Before she left, she leaned over to Zeke and said, loud enough for the table, “You tell your boss she’s a Ploof the way her grandfather was a Ploof.” Zeke said he’d tell me. I was sitting right there. Everybody laughed.
Her furnace man came the next Tuesday. Her oil truck came the Thursday after. She paid her taxes at the town office in person and told the clerk all about it.
As for Duane, I’m going to tell it straight, because I don’t want you to think I’m writing a fairy tale.
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He didn’t call me. He didn’t come by. I heard he went to see the mill owner and they talked a long while, and the mill told him they’d look at taking his wood again in the spring, if he came in clean.
His skidder, I heard, went back to the bank in November. He drove truck for another outfit that winter.
The week before Christmas, I went up to Hester’s with a box of groceries and found her woodshed full. It had been half empty in October. Somebody had come in with a splitter and a pickup and split and stacked four cords of dry hardwood, neat as a church pew.
“Who did that?” I asked her.
She was standing at the window with her coffee. “Your cousin,” she said. “Three Saturdays in a row. In the daytime, so I’d see him. He didn’t say much.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He said he was sorry about the oak,” she said. “He said it to me, not to you. I told him he should say it to you, too.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said he knew,” she said. “He said he wasn’t ready yet.”
I stood there a long time looking at that woodshed.
I am not going to tell you we made up, because we haven’t. Not yet. But I keep his number in my phone, and at Christmas I sent him a card, and I wrote on it that when he has his feet under him there’s work on my crew for a man who knows how to run a truck.
He hasn’t answered. The door is open anyway.
The hammer is back in the toolbox behind my cab, wrapped in the feed sack. I stamped a log with it this morning, on a red oak lot over toward Andover, one good swing on the butt end, the same as always.
MP, with a little tail on the P.
My grandfather used to say a mark on a log is a promise. It says, this is mine, I cut it honest, and I’ll stand behind it. I didn’t understand that when I was a girl.
I understand it now. Hester understood it the minute she held that hammer in her lap. And on a cold, bright Monday morning in a mill yard by the river, so did every man who watched Avery Thibodeau walk those eleven piles with me, one log at a time.