The Stamp on Every Log

I stamp every log off every lot, the butt end, one good swing. Most people quit marking years ago. The mill doesn’t require it. Zeke used to tease me about it, said I was the last one in Oxford County still doing it.

He stopped teasing me that Monday.

I walked the landing slowly. The tire tracks went out the woods road toward Hester Libby’s house and the paved road beyond it. There were two sets of tracks, both with chains, and the loader pads had chewed up the gravel where somebody had set his outriggers.

“Two trucks,” Zeke said. “Self-loaders. Look at the pad marks. One here, one over there.”

“They’d have needed all day,” I said.

“They had all day,” he said. “It was Sunday.”

That was the part that sat in my stomach. On a Sunday our woods roads are empty, no crews working and hardly anybody out in orange. No one in a tree stand to see a truck go by. Whoever did this knew that.

The lot belonged to Hester Libby. She is eighty years old and has been a widow for six years. Her husband had kept that woodlot like a garden, thinned it, pruned it, let the white oak grow fat and straight on the south slope for forty years.

Hester had sold me the stumpage in September. Stumpage is the share a landowner gets for the standing timber, paid as the wood is scaled and sold. We had agreed on a price per thousand board feet, and it was written on a contract on file at the mill.

She had told me plainly why she was selling. Her furnace needed work, her oil tank was low, and her taxes were due at the town office before the end of the year. She was not a woman who asked anybody for help. She sold her trees instead.

Those eleven loads were going to be the biggest part of her check. They were also my crew’s pay for three weeks of cutting.

I got back in the pickup and drove down the woods road to Hester’s house, and Zeke rode with me.

She was already standing on her porch in a barn coat over her housedress, with her hand up to shade her eyes from the low sun. She knew something was wrong from the way I drove in.

“They took it, didn’t they,” she said, before I had the door shut.

“Somebody did,” I said. “Did you see anything yesterday, Hester?”

She folded her arms. “I went to church in the morning,” she said. “When I got home there was a truck coming out of my road, loaded, and another one going in. I thought it was you. I waved.”

“Did you see the trucks?”

“I saw the first one plain as day,” she said. “Green cab. Your cousin’s name on the door. I’ve known that truck for ten years, Mercy. I thought you two had made up.”