What I don't have is a ladder.
What I have is a wood pile stacked against the back wall, chest height, its top surface close enough to the eave that I could use it as a platform.
I could knock on their door. Reid made the offer plainly. Twenty minutes up the mountain. Three men with tools and height and the kind of competence that makes a job like this take twenty minutes instead of two hours.
I pull on the coat. The boots. Pick up the tarp and the rope.
The thing about accepting help is that it comes with a ledger. Maybe not the first time. Maybe not the second. But eventually someone looks at the column of things they've done for you and decides the balance has shifted, and then they tell you what you owe.
I can fix my own roof.
The back of the cabin is already in shadow, the cold here more immediate than in the open, the kind that settles into joints and seams and stays. The wood pile catches the last of the western light across its top layer. I study the route. Stack to eave to roof.
The first attempt rolls my left ankle on a shifting log. I grab the cabin wall and hold still until the sting passes, cheek pressed against cold wood siding, breathing through it. Not broken. Fine. The second attempt is more deliberate. I find the stable logs, test before I commit, get my knee onto the top layer and then my other foot. The eave is within reach. Both hands on the roof edge, the granular bite of snow-dusted shingles through my gloves, and I pull.
By the time I'm on my knees on the shingles the light has already shifted and my fingers are registering temperature through the gloves in a way that means the time window is closing. The wind comes across the roof in gusts, irregular, which I did not account for on the ground.
The view stops me for two seconds. The valley through the tree line, the mountains beyond it, the sky holding that unreasonable blue against the white. Cerulean bleeding into cobalt at the edges, the snow catching the last light in a wash of warm gold that I'd mix with titanium white and a breath of cadmium yellow. The kind of thing I'd have painted once.
Two seconds. Then I find the problem section and work.
The tarp fights me. Every time I get it positioned the wind finds an edge and lifts it. My fingers go from cold to numb on the third attempt, the feeling dropping out of my fingertips so gradually I don't notice until I'm working a grommet by sensation alone, the metal edge barely registering. I work by feel where I can't work by sight, the tarp snapping against my forearms hard enough to sting, until the rope goes through and I have something to anchor. Loop it, pull it taut, work to the roof edge, tie off to the post below. The knot is ugly. It is also not coming undone.
I sit back on the shingles and look at what I've done. Problem identified, addressed, resolved. The satisfaction is specific and clean and entirely mine.
I turn around and lower myself toward the wood pile.
My right boot finds the top log.
The log shifts.
My left boot goes with it. No recovery. No moment between stable and not. The roof edge is there and then it isn't. Sky where the cabin wall was. The wood pile not where my feet expected it.
Impact.
My hip takes it first and then my shoulder and then the back of my skull against something that isn't snow.
A log comes down from above. The edge of it catches my head above the left ear with a sound I hear inside my skull.
Snow in my mouth, cold and granular, the taste of iron underneath it. I try to put my hand to my head and my arm doesn't respond on the first attempt. The second attempt finds wetness. Warm, in all this cold.
I need to get up.
The thought is clear. My body does not follow it. The ground is very cold against my back and the sky above me is losing its color, the blue draining toward grey, or maybe that's my vision, I can't tell the difference.
The cold is seeping through the coat. Through the base layer. Into the skin along my spine. I can feel it making progress, systematic, patient, and I think, distantly, that this is how people die in places like this. Not dramatically. Just a slow surrender of heat while the sky gets dark and there is nobody close enough to know.
My eyes close.
I tell them to open.
They don't.
5
OWEN
There is no smoke.
