The Skidder on the County Road

Thanksgiving

I’d like to tell you Wilbur came around all at once. He didn’t. People don’t.

But the week before Thanksgiving, I was at the landing early, greasing the skidder, when a pickup came up the town road. It was Wilbur. He’d never once been out to one of our jobs in twenty years.

He got out and stood by the truck with his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked at the stand, at the piles of pine, at the skidder. He looked at it all for a long time without saying anything.

“Ivan around?” he said finally. “He’s on his way back from the mill. Twenty minutes.”

Wilbur nodded. He stood there and waited, and I went back to greasing. After a while he walked over and held the grease gun for me while I worked the fittings on the articulation joint. He knew right where they all were.

When Ivan pulled in, Wilbur walked over to the truck before Ivan was even out of the cab.

I didn’t hear what he said. I was too far away and I didn’t try to listen. I just saw Wilbur standing there by the step, talking, with his cap in his hand.

And I saw Ivan sit there in the cab and listen, with the door open, for a long time.

Then Ivan climbed down. And Wilbur put out his hand.

Ivan looked at it. Then he shook it. That evening, at Thanksgiving dinner, Wilbur stood up at the head of Marjean’s table before the prayer.

He said the grace himself, which he never does. At the end of it, he said, in a voice like gravel, “And thank you for Ivan. And for Tilda. Amen.”

Marjean put her hand over her mouth. Ivan stared at his plate. Our daughter looked at me with her eyebrows up, and I shook my head at her, and she passed the potatoes.

The Sign

I still think about that morning more than I’d expect to.

Not the pulls. Not even Wilbur in the road. I think about Opal walking out onto that shoulder in her purple jacket with her flag, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And Marjean sitting on that wet skidder step in her good slacks, handing me a ham sandwich.

I think about Ivan sitting in that cab with both hands on the wheel, not moving, after the truck came up. I asked him once what he was thinking about right then. He took a long time to answer.

“Dad,” he said. “I was thinking he would’ve liked to see that.”

We still have Thurman’s skidder. We’ll make the last payment on it next fall. I’ve thought about painting his name on the side, small, under the cab, where only we would see it.

Ivan says not yet. He says we’ll do it when it’s paid off, when it’s all ours.

Last week, when the first snow came, Lars finally had the old yard skidder hauled back behind the mill where it belongs. But somebody, and nobody will say who, painted a small yellow skidder on the corner of the mill’s sign out front. It’s still there.

Every time I drive past it, hauling wood, I think about three pulls in the November sun, and a road that shone like a creek, and the people who stopped.