The Barn My Son Cut By Harvest

The numbers

The insurance man came out the next week. Wendell showed me the letter on his kitchen table. The old barn had been insured for what an old barn is worth on paper, and the check was going to be nine thousand dollars.

He had already called the lumberyard in town and a man who puts up pole barns. The cheapest kit he was quoted for something his size, thirty by forty with a lean-to, was thirty-eight thousand dollars before anybody drove a nail.

“I’m seventy-six years old,” he said. “I’m not going to borrow thirty thousand dollars for a barn I might use ten years. I’ll just put the hay under a tarp.”

That was when I said it out loud for the first time.

“Wendell, you have half a barn lying in your north woods. Paul’s dad left a band mill in our shed. If you’ll let us, Logan and I will cut your lumber out of your own trees.”

He looked at me for a long minute. Then he looked past me, at Logan, who had walked over with me and was standing a little ways back by the fence.

“That old mill run?” Wendell asked him.

“Not yet,” Logan said. “It will.”

Under the tarp

We pulled the tarp off that same afternoon, as soon as I got in off the route, with the sun still high over the oaks. Six years of mouse nests and dust came off with it.

Paul’s dad bought that mill used in the spring of 1986, the year Paul turned seven.

It is a small orange band mill on a trailer, the kind you push down the track by hand and crank up and down by hand, with a little gas engine on the head.

He bought it to cut lumber off the home place for himself and his neighbors, back when Kask Lumber was still just him and a circle saw in a lean-to.

Later, when the real mill got big and Steve came in, the little orange one went into the shed for odd jobs.

The last thing Grandpa cut on it was a set of boards for the church’s handicap ramp, the summer before he died. Then it sat.

Logan walked around it three times without touching it. Then he got down on his back under the head with a flashlight and stayed there until I called him in for supper.

Paul talked him through the carburetor over the phone the next night, from a truck stop in Nebraska. I sat at the kitchen table listening to the two of them, Paul’s voice on the speaker saying, “Now look for the little brass screw, the one with the spring on it,” and Logan saying, “Got it. Got it.”

It took them four nights, a new fuel line, a battery, a set of blade guide bearings from the dealer in Springfield, and a good deal of cussing from Paul’s end that I pretended not to hear.

On the fifth day, a Thursday afternoon, I came home off the route and heard it running before I got out of the Jeep.

That sound, that low steady engine with the whine of the blade over it, went right through me. I had not heard it since the funeral.