“The salt will eat the brass before the vane turns twice,” Louis said, without looking up from the leather washer he was paring with a small bone-handled knife.
Opal did not answer him at once; she was kneeling in the damp fern-fronds by the creek mouth, smoothing a sheet of gray blotting paper over a damp maidenhair sample so the delicate veins would not curl as they dried. The tide was pushing cold Puget Sound water up the brackish mud-run, lifting the skiff against its cedar painter with a hollow, rhythmic *clonk* that matched the heavy throb of the steam sawmill across the narrow channel. Neither of them had mentioned the pump since Tuesday, when the wagon axle had snapped four miles up the logging track and left the heavy galvanized casing half-unloaded in the stinging nettles.
“Brass is soft,” she said finally, her voice light and distinct over the wash of the paddle-wheel across the water. “If you grease it with mutton tallow instead of whale oil, it stays sweet in the salt. My uncle used to run three cylinders on the tide flats at Quilcene that way for four summers without a score.”
Louis trimmed another curl of hide, letting the scrap drop into the cedar shavings between his boots. He was not a tall man, but he had a blockish, solid build that made him look as though he had been dropped into the landscape and left there by some receding glacier, broad-shouldered and deliberate in his movements. His shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbows, exposing forearms browned and freckled by twenty years of salt air and pine rosin.
“Your uncle had an easier grade of mud than this,” he remarked, though there was no weight in the contradiction. “Here you’ve got blue clay mixed with hemlock bark three feet down. You drive a pipe thirty feet and you hit nothing but rotten wood that smells like an old cellar.”
“Then we don’t drive it,” Opal said, standing up and dusting gray silt from the knees of her coarse linsey-woolsey skirt. She was a woman of medium height and comfortable, full-figured build, with dark hair pinned up under a faded straw hat that had seen three seasons of blackberry briars and salt spray. “We sink a timber crib first. A square box of squared cedar, four feet across, and shovel the muck out from the inside. Once we reach the gravel, the pipe goes down straight whether the tide likes it or not.”
She walked over to where the pile of pump parts lay tarped against the drizzling mistโiron stanchions, leather-flanged plungers, and four twenty-foot lengths of cold-rolled steel pipe that smelled of machine shops in Seattle. Her hands were small and red-knuckled from the damp, but she touched the iron with a familiar sureness that had nothing to do with books or ledgers.
Louis watched her through the gray veil of the drizzle, his mouth twitching at the corner into something that might have been a grin if he had felt like spending the breath on it. “You’ve got a lot of square box in you, Miss Marshall,” he said. “The boys at the mill cribbing office been telling you how to spend my timber?”
“The boys at the mill are cutting seventy-foot spars for San Francisco and don’t know a well from a bilge,” she said, picking up a heavy iron coupling and testing its threads with her thumb. “And my name is Marshall same as yours was before your father took the notion to move across the line and call himself Cutler for the tax assessor. I know who’s eating salt pork out of my cellar.”
That stopped him. The knife stayed still against the leather. For a second the only sound was the heavy *thrum-thrum* of the sawmill engine and the drip of moisture from the cedar boughs overhead. Louis looked up then, his gray eyes narrow under sandy lashes that had been bleached nearly white by the Sound glare.
“You had no business looking at the county rolls,” he said quietly.
“I didn’t look at the rolls. Your sister told me when she came by for the lard press in June,” Opal said without looking back at him. She laid the coupling down with a small, hard *clink* on the log. “She said you were the same Louis who used to drop clams down her pinafore behind the smokehouse. I told her I hadn’t forgotten the clams and I hadn’t forgotten the debt your uncle left my mother on the three-row harrow.”
“That debt was settled in cordwood,” Louis said, standing up with a slight grunt that betrayed an old stiffness in his left hipโa souvenir of the road-grading crew down near Portland five years back. He stepped over the cedar shavings, closing the distance between them until he was standing close enough that she could smell the clean, sharp tang of fir pitch and wet wool on his jacket. “And the harrow was rusted through when your mother took it.”
