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rattling off a pine tree as it entered the woods. He sighed his frustration and lowered his bow and plucked at the string as if seeking out the first note of a sad song. “And then what? Then another company gets it and the job gets done anyway. The other guy gets money in the bank, gets his name out there, gets the call the next time a job comes up. And where does that leave me? You don’t know politics.” He withdrew another arrow from his quiver and examined its broadhead. The metal caught the sun and a thin gleam played across his face. “You think I want to see that nice country ripped up?”
    “There’s a lot of nice country out there. We can find another canyon.”
    “Is that how you feel?”
    “Maybe. I don’t know.”
    “I don’t know,” he said, parroting Justin in a singsong voice, then again, “I don’t know.” He pointed the arrow at Justin, bringing its razor point within an inch of his chest. “You should get that tattooed across your heart. I don’t know. No, you don’t know. You don’t know much at all.”
    Paul is not the sort of father who goes to church and plays golf and whistles Christmas songs year-round. He is the kind of father who enjoys saying things like, “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” and “Knowing you could die tomorrow, don’t buy any green bananas.” He smells like motor oil. His huge hands seem capable of tearing phone books in half and uprooting trees with a tug. His fingernails always carry dirt and bruises beneath them. He often keeps a sandwich in his pocket and withdraws it intermittently for a bite. His idea of a good time is to go price pistols at Bi-Mart.
    Paul doesn’t need to work so hard. Business is good. Justin knows this because he has taken care of the company paperwork since college. His father could easily hire more men, could spend his days sipping coffee and negotiating contracts and letting his hands go soft, but if his name appears on the letterhead, he ought to be the one dangling from a thirty-foot ladder, driving home the first and final nail—or so he insists. It’s a general-on-the-front-lines sort of mentality.
    And so right alongside his crew he pilots the cement truck and lays a concrete foundation. He uses broadaxes and table saws to hew down logs on all four sides until they are square. He chisels notches. He cuts lap joints. He uses an auger to bore holes.
    For him, every day is a mechanical storm of chain saws snarling and sandpaper sizzling and hammers cracking. Sawdust hangs in heavy clouds. When Justin was a boy, his father would sometimes take him along. Justin would spend the day uselessly hammering nails into planks of wood, darting in and out of doorways, and climbing onto the roof and imagining the cabin as his own. He remembers everything smelling like the memory of a sawmill. He remembers watching his father as he worked, shirtless, sometimes with steam rising off his body in the cold mountain air.
    His father lays floors. He stacks walls, cutting dovetail notches for the corners. He cuts the rafters, he cuts the joists. He bolts down a steel roof to shrug off the snow. He cuts out the windows and the doors, and his blacksmith digs a hole and fills it with pinewood and burns it down to an orange bed of coals and sets up his forge to bang out some wrought-iron hinges, doorknobs, banisters. Then comes the paneling, the chinking, the sanding, the varnishing, the caulking, the masonry, the plumbing and electricity.
    And Paul does all this while maintaining a mostly meat diet and drinking his way through a six-pack almost every evening. To Justin, the heart attack comes as no surprise.
    His father later tells him what it felt like. He says a belt seemed to tighten around his chest and the world darkened abruptly. He ran slantingly and stumbled with a half-fascinated terror at what was happening to him, at the way his body seemed at once to constrict and expand. When his legs gave out beneath him and he pitched forward, he