We had to stop again a few hours later for more gas and oil and to resharpen the saws. None of us was very hungry; all we really wanted was sleep. So we settled for more gas station sandwiches with a healthy side of ibuprofen and sodas. Then we were back at it. I had a feeling if the group had arrived right then, we might have all looked crazy to them, covered in sweat, sawdust, oil and gas fumes, our hair standing on end, noses steadily dripping from the cold, our eyes gritty and too round as we pushed ourselves way past our bodies’ natural limits.
We were on a mission. And that was all that kept us going.
The sound of big engines drawing closer pulled me from the circling fog of my thoughts sometime later. I turned off my chainsaw, nearly cutting off my own leg when I set it down before the chain had fully stopped cycling.
Ready or not, the houses were here.
I looked around me and sighed with relief. Yeah, we should have enough room to position the houses. But it would be tight, and the drivers would have to be careful not to puncture their tires driving over the stumps we’d left everywhere.
We had to help the drivers position rubber mats along the makeshift road into the clearing to give their tires enough traction. Then we had to prune back a lot of branches along the perimeter to keep them from busting out the windows of the houses as they were arranged.
While the drivers finished arranging and leveling the houses with cement blocks, the logging team and I leaned against the hood of my truck, half asleep on our feet.
And then everything became a series of minute long moments separated by long, slow blinks.
Long blink.
“Sign here, and here, and here, and here,” someone said, thrusting clipboards in front of me that I clumsily forced my gloved fingers to scrawl some attempt at a signature on.
Long blink.
The tail lights of the last delivery truck turned at the end of our newly created road and faded. I hoped Grandma Letty remembered to do something about the paperwork trail for the houses. She probably would. She was one smart old lady.
Long blink.
My chin bounced off my chest and I stumbled sideways. “I’ve got an idea,” I muttered, scrubbing my face. “Let’s cut up one of these trees, stick the logs in one of those houses’ fireplaces, and see how soft the living room carpeting is.”
Somebody laughed, which was kind of annoying because I was totally serious.
“Yeah, sure. You volunteering to chop the firewood?” Harvey said.
I scowled. “On second thought, my truck sounds better.”
Grunts of agreement were all the votes I needed. We pulled ourselves into the truck, and this time I didn’t care at all about the snow we tracked in on the floorboards. I had just enough energy to crank the engine, turn on the heat, and call my grandma. No one answered, so I left a message to confirm the houses were in place. Then I conked out.
Wednesday, December 23rd
Tapping sounded against something hard near my left ear. I jerked awake to find the sweetest smile on earth on the other side of the glass.
“Hey, guys, they’re here!” I cut off the truck’s engine and tried to casually unfold my stiff body out of the truck. A series of pops from my joints gave me away.
“Oh my lord, Hayden, are you okay?” Tarah gasped as I hugged her with one aching arm I nearly couldn’t move.
“Nothing a bottle of aspirin won’t fix,” I joked, drawing in a deep breath of shampoo from her hair.
She shook her head and looked up at me with a smile. “Did you have much time to miss me?”
I knew she was teasing me. So I didn’t tell her the truth, that thoughts of her were just about all that had kept me going the last few hours. She probably wouldn’t have believed me anyways.
So all I ended up saying was, “Yeah.”
“Everyone’s checking out the houses and putting together the bunk beds. Should we help assign families to each room, or...?”
“Nah, let them sort it out.” Slinging an arm around her shoulders, I grandly swung an arm out towards the grouping of houses, intending to say, “So what do you think?” But before I could speak, I got a good look at the place in the daylight, and my free arm dropped to my side, screaming muscles already forgotten.
Cut trees formed haphazard piles all around the perimeter like forgotten Jenga pieces some giant had thrown down and forgotten to put away. Despite the use of the rubber mats, the delivery trucks had still managed to plow deep ruts into the snow in places. And though we’d tried to cut the trees as close to the ground as we could, there were still stumps left visible everywhere.
And then there were the mobile homes themselves. Grandma Letty and I had picked out a design that had a short, narrow porch on the front and a peaked roof with green shingles. So they didn’t exactly look like metal cans on wheels. But...
I walked over to the nearest cement steps leading up to one of the house’s porch. I must have dozed off when the delivery drivers had set up the steps for each house.
“What’s wrong?” Tarah asked.
I didn’t know how to answer her. I looked around us, at the four matching white houses resting several feet above the ground, their wheels exposed below. Then I flopped down onto the nearby steps.
Tarah sat beside me with a frown, waiting.
“Well, this sucks.” I was too tired to be mad. All I felt was beat up and defeated.
CHAPTER 17
“What sucks?” Tarah looked around us, clearly lost.
“This!” I threw my hands out at all the houses, the clearing, the stumps like huge zits making the whole area ugly. “This is supposed to be a village for people with powers so dangerous the government’s afraid of us?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
I growled in frustration, trying to sort out my groggy thoughts enough to put them into words. “It’s...not right. It’s just a bunch of ordinary houses in the middle of nowhere. Where’s the fantasy that says ‘secret Clann village?’”
She burst into laughter. “Hayden, what exactly did you expect, Disneyworld?”
I lunged off the steps, giving in to the urge to pace though my sore leg muscles protested loudly. “Not a trailer park in the woods, that’s for sure. Look around you. Does this look like Hogsmeade or Lothlorien to you?”
She snickered. “Okay, first off, you’re talking about made up places. And secondly, this is just temporary until spring. The fantasy village will come. We just got here.” She stood up, walked over to me, and wrapped her arms around my waist. “Give it time while everyone settles in and gets used to their new home. Come summer time, I bet you’ll get your Lothlorien.” She rose up on tiptoe and nuzzled her nose against mine. “And your elven ears, too, if you want them.”