What Steve said
When he stood up, his face had changed. He looked older, and not in a bad way. He looked like his daddy.
“Dad couldn’t read,” he said. “Not well. Not ever.”
Logan looked at me. I didn’t know it either. In twenty-two years, Paul had never once said it.
“Mom read him every order that ever came in,” Steve said. “Thirty-some years.”
He looked at the scratches on the frame again. “She sat at the kitchen table every night with the order book and read him the cuts, and he drew them on a scrap of paper and took it to the mill in his shirt pocket. When her eyes went bad, I took it over. I was twenty-five.”
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He rubbed the back of his neck.
“He was the best sawyer in this county,” he said. “Everybody said so. And he couldn’t read a menu at the fish fry either.”
The blue jay had quit. The only sound was the wind in the tops of the oaks.
“I told you that in front of my whole crew,” Steve said to Logan. “I told you to go work at the burger place. I said you couldn’t read the sheets.”
He stopped. Then he made himself go on. “I was scared. That’s the truth. I’ve been scared of that edger since Ulys. And I took it out on a boy who never did a thing to me. That was wrong, and I knew it was wrong before I got back in my office.”
Logan didn’t say anything. I watched him think. He takes his time with words, my son, the same way he takes his time with a cut.
“Ulys told me,” Logan said finally. “About his hand.”
“Ulys tells everybody,” Steve said, and almost smiled. “Ulys told me I was a fool that same afternoon. He’s been telling me every week since.”
He looked at me then. “Danielle. I should have come up here in July.”
“You should have,” I said. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t need to.
He nodded. He took that. He stood there and took it.
Then he looked down the hill at the barn, and at the cars and trucks parked along the shoulder of the road where people had stopped to look, and he let out a long breath.
“The whole road knows, don’t they,” he said.
“The whole road knows,” I said.
“Good,” he said quietly. “They ought to.”
He turned to go. Then he turned back and looked at Logan one more time, and I thought he was going to say it right there. But he didn’t. He just said, “Wendell’s raising the rest of it next Saturday?”
“Yes, sir,” Logan said.
“I’ll be there,” Steve said, and he walked back down the clearing to his truck.
Logan stood there until the truck was gone. Then he pulled his ear protection up, started the engine, checked the scale twice, and cut the last board of Wendell’s siding.