Alden Bram looked down at his own knuckles resting on the scrubbed oak of the Hale kitchen table, right beside the two rusted, jagged pieces of the iron brace that had been unbuckled from his dead arm less than three hours ago by the town clock, and five days ago by the measure of the man standing at the head of the board.
Bram was forty-five years old. He had spent thirty-one of those years with a mason’s mallet in one fist and a cold chisel in the other, working limestone, river-granite, and kiln-baked brick from the headwaters of the Oakhaven gorge down to the salt-marshes. A man who worked stone learned early that rock had no malice in it, and no mercy either. If you laid a foundation course three-eighths of an inch off plumb to save an afternoon’s digging in wet clay, the wall might stand through five summers of dry weather and make you look like a clever fellow. Then the sixth spring thaw would come down the valley, the frost heave would find that three-eighths of an inch, and the gable would come down on a weaver’s cradle in the middle of the night.
Looking up at Jon Hale’s weathered, tight-drawn face in the yellow candle-glow, Bram saw a three-eighths-inch crack running straight through the middle of the innkeeper’s foundation.
