The Stamp on Every Log

Zeke let out a breath beside me and didn’t say anything.

My cousin Duane Ploof is fifty years old. He logs, too. He has a skidder and a truck with a loader on it, and he sells to the same hardwood mill I do, forty minutes down the valley. His lot was on the next road over.

We had not made up. We had never really been on speaking terms since the funeral, when the letter was read and Duane stood up and walked out of the fellowship hall without finishing his coffee.

He believed, and he had told half the county, that the hammer and the business and the woodlots our grandfather had cut should have come to him. He was the oldest grandson. He thought that ought to count more than it did.

I stood in Hester’s dooryard and did the arithmetic the way I do everything, in my head first and on paper later.

Eleven loads of white oak sawlogs. Somewhere around forty-eight thousand board feet. At what the mill had been paying that fall for oak, delivered, it came to something like twenty-six thousand dollars. Hester’s share of that was a little over eleven thousand.

That was her oil. That was her furnace. That was her taxes.

“What do we do?” Hester asked me.

I’ll tell you what most people would say, because Merritt said it twenty minutes later on the phone. Merritt is my husband. He works shifts at the paper mill in Rumford, and that week he was on days, so he was already at work when I called him.

“Call the warden service,” he said. “Call the sheriff. That’s timber theft, Mercy. That’s a crime