The Skidder on the County Road

Marjean

I was sitting on the skidder step getting my breath back when a blue sedan pulled onto the shoulder and stopped.

It was Marjean. Ivan’s mother is sixty-three. She is a small woman, quiet, with soft hands and gray hair she still sets in rollers on Saturday night.

She plays piano at the little white church on the corner on second Sundays and keeps the books for half the businesses in town.

She got out of the car with a grocery bag in one hand and a thermos in the other.

“Avis at the scale house called me,” she said. “Said Ivan was in the ditch and Wilbur wasn’t coming.” She looked at the empty ditch, the ruts in the clay, and the skidder. “I see he wasn’t needed.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. She came over and sat down on the skidder step beside me. Right there in her good slacks, in the mud.

She opened the grocery bag and handed me a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Ham and butter on white bread, the way she’s made them for forty years.

“I made two,” she said. “One for Ivan. I’ll give his to the scale house girl to hold.”

Then she poured coffee from the thermos into the cap and handed it to me, and I held it with both hands and let it warm my fingers.

We sat there a while. Opal came over and Marjean gave her the half of her own sandwich, and the three of us sat and stood there in the sun, eating and not saying much.

After a while, Marjean said, without looking at me, “Thurman would have done the same thing, you know. He’d have driven that skidder to Canada if he had to.”

“I know,” I said. “Ivan’s so much like him.” She folded the wax paper into a small square, the way she folds everything. “Wilbur can’t stand it. He never could.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t know what to say. She put her hand on my knee for a second, light, the way you’d touch a horse.

“You’re a good wife to my boy,” she said. I have been married to Ivan for sixteen years. Marjean has always been kind to me.

But she had never said that, and I sat there on that wet steel step with a ham sandwich in my lap and cried, just a little, where nobody else could see.

The Mill

At the mill, Ivan crossed the scale at ten after twelve.

Avis, who runs the scale house, told me later he came through the window with his eyebrow taped up and mud to his knees and she asked him if he wanted her to call anybody. He said no, his wife had already come.

Lars Kettleson, the mill yard boss, walked out to meet him at the deck. Lars is fifty-five and has been running that yard for twenty years. He’s seen every way a load can come in. He’d heard about the ditch already, because by then everybody had.

“Heard you had some trouble,” Lars said. “Had some,” Ivan said.

“Heard your wife pulled you out with a skidder.” “She did.”

Lars stood there and looked at the load for a long time. Then he took off his cap and scratched his head and put it back on.

“Good wood,” he said. That’s all he said. But he let Ivan unload first, ahead of two trucks that had been waiting, and he wrote on the ticket himself.