The Skidder on the County Road

The Third Pull

The clouds over the pines were coming apart. You could see blue up there, the hard clean blue of a November sky after rain.

And then the sun came out. All at once, the way it does sometimes, like somebody had opened a barn door.

The whole wet road lit up. It shone like a creek in the sun, running off both ways between the trees, and every needle on every pine was dripping with light. Opal stood there on the shoulder with her red bucket and her purple jacket, squinting into it.

I took a breath right then, the first full breath since ten past eight.

I raised my hand. Ivan raised his. I eased the lever back for the third time.

The cable came tight. The skidder settled. The truck groaned, and the drives turned, and Ivan gave it fuel, and I gave it winch, and for a second nothing happened at all.

Then the steer tire came up out of the mud.

Then the drives. They grabbed the edge of the gravel and climbed, and the whole truck came up out of that ditch and leveled out on the shoulder with a long slow rock, the logs swaying on the bunks and settling.

The trailer followed. It came up the bank last, throwing clay off the tires, and then the whole rig was sitting on the gravel, straight and level, like it had never been anywhere else.

I let off the winch. It was eleven forty-five.

After

Nobody clapped. People say there was clapping. There wasn’t. The man from the creamery nodded at me. The young mother bounced her baby and smiled.

The two boys looked at each other and one of them said something that I think was “Holy cow,” and the other one punched his arm.

Ivan sat in the cab with both hands on the wheel for a long minute. I watched him through the windshield. He didn’t move. He just sat there, looking straight ahead.

Then he reached his hand out the window, and I climbed down off the skidder and walked over and took it. His hand was ice cold. He squeezed mine so hard my ring dug in.

“Thanks, Til,” he said. That was all. That’s all he needed to say.

I unhooked the cable, wound it back on the drum, and checked the tow hooks. Bent a little on the left, nothing that would fail. Ivan walked around the whole rig twice, checking the binders, the stakes, the tires. Everything had held.

He climbed back up. He looked at the clock on his dash.

“I can make it,” he said. “Then go make it,” I said.

He drove the last half mile to the mill at about fifteen miles an hour, with his flashers on, and Opal waved the southbound traffic on behind him like a parade marshal.