That is what beds are made for. Jacob had cut the ash and split it lengthwise and soaked it, split it finer and cut it to size. He took the lengths and in an old oil drum steamed the bed into shape with the legs curving up and joining, the headboard a shallow point like a temple dome. The rawhide lacing held it tight like a net in which they struggled with each other, not against. That’s what a bed is made for.

His brothers had laughed as he spent the nights sanding the runners, though the young couple’s skin would never touch the wood. They teased him as he laced the headboard. To them it looked too much like a net, and he, the most self-sufficient among them, afraid she would struggle free.

“Aaniin ge-izhichiged giwiiw? Giwii-ozhimig ina?”

“Gaa wiikaa,” he said.

He came back from Normandy with no stories to tell, no scars to exhibit, nothing to say except Ingii-ayaa iwidi. That’s all he said when pressed. He left silent and came back the same. He towered above his squat brothers when they gathered around him as he bent over the gaping hood of a steadily chugging engine. He was as silent among men as he was around his young wife, so at least she could tell herself it wasn’t just her. Though he rarely spoke she learned to hear him through the rattle of her own girlish fear. A wonder: she was only sixteen.

When he came back from the war he moved out of his parents’ thin frame house and built one out of logs. He cut Norway pine in the winter and peeled them so that by spring they were seasoned and straight. He dragged them by himself to the site on which he chose to build. The corners were dovetailed, the cracks chinked with wire and cement instead of clay and moss. The floor was planked with maple he had cut and had planed at the mill in exchange for labor. The cabin had a re-blackened cookstove he had rescued from the charred tumble of a burned-out hotel. A winter’s worth of firewood leaned comfortably under a corrugated tin roof supported by peeled tamarack poles. By the end of the summer the cabin was finished. In early fall, when the lakeside poplar shook loose their gold, he walked the smooth path from the highway to Betty’s house with a cardboard box of packaged deer meat in his muscular arms and a bank statement in his back pocket to show her parents. He’d saved everything he’d earned in his three years in the army.