“It was rusted because it sat in our brush-lot after your cousin broke the tongue,” she said, raising her chin. She was shorter than he by half a head, but she did not step back. Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast against her ribsโnot from anger, exactly, but from the sudden, sharp realization that he was looking at her not as a cousin by marriage or a customer for ironwork, but as a person who had taken his measure and found him short-changed. “Are we going to haul that pipe today or do we wait for the high tide to wash it into the channel?”
Louis looked down at her hands, then up at her face, where a smear of gray clay crossed the bridge of her nose like a smudge of soot. A slow, reluctant amusement cleared the stubborn set from his jaw.
“The tide’s already turning,” he said, nodding toward the gray expanse of the bay where the seaweed was beginning to stream southward toward the spit. “If we don’t get the wheels rolling before the creek mouth floods the corduroy road, we’ll be spending the night in the fern with the mosquitoes. Get the block and tackle out of the locker.”
They worked through the afternoon with the methodical, unhurried concentration of people who knew that a single slip on the slippery round cedar logs could crush a foot or snap a chain. Louis hitched his matched team of roan geldingsโheavy-set, quiet-tempered animals named Prince and Dukeโto the drag-sled loaded with the pump casing and the heavy oak timbers for the crib. Opal walked beside the off-side horse, her hand resting lightly on Duke’s salt-crusted shoulder, guiding the team around the deep washouts where the autumn rains had gouged red scars through the huckleberry brush.
The air smelled of rotting kelp, cedar duff, and the sharp, clean ozone of the approaching equinox. Every half mile, as the timber gave way to open gravel beach where the salt spray stung their lips, Louis would check the bindings on the sled, his large, square hands moving surely over the hemp knots without a word. He did not offer to lift her across the tide creeks, and she did not ask; she simply tucked her skirts high in her belt, waded the cold, knee-deep saltwater with her teeth set against the chill, and caught the leading rein on the other side while the horses scrambled up the gravel bank with the sled sliding behind them in a shower of round stones.
By late afternoon they reached the claimโa narrow bench of flat, fern-covered land wedged between the tidal salt-marsh and the steep, timbered slope of the ridge where the cedar forest rose like a dark wall against the gray sky. A small, unpainted cabin with a cedar-shake roof sat back from the bank, its window-panes reflecting the dreary slate light of the Sound.
“There’s coffee in the pot if you haven’t forgotten how to boil salt water,” Opal said as she dropped the tow-chain with a heavy thud against the horse-block. “I’ve got salt-riser bread in the crock, too, if the mice haven’t got to it.”
Louis unhitched the traces, dropping the heavy leather straps with practiced ease. “The mice won’t touch your bread, Opal,” he said, turning the roans toward the rough-fenced paddock behind the shed. “They got more sense than to chew on stone.”
She watched him lead the horses away, her shoulders stiff under her wool shawl. She was an anxiously cautious woman by habitโone who kept three months of flour in the bin and checked the latch on the root-cellar twice every night before she blew out the tallow dipโand the notion of sharing this isolated scrap of cedar-stump country with a man who laughed at her housekeeping was something she had not yet reconciled with her ledgers. Yet as she climbed the two split-cedar steps to the cabin door and smelled the cold, dry cedar-dust trapped inside, she knew the pump had to go down before the winter rains swelled the creek over the sills, and Louis Cutler was the only man within ten miles who owned a set of shear-legs heavy enough to drop twenty-foot iron pipe into the blue clay.
They ate in silence by the light of a single whale-oil lamp on the oilcloth-covered table. The bread was heavy and dark, baked with wild hops and coarse flour, but it stayed the hunger after the long haul through the salt marsh. Louis buttered his slice thickly with yellow lard-oil and chewed slowly, his eyes fixed on the small drying frame by the stove where Opal had pinned her collection of pressed ferns between sheets of blotting paper.