He looked at the half-built corridor, the boards nailed to the frame, the gap still waiting to be sealed. “Then I saw your smoke, saw you tearing down that porch, and I thought, that’s Silas’s grand trying to finish what he started. And Silas was my friend, and he never got to finish anything.”
He stood up slowly, his joints cracking. “So I’m helping you finish because somebody should.”
The first test failed.
We had built the corridor 20 feet long and 5 feet wide, with double doors at each end. The boards were nailed tight. The gaps were stuffed with linen strips and clay and moss, then sealed with Jonah’s lime mortar. It looked solid. It felt solid. But when the first real cold snap came in late November, I closed the cabin door and opened the corridor door and waited for the cave’s breath to fill the passage.
Instead I heard whistling. 1 of the wall seams had opened. The mortar had cracked where we had applied it too thick. Cold air was streaming through, not from the cave but from outside, and the crossdraft was pulling smoke back from my stove and filling the cabin with it. I coughed until I could not breathe. I threw open the cabin door and stumbled out into the cold and stood there with tears streaming down my face that were not from crying.
Jonah found me like that an hour later. He did not say anything. He just looked at the cracked seam in the smoke-blackened cabin interior and nodded slowly.
“Too thick,” he said. “Mortar cracked because it dried too fast. We’ll have to strip it and do it again. Thinner layers. Give each 1 time to cure.”
It took us 3 more days, 3 days of chipping out mortar and resealing and waiting and chipping out more mortar and resealing again, 3 days when the cold deepened and my food ran lower and I thought about the road more than I should have.
But on the 4th day we finished.
