The Barn My Son Cut By Harvest

Ulys

One Saturday in late September, a truck I knew pulled into Wendell’s lot. It was Ulys, from Kask Lumber.

Ulys has worked for the Kasks for twenty-two years. He was Grandpa’s man before he was Steve’s. He lost his left hand at the wrist nine years ago, on the edger, and now he runs the scale house and does the books.

He walked up the ridge to the mill and stood there while Logan finished a cut. When the engine shut down, he held out his right hand, and Logan wiped his glove on his jeans and shook it.

“I wanted to see it,” Ulys said. “Everybody at the mill’s talking about it. Kenny and Mike are coming over this afternoon to help Wendell set rafters. They didn’t ask Steve. They’re just coming.”

Logan didn’t know what to say to that. Ulys looked at the cardboard cut list propped on the bucket, with Wendell’s pictures and the big black numbers.

“You read every one of these out loud?” he asked.

“Twice,” Logan said. “Then I read the scale.”

Ulys nodded slowly. Then he did something I didn’t expect. He held up his left arm, the one that ends at the wrist, and looked at it like it belonged to somebody else.

“You know how I lost this?” he said. “It wasn’t because I couldn’t read. I read just fine. I read the sheet in a hurry and I didn’t check it.”

He looked down the hill at the barn for a second. “I was running late and I wanted to go home. I read a five and a quarter as a five and three quarters, and I reached in to fix a board I shouldn’t have touched.”

He let his arm down.

“Your uncle was there that day. He’s the one who tied it off. He held my arm up over my head for eleven minutes until the ambulance got to us. He hasn’t been right about that edger since.”

I hadn’t known that. Paul had told me about the accident, but not that Steve was the one who held him.

“That’s why he said what he said,” Ulys told Logan. “It wasn’t right. I told him it wasn’t right, the same day. But that’s why.”

Then he looked at the cardboard again. “You check it twice,” he said. “I didn’t. Remember that, and you’ll never lose anything on a saw.”

He went down the hill to help Wendell. Kenny and Mike came that afternoon in their work boots and stayed until suppertime, and at supper that night Logan ate three plates of Wendell’s chili and didn’t stop talking.

The last of the siding

The first Saturday in October was one of those days you get in the Ozarks maybe ten times a year.

Clear sky, no wind, warm in the sun and cool in the shade, with the oaks just starting to turn at the tops.

I had the Saturday off. We were cutting the last of the siding, the long one-by-twelves for the gable ends. When those were done, Wendell would have every board he needed.

Logan had on his gray T-shirt, his safety glasses, and his ear protection hanging around his neck between cuts.

He was guiding an oak log onto the bunks of that old orange mill with the cant hook, setting it square, checking it twice.

I was beside him in my ball cap and green T-shirt and work gloves, stacking. Sawdust was everywhere, on the ground, in my hair, down my collar. The stack of fresh boards beside me was as pale as cream in that sun.

Down the hill, past the edge of the oaks, Wendell’s new barn stood half-framed against the pasture.

The posts and girts were up, and the rafters were on the near half, and from the ridge it looked like the ribs of something being born.

That was when I heard Steve’s diesel coming up our lane.

You get to know a truck’s sound when you’ve lived next to it your whole married life. Logan heard it too.

He didn’t look at me. He finished pushing the head to the end of the track, and then he shut the mill down.

It got so quiet I could hear the engine ticking as it cooled. A blue jay was scolding somewhere in the oaks. A truck door shut down at the bottom of the clearing.

Logan stepped back from the saw and looked at me.

“Mom,” he said quietly. “Is he coming over here?”

“I think he is,” I said.