The Stamp on Every Log

The landing was empty when we pulled in Monday morning, and I sat in the pickup with the engine running and looked at it for a long time before I got out.

On Friday afternoon there had been eleven loads of white oak decked on that landing. I know because I counted them twice before I drove home, the way I always do before a weekend.

Now there was frozen mud, bark, a few broken limbs, and a set of tire tracks with chains that I did not need anybody to explain to me. Somebody with a log truck had been in there.

Zeke Gagnon got out of the passenger side and walked to the middle of the landing. He is thirty-five, my crew lead, and the calmest man I have ever worked with. He stood there with his hands in his pockets.

“Mercy,” he said, “tell me you sent the truck in early and forgot to mention it.”

“I didn’t send anybody,” I said. “Our trucker isn’t due until ten.”

My other two men pulled in behind us in their own truck, saw our faces, and did not ask anything. They just got out and stood by the tailgate with their coffee, the steam going straight up in the cold.

I want to tell you who I am before I tell you the rest, because people who don’t live up here have strange ideas about women in the woods. My name is Mercy Ploof. I am forty-seven years old, and I own a three-man logging crew in western Maine, out past Rumford.

I did not marry into it and I did not buy into it. My grandfather cut wood on these hills for fifty years, and my father after him, and I was the one of the grandchildren who kept showing up.

We are a small outfit. Zeke runs the grapple skidder. My other two men cut. I run the loader on the landing, and I do the books at the kitchen table on Sunday nights, which is the part nobody envies.

And I stamp every log.

That needs explaining, too. A log hammer is an iron hammer with letters cast on the face of it, raised up like a seal. You swing it at the cut end of a log and it presses your mark into the end grain, deep enough to read across a mill yard.

They were common once all over New England and up into Canada, back when wood went down the rivers in the spring drives and every company needed to know whose logs were whose when they came out the other end.

My grandfather’s hammer says MP. His initials were the same as mine, which he thought was the funniest thing in the world when I was born. He told my mother she had named me for his hammer.

When he died, he left it to me. He left me his saws, too, and his old pickup, and a letter that said he wanted the business to go to the grandchild who was still in the woods. That was me. It was not my cousin Duane.