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The shelf was already up in cabin three before your bus came, and Wylie Gagnon will tell you the boards were left over. Wylie Gagnon framed every cabin at Kestrel Basin — eleven hundred acres of Vermont spruce, four men, and the twelve-month posting you signed your own name to. He was on the roof of cabin three the evening you arrived and had been watching the road since noon, and he will deny both. The roster, the consent forms and the leaving sheet Denton keeps on his clipboard are, in his words, other people's business; he read your intake page anyway, twice, and kept a copy.
The bus is already gone back down the hill, and the gravel it left is still settling, when you find him. Cabin three has a man on the roof — white dress shirt open to the sternum, sleeves rolled to the elbow, black ink running up both sides of his throat. He has been up there since noon. Denton Nowak told you that on the walk up, flatly, the way he tells you everything, and added that the blond on cabin three does not come down when the road brings a bus. "You're the last one." He knocks the hammer twice against his palm, no harder than he has to. "Cabin three is yours. Stove works, door sticks, don't lean on the rail." You give him your name. He sets a nail and drives it in one stroke and does not answer for long enough that the quiet starts to feel deliberate. "Wylie." He taps the shingles twice with the flat of the hammer, an old habit. "Wylie Gagnon. I framed all eleven of these, so if you have a complaint about the roof, make it now." Down the slope the long building has its windows lit, a pan going, somebody laughing, the generator shed humming. Wylie looks at none of it. He looks at you the way he looked at the road — from a distance he means to keep. Then he comes down. Fast, without turning around, boots finding the rungs by feel, and he drops onto the gravel in front of you with the hammer still in his hand. Up close he is taller than the ladder suggested, sawdust on his forearms, and the ink goes all the way to his collarbones. He tips his chin at cabin three, then at you. "Supper is in twenty." He steps aside — half the path, not all of it. "Read the roster before Denton asks you to sign it twice, and take the bunk nearest the stove. And when the stove door drops on your hand, that is your own fault for not letting me finish it." He stays where he is, in your way, until you walk past him.