A Preacher and His Wife

Chapter Fifteen

When I woke for the first time on my own property, Grace was nowhere to be seen. Every part of me ached from the work I'd done the day before, and I was in no hurry to be getting up and back to it, but part of me was worried about Grace on account of I hadn't yet met everyone in town, and so I didn't know if it was safe to have her far from me. I rose, but even sitting up hurt my back and my stomach.

I wandered around a little, unsure of where she could have gone. When I found her, I should have been pleased, but I was somewhat annoyed. She'd been clearing the space where the cabin was to go. Not using an axe or a saw—she left the bigger trees in place—but she'd taken to pulling out all the smaller brush and piling it up to one side.

It was work that needed to be done, but I felt a little emasculated as I'd been sleeping while my wife was working, and it wasn't easy what she was doing either. She stopped when she saw me, and we had tea and toast and when we were done, she cleaned up, and there was nothing for me to do other than pick up the axe Mr. Ryan had purchased for me even though I had almost no idea how to use it.

That day was the beginning of several long battles.

I was fighting with the land. And this was hard. It seemed to know exactly what to do to make my struggles greater. I swear sometimes it was laughing at me.

Grace worked alongside me, clearing the bushes and the small plants, pointing out the poison one which she said the property was filled with. She would wrap her hands with cloth and pull the poison ivy, putting it in a pile far away from anywhere we'd be working.

It felt terrible to have my wife doing such rough work, but when I managed to take a tree down—which took a comically long time without Anders—almost always I couldn't lift it alone as even if I could lift the weight of it, it was too long to maneuver, and so Grace would take one end, and I'd lift the other, and we'd move the thing to the place Anders and I had begun laying trees that first day. We couldn't always lift them, and so some of them I left laying in the way, making my work harder.

When Anders had been out with me, he knew which way a tree was to fall. He'd shown me to make a wedge on one side and then work from the other to control which way it tumbled. But when I was by myself, I never felt certain, and so there was always this sickly moment of fear as I waited, watching, wondering if I would need to be running.

The first time I knew rightly how a tree was going to fall was also the first time I cut down a tree with a bee's nest in it, so I had to run anyways. This being said, the bees were clever and fast, and I was given eight stings anyway. Grace wasn't so near and so had a head start, but she didn't escape unscathed either.

Of course, there were still all the other insects and the heat to contend with in addition to these new challenges. I'd never sweated so much that my eyebrows and eyelashes couldn't catch it all. I learned why God saw fit to give us eyebrows in the first place, as until that point, they'd always confused me. I discovered that sweat burned the eyes.

So that was the first fight.

I was also fighting with my father. This was the sort of work he'd done his whole life, and knowing how tired and sore he must have been each night confused my heart. It was the sort of work Liam had lived and died doing. Darren as well did manual labour when he could find it and when he could go without the drink long enough to be paid for a day's work.

I thought a lot about the men I'd known in my life as I fought with the land. I thought about how I'd judged them for their coarseness and hardness. And I felt guilt over that, as I hadn't before understood what they'd been suffering through. I thought of how I'd never heard them complain about their work and felt like nothing when I compared myself to them. Also, I found myself craving a whiskey for the first time in many years.