He agreed with Libbie that it would be best for all of them to live in her and Caleum’s house until spring, when they could decide how best to go on — and either build that one out or else restore the original.

“Once Caleum gets back we can figure the best way to go at it. It doesn’t make sense to start before.” It cost him great effort to admit this, thinking how proud his father had been of that house, as well as the rooms he himself had added. However, he knew he could not build anymore by himself, and Caleum would have to decide what he preferred for the future.

When he said Caleum’s name again, though, Libbie turned silent and moved away from the rest of them.

“Libbie, what’s wrong with you?” Adelia asked, seeing that the younger woman was upset.

“Aunt Adelia, Caleum isn’t coming back,” Libbie said coldly, forgetting Lucky and Rose were still there. “Maybe we can get help from the neighbors or hire hands to help us build, but if we wait for Caleum we will be living out in the woods come next winter.”

Her words wounded Adelia to the core, and tears began to fall from the old woman’s eyes, seeming to trace each wrinkle of her face. “That is not so,” she said, but then spoke no more, being consumed with crying.

“Stop your tears,” Magnus told his wife crossly. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and you know better than listen to her.” For he had been at Stonehouses longest of all, and they had never given up on their people. “Libbie, we’ve always buried our people when they died, but not before that,” he told the younger woman, gently but with a finality that did not allow for argument.

Libbie felt very ashamed of herself then, and apologized for what she had said. “It has been a difficult day,” she tried to explain, turning her head low. “I did not mean it to sound hateful.”

“I know, dear,” Magnus answered, not wanting more strife to befall the house than already had.

“I will cook something for us to have for dinner,” Adelia interrupted, standing to go out to the exposed kitchen. When Libbie volunteered to help her, Adelia accepted gladly, and the two went off, leaving the girls and Magnus alone by themselves.

Magnus slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes, thinking to rest before he ate. However, Rose and Lucky, who were normally very shy with him, came and sat near his feet and looked up at him as he nodded.

Magnus felt their eyes upon him and sat up again in his chair. “We had a great setback today,” he said, looking down to them, “but we will get beyond it. Just as everything outside that window used to be wild until your great-grandfather, Jasper Merian, came here. He tamed the land, and built the house over across the lake from nothing but his own will. Maybe, though, it is not enough to only build once, but you must improve on what you have done, and sometimes build it over, if God wants you to prove yourself again. This is our place, though, and as long as we don’t do anything to foul that up it will always be so, and we will always be blessed.”

The girls let his words wash over them, not certain what he was telling them, or even that he was talking to them at all, but pleased to have his attention and warm mood. He in his turn spoke as he could only to the two of them, as they were after all his blood and his future.

“When will our papa come back?” Rose asked, worrying for the first time that he had not been there since her third birthday, when there was a break in the fighting.

“I don’t know, rightfully,” Magnus said, “but you must believe that he will.”

When Adelia and Libbie came in from the kitchen, bundled in their coats and carrying pots for the evening meal, Magnus and the two girls both went to offer to help with the table. The five of them then said grace and sat down to supper.

They finished late that evening, then began to search for bedding for all to stay warm through the night. After that they dispersed through the two undamaged rooms of the house, Magnus and Adelia downstairs in the parlor and Libbie upstairs with the girls on the other mattress left to them.

The air still smelled of smoke from the fire that had burned through their lives that day, and all were spent from the ordeal. When Rose and Lucky tried to ask their mother questions she quieted them and fell hard asleep, thinking of what all she had to do the next day, if they were to get on properly the rest of the week and, beyond that, the winter.

Downstairs Adelia could see the toll battling the fire had taken on her husband and fed him a glass of warm milk to help soothe his nerves. She listened then as he tried to get comfortable but was unable to because of the aches that racked his body. Whenever he found a position that seemed conducive to sleep, he would soon feel a pain he had not felt before and shift to avoid aggravating it. She rubbed his shoulders to ease his mind at least, but he was unable to find slumber and rest, so neither could she.

The two of them lay awake staring at the ceiling in the dark room, as they had occasionally done through the earliest days of their marriage but most memorably before they were wed. “We have been with each other a long time,” Magnus reminisced, without looking at her. “Through more than I ever thought we would survive.”

“Longer than I dared hope,” Adelia, who was always modest about such matters, answered. “But not longer than I wanted.”

“You have been a good wife to me,” Magnus said then. “Just as you will continue to be good to all of them when I am gone.”

She hated to hear her husband speak this way and usually tried to quiet him when he started down such a line. However, they were both very old and she could see he was feeling each of his years that night — those that weighed heavily on him as well as those that were light and sweet to his memory as spun sugar. She allowed him to say his piece, knowing there might not be very many more opportunities such as this one to count blessings and, though they had suffered a blow, give thanks.

“If I have been a good wife, it is because I had a good man, and it was easy,” she answered.

Magnus laughed softly at this, knowing she bent the truth for the sake of sentiment. They were like young lovers then for a moment, though in his limbs he still felt the accumulation of all his years. “It will be easier on you after he returns,” Magnus said. For he knew that, since he first became theirs to raise, Caleum had supplanted him in her affection. He had long ceased to be bothered by this, as he knew it to be a different emotion than that between man and wife. “Though I fear it might not be easy for him.”

“Do you think Libbie will be able to support him as he needs to be,” Adelia asked, “or might she be overwhelmed?”

“They will have to reckon with that,” Magnus replied. “Everybody figures out how to be with their troubles. But they are both grown now and will just have to figure it out. All I know is I myself was lucky with who I had for a wife.”

When she touched him he shifted himself again and took her in his arms tightly. “Not every man has a home.”

He was still holding her in the morning when she awoke, although he himself did not move. She turned, trying to get free of his grasp without waking him, so that she could go out to the kitchen and make his breakfast, as she had done every morning of their marriage. When his arms did not give way immediately she reached to pry his fingers one by one from the opposite forearm.

She knew as soon as she touched him that he felt no more pain. She took each finger in hers very gently then and coaxed it open. When they were removed from their final grasp, she squeezed his hand, and smoothed it tenderly, then withdrew from his embrace. She stood, and finished arranging his body, then went out to the kitchen, where she lit the stove.

She prepared that morning eggs, the last bacon from their larder, biscuits and wildberry preserves, then poured out a large glass of milk, which she set on the table beside his place at the table. Upstairs Libbie rose as soon as she smelled cooking coming from her kitchen and came downstairs to help.