had stopped. A length of cloth hung over the opening that would become the front door. Arlen was holding one end away from the wet stone while Iona pinned the other. Her hair was plastered against her cheek.

“The house comes down tomorrow,” I said.

“The roof,” Veda said. “Your walls can stay.”

I nodded too quickly.

She took the piece of wood away. There was a square of damp grit where she had set it. I left it until evening.

September 18

There is no good word for the noise a room makes when the sky arrives in it.

I stayed inside while they took the last covering away, although Arlen told me to go out. The last section lay over the empty bedroom. He wanted me outside anyway. Each time he looked down, I was still there.

Light fell on the clean rectangle where a picture had hung. My husband had disliked that picture. He had hung it anyway, measuring from both sides because I wanted it centered.

I had saved the picture in a bag. There was nothing left for me to do beneath the mark.

Outside, Iona and I carried timber to the inspection trestles. She took the heavier end without discussing it. We worked until my sleeves rasped against my wrists.

At noon Arlen found a split at the joint of the longest beam, where he had not been able to see it until the roof came apart.

He laid it aside. Two shorter pieces joined it before supper.

I looked at the remaining stack. It did not look like a roof.

Veda sat down on an upturned bucket. She asked Arlen to show her the drawing.

They talked over it while I stacked the rejected pieces separately. Once he looked toward me, then away.

We could build a lower roof, Arlen said. The old kitchen partition could carry its middle, so the shorter timbers would reach. But that wall stopped below the height needed for upstairs rooms. The stair would rise into the new roof. We needed its place for beds.

“Not next year,” I said. “But later.”

Arlen rubbed a thumb along the pencil line.

“We’d have to take the roof off again.”

The star was still in the little square above his hand.

September 19

Tomas said we should stop. There were buildings downriver. We could follow Arlen and Iona, find one, stop taking apart the few things we had.

“Seventeen berths?” Veda asked.

“Fifteen now. They have theirs.”

Arlen folded the drawing.

“We’ve earned ours.”

“I didn’t say you hadn’t.”

“You keep counting them that way.”

Tomas pushed his plate aside. He had spent the morning stripping nails out of wood for Arlen.

We were eating beneath the shed’s new leak. A bowl stood between Iona’s knees to catch it. Every time the bowl rang, I wanted someone to move it. There was nowhere useful to move it.

I took out the diary. I had intended to read the amounts of timber, the nails, the days already spent. Instead I told them what Arlen had said on the fourteenth. I told it twice because the first time I left out the tea.

Iona set the bowl on the floor.

“You thought if we were late enough, he’d stay.”

I looked at Arlen. I had not expected her to say it in front of him.

“Yes,” I said.

He got up and went out. Iona followed him. None of the rest of us tried to finish the meeting.

That night I slept in the shed. My old room was full of weather.

September 21

Arlen came back with a smaller drawing. One floor. Three rooms. No star. He laid it beside the diary, not on top of it.

“I can finish the frame,” he said. “You can do the rest with Veda. If the boat comes, I go.”

I said I understood.

“No meeting when it comes. No asking me to have one more look.”

I wrote that down.

He watched me write it, then showed me where the stair had to be removed.

It took Tomas and me most of the day. Arlen stopped us twice and had us take it apart in a different order. I thought of it as demolition. He was watching which pieces we would be able to use afterward.

At the bottom of the stairs, under a worn tread, we found a child’s marble. Tomas rolled it between his fingers and put it in his pocket. He said nothing about it. I didn’t know whether he had ever had marbles as a boy.

In the evening I crossed out the first title. Pump Yard House fitted beneath it. The old words remained readable.

September 26

The boat came while we were carrying the last bundle of covering across the yard.

It was smaller than I expected. There were three people already aboard, including a boy with a sleeping bird inside his coat. The owner wanted to load vegetables and leave before the water fell farther. He gave us until noon.

Arlen went into the new house. I followed him as far as the door. He put his hand against a timber, looked along it, then fetched the saw he had left on a shelf.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“I’m taking my saw.”

He passed me. I did not follow.

Iona came for the diary. She entered the two blankets they were taking. I told her they were their own blankets.

“I know,” she said.

She entered them anyway, under Departures, beside their names. Then she tore out a blank page for their packing list.

At the boat, Arlen shook hands with everyone except me. He nodded to me. I put a parcel of dried pears into Iona’s bag. She moved it so it would not crush a small tin box.

I wanted to ask about the yard downriver. Whether there really was one, whether there would be work, who would meet them. Any answer would have given me a reason to ask them to stay. I kept my hands at my sides.

After they left, we carried the bundle the rest of the way.

October 8

Last week Veda found two places where the rain came in. We spent the next day fixing them and the day after undoing half of what we had done. Tomas lost a glove in the roof and refused to let us open it again to get it back.

My old house stood across the yard. The walls would have to be capped or brought down before they became dangerous. For now, my doorway framed a patch of yellow weeds.

We argued about beds. We argued about who got the room with the two windows. Finally we put the youngest children there with their parents and a curtain across the middle. Three people disliked this. They moved in anyway.

I took the narrow place where the stair had been. There was room for a mattress and my bag, and for me if I approached sideways. From there I could see the bottom of every door.

Last night, the first wet night with everyone inside, I lay awake waiting for a drop to strike my face.

None did.

There was snoring beyond the partition. Someone coughed, spat into a cloth, apologized. A child wanted water. I knew where every person was without seeing them.

In the morning I wrote: Fifteen slept here. No water came through.

Veda read it over my shoulder. She took the pencil.

Except at the door, she added. Mara will mend the threshold.

Then she gave it back.