The Skidder on the County Road

Just the Two of Us

It was just the two of us then, me on the skidder and him in the road. The sun was full out and the pavement was steaming. A crow called from somewhere back in the pines.

I didn’t say anything. I’ll be honest with you. I wanted to. I had a whole speech in me, twenty years of Christmas twenties and missed birthdays and the look on Ivan’s face every time Wilbur walked into a room. I’d been building that speech for a long time.

But I looked at him standing there, an old man in a wrecker jacket, with his wife driving away from him, and I didn’t have the heart.

He looked at me. Then he looked at the skidder.

“Thurman’s machine,” he said. “Yes, sir.”

“He bought it off a widow over in Tomahawk the year before he died. I told him he paid too much.”

“He probably did,” I said. Wilbur almost smiled. Then he didn’t. He looked back down at the torn-up ditch for a long time.

“Three pulls?” he said. “Three pulls. Blade down, grapple set in the bank. Ivan drove it out in low.”

He nodded slowly, like he was running it through his head, the way he’d run any job. Then he said, quiet, “That’s how I’d have done it. If I’d had a skidder.”

He walked back to the wrecker and climbed up. He sat there a while with the engine running. Then he pulled a slow U-turn in the road and drove back toward town.

I started the skidder and drove six miles home on the shoulder, the long way, in the sun.

What People Did

I didn’t tell anybody about it. Neither did Ivan. You don’t, up here.

But Opal did, and Avis at the scale house did, and the man from the creamery and the young mother with the baby and the two boys with the pickup did.

By Wednesday night, the whole county had it. By Thursday morning at the café, it had grown to five pulls and a rollover and me standing on the hood with a chainsaw.

Nobody said much to Wilbur about it. That’s not how it’s done here either. But the Friday after, two of the other logging outfits who’d always used Pagel Towing called a shop out of Tomahawk to service their trucks instead.

And the Sunday after that, Wilbur sat alone in the back pew while Marjean played piano.

She went home with him after church. She’s not a woman who leaves. But Ivan told me she didn’t make him supper that week, and she didn’t sit with him at the potluck, either.

On Monday morning, Lars Kettleson had the mill’s old yard skidder, a dented yellow machine that hadn’t run in three years, dragged out by the road and parked right up against the mill’s sign.

Somebody had hung a log chain off the grapple. It sat there a full week. Every truck that turned in at the mill drove past it.

Lars never said why. He didn’t have to. Everybody in town knew.