They fought out there for hours, and even Lucky and Rose tried to help, carrying a single bucket between the two of them to give to Magnus, with barely a word passing between them all, until, as darkness fell at last, they began to gain the better of the fire. It was finally extinguished around seven that evening, but the exact time was impossible to reckon. Much of the house was still standing and useful, and they went inside what remained of it to rest, all shivering from wetness and exposure to the freezing air.
Libbie put on a pot of water for tea, and brought the first ready cup to Magnus, who aside from the coldness had grown stiff in his joints from the diseases of age. He was still covered in gray ash from head to foot and coughed violently from time to time due to the smoke he had breathed in. The smell of burning still clung to him, as it hung in the air in general, but in greater concentration. Still, he wanted to go out and inspect the damage the fire had done to his lands. Libbie and Adelia, though, prevailed on him to rest awhile longer. He seemed then to all of them to have grown ancient, and he felt as much in his own mind, as it was true.
“It is nothing to worry about,” he said, trying to speak to their collective worries and console them, even as they looked after him. “We will rebuild everything just as soon as Caleum returns. It only took four of us a summer to put the majority of this place up, and I don’t imagine it will take half that to fix.” The main house he was less certain of, whether there was need to rebuild, or whether they could on that scale again. During the time he drank his tea, he tried to recall what Stonehouses had looked like the first time he laid eyes on it. Certainly it was bigger now than it had been then, and rooms had been added not from a plan but according to where and when they were needed and the purpose they were to be put to, so that he was not even certain he could draw a plan of the place from memory, even though he had been in each of its rooms a thousand times and could walk through each of them in his sleep at night.
When Magnus mentioned Caleum’s name, Libbie was silent, as was Adelia. Having all expected him home so long, there was no evidence now that he was anything other than dead. Magnus had counseled them steadily against assuming anything until there was ready proof of it — such as the army usually sent back to fallen soldiers’ families. However, as the weeks and months passed with no word from him, Libbie had all but given up hope of ever laying eyes on her husband again.
“I had better see what the damage is to the house,” she said, not wanting to speak out loud what was uppermost in her heart.
When Magnus offered to help her, though, she declined.
“You should rest, Uncle, and get back your strength,” she urged him. “Besides, I know better how everything out here was before.”
“Then I’ll walk around to the main house to see what is left of it.”
“Are you rested enough?” Adelia asked her husband.
“It’s just to have a look around,” he answered. “You stay here and tend to Libbie and the girls.”
Magnus left the women, then, and walked back to his house, surveying his lands as he went and the damage done to them. At the same time, Libbie went off to assess her house and how much of it was still sound.
What she saw was that the kitchen was in far worse shape than it had seemed before, and the upper portion of the house was burned very badly, so that those rooms were all open to the outside. She had also lost many of her household effects, but on the whole it was stable enough that they could live there until spring.
At Magnus and Adelia’s house, fire had taken a far higher toll. Besides the barn and an acre of trees around the lake, most of the main house was gone entirely along with everything it had held, except for the fieldstone outer shell. The fireplace and chimney was all that remained of the kitchen, and a few of the rooms that had been added over the years sat exposed to the elements, like something children had built and left in the woods. The original structure could be discerned for the first time in decades, so that Magnus could see, as he had not before, that for all its grandness Stonehouses was really two cabins, identical to the ones he had known at Sorel’s Hundred, built side by side. Being used to the completed house, this foundation seemed unimaginably small to him, as the house was already four times its original size when he came to live there, and it had grown four times that again. In his sadness, when he returned to Libbie and Caleum’s place, he told Adelia that the house was destroyed completely. “It claimed the whole thing, except some scraps you can have at if you want.”
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.