The Barn My Son Cut By Harvest

The initials

Logan spent the next Saturday cleaning the frame. There was a crust of old grease and sawdust on it as hard as tar, and he went at it with a putty knife and a can of degreaser and a wire brush.

Around two in the afternoon, I looked up from the garden and he was sitting on the ground by the mill. Not working. Just sitting there in the sawdust with the wire brush in his hand.

I went over. He didn’t look up. He pointed.

On the steel of the frame, down low where the track meets the trailer, somebody had scratched letters with a nail a long time ago.

W.K. 86. And under that, smaller, a little picture of a board with an arrow on each end and the number 8 beside it.

“That’s how he marked his cuts,” Logan said. “Grandpa. He drew them.”

I knelt down next to him. I could see what he meant. Grandpa had scratched other little marks down the frame, a board, an arrow, a number, a board, an arrow, a number. Little pictures where another man might have written words.

“He used to do that with me,” Logan said. “When I was little, out here. He’d draw me what he wanted instead of telling me. I thought he did it because I was a kid.”

He ran his thumb across the W.

I put my hand on the back of his neck the way I did when he was small, and we sat there a long time.

I said a prayer in my head, just a short one, the kind you say without deciding to. I thanked God for a man who drew pictures.

The cut list

On Monday evening, Wendell came up the hill with a feed store notepad and a carpenter’s pencil behind his ear.

He sat at our kitchen table and drew the barn for Logan. He didn’t write it. He drew it.

Every post, every girt, every rafter, every board of siding, each one a little picture with its length beside it in big square numbers.

“Thirty by forty,” he said. “Twelve-foot sidewalls. Board and batten, the way it was. I’ll pole-frame it on new posts set in concrete, and the boards go on green. Oak’s going to move on you as it dries, son. That’s what the battens are for.”

“How many board feet, all told?” Logan asked.

Wendell squinted at his pictures and added in the margin. “Close to sixty-four hundred, give or take what we waste.”

Logan looked at me. I had looked up the little mill the night before. On a good day, with sharp blades and logs on the deck, it would cut maybe four hundred board feet. On a bad day, half that.

“That’s most of the summer,” I said.

“Then it’s the summer,” Logan said.

He took Wendell’s drawings to his room that night.

When I went in to say goodnight, he had copied every one of them over onto big sheets of cardboard in black marker, the numbers twice as tall as Wendell’s, and he was reading them out loud to himself, one at a time, each one twice.