The Barn My Son Cut By Harvest

How we did it

Here is how a summer goes when you are a rural mail carrier and your son is running a sawmill.

I was out the door at six with my mail trays, and I was home by two.

Logan was up on the ridge by seven with Wendell’s old Ford tractor, a log chain and a cant hook, skidding the downed oaks up the logging trail before the heat got bad.

We set the mill up on the flat at the top of our ridge, where Grandpa always set it, with the oak woods behind it and a clear view down the hill to Wendell’s barn lot.

You can see three farms from up there on a clear day.

Logan cut in the mornings, with Wendell sitting on an upturned bucket in the shade of the big white oak, reading the cut list off the cardboard and holding it up so Logan could see the picture too.

The rule was simple, and Logan made it, not me. Before every cut, he said the number out loud. Then he read the scale on the mast and said that number out loud. If they didn’t match, nothing moved.

“Two by six, sixteen foot,” Wendell would call out.

“Two by six, sixteen foot,” Logan would say back. Then he’d tap the scale with one gloved finger. “Two inch. Setting two inch.” And only then would he start the engine and push the head down the track.

In the afternoons I came home, changed out of my uniform, put on my ball cap and gloves, and stacked. Fresh-cut oak is heavy. A green two-by-six sixteen feet long will make you remember it the next morning.

We stacked it on stickers, flat and level, every board with air under it, the way Grandpa used to say a man stacks lumber when he means for it to last.

By July, there were three long piles of pale oak in the clearing, and they smelled sour and sweet at the same time, the way only green oak does.

We went through fourteen blades that summer. Some went dull on dirt in the bark. Two hit old fence staples in a yard tree that had been a fence post line eighty years ago.

Every one of those blades cost money, and every Friday I drove the dull ones to the man in Houston who resharpens them.

Wendell tried to pay for the blades. I wouldn’t let him. He started leaving a dozen eggs and a sack of sweet corn on our porch every Friday instead, and I let him do that.