 
DAVID SHATH SQUARE Chapter Eighteen
Thoreena said I had restarted Shadow's breathing by pounding on his chest, sort of like a dead person can be brought back to life by artificial respiration. Maybe she was right, but I think God sent Shadow back to help us.
After Shadow recovered, we worked hard restoring the cabin. One day after a long work session, we walked down to the edge of the lake where Thoreena admired some late blooming golden rod and yellow cornflowers. We stretched out on a smooth granite boulder to watch the flowers sway in the wind and dazzle the blue sky.
We were both drowsy. It reminded me of a time when I was young, fishing on this very lake with my father and grandfather. We'd pulled our canoe ashore to build a fire to cook lake trout on a granite outcropping much like the one Thoreena and I now sat on. My father had studied the same golden flowers as Thoreena was doing. After a while, he recited some lines of poetry I've never forgotten:
And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?
And, what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand?
Ah, what then?"
"What in the name of Jesus Christ is that supposed to mean, Judas?"
"It means what it means," said my father.
I wondered how Thoreena would react to the poem. I was about to blurt it out, but thought better of it. Instead, I got up and picked a bunch of cornflowers and placed them across her chest.
"Thank you," she said. They're beautiful. But you shouldn't have picked them because now they'll die."
"They'll die when winter comes."
"Yes, but at least a natural death."
"Hell's bells, Thoreena, I was just giving you a gift."
"Perhaps before you offer a gift you should consider the person receiving it?"
She stood up and walked back to the cabin stroking the golden petals and arranging the flowers in a neat bouquet.
My grandfather had warned me about the capriciousness of women.
"Believe me, Zach, you can't live with 'em and you can't live without 'em. And you aren't ever going to understand 'em."
I wandered back to the cabin thinking about Thoreena. She was a capricious woman. A capricious, remarkable woman that I would never understand.
In one month, we had accomplished a lot, mostly thanks to Thoreena. In the morning, I got up early to catch lake trout and grouse while Thoreena started a fire in the cook stove and foraged for edible plants. She always made the meals of fish and grouse taste better by adding wild sage and thyme or preparing a stuffing of wild rice and watercress.
When I arrived, Thoreena was splitting a two-foot length of white cedar into shakes for the roof. She worked with speed and determination. She had found a pile of rusty tools behind the cabin and given them new life by whittling ash handles and sharpening old steel with a grindstone unearthed under the pile of cans.
While Thoreena used the rebuilt fore and maul to split shakes, I began to stack them into bundles and carry them up a makeshift ladder to the roof.
We had decided to repair the roof before the storms of autumn brought foul weather. We replaced the sagging ridge pole with a sound length of red pine, adding purloins at intervals to carry the weight of the pole rafters. We cut the rafters from a nearby stand of tall tamarack, strong and resistant to rot. We scrounged nails from old boards and used rocks to drive the nails through the rafters into the purloins. The completed roof was a grid of thin poles spaced on six-inch centers running at right angles to the rafters. The final chore of nailing shakes to poles was taking longer than anticipated.
The roof had a steep pitch and it wasn't easy to keep your balance and nail shakes at the same time. I was balancing myself along the ridge pole when my foot slipped and I stepped into a void between poles and rafters that left me falling into the root cellar below. I landed on my right shoulder and stars manifested before me like fireworks on the twenty-fourth of May. I heard Thoreena calling my name and Shadow barking before I passed out. to be continued...
To Chapter Seventeen
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