The Oaks on My Side of the Creek

The Logger

So that’s where we were. Wade waving his arms. Me with my coffee. And the skidder coming up the lane, a big yellow grapple skidder with mud on it to the cab, chains on all four tires, and an old man in the seat.

Floyd Merriman is sixty-eight years old. He has cut timber in these hills for fifty years. He has a silver crew cut and a face like a walnut, and he has held a timber buyer’s license in the state of Indiana for longer than I have been carrying mail.

He brought that machine up the lane at a crawl and stopped it about twenty feet from my boots. He sat there with the engine idling. He looked at me. He looked up at the orange slash over my head. He looked over at Wade.

Then he shut the skidder off.

The woods went so quiet, so fast, that I could hear the creek running over the riffle a hundred yards down. Belle got up. I told her to lie down and she did.

Floyd climbed down slowly, one hand on the rail, the way a man his age climbs down off anything. He didn’t come to Wade first. He came to me. He stood in front of my chair with his gloves in one hand and held out the other.

“You must be Ray Hensley’s granddaughter,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I bought timber off your grandpa in 1979. Fair man.” He nodded at my knee. “That your map?”

I gave it to him.

Reading the Line

Floyd unfolded my map on the hood of Wade’s pickup. He took a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on and bent over it, and he did not say anything for a long time. Wade stood beside him with his arms folded.

“Floyd,” Wade said, “we went over this. The creek’s the line.”

“You told me the creek was the line,” Floyd said, still reading. “I took your word. That’s how it works. The landowner shows me his line, and I cut inside it.”

He put his finger on the little square that said Stone. Then he looked up and turned slowly in a half circle until he was facing the dry slough, full of drift, where the old creek used to run.

“When did that channel cut through?” he asked me.

“March flood. Five years ago.”

“Hm,” Floyd said.

He took off his glasses and folded them and put them away. Then he walked down to the three oaks lying in the sand, the ones his nephew had felled the afternoon before. He stood by the biggest stump and looked at it a while. I saw him put his bare hand flat on the cut, the way my grandfather used to pat a tree.

When he came back, his face had changed.

“Wade,” he said, “I’m not cutting another stick on this bottom until this line is walked.”

“Floyd, I’ve got a signed contract with you.”

“You’ve got a contract with me for your trees,” Floyd said. “I’ve been doing this fifty years. I’ve never cut a disputed line, and I’m not going to start on a Tuesday morning with a lady sitting under the tree.”

“So we get a surveyor out here. That’s two weeks.”

“Then it’s two weeks.”

“I already spent half that money,” Wade said, and his voice cracked a little on it, which surprised me.

Floyd looked at him. Not mean. Just a long look.

“Then I’d say you’d better be right about the line,” he said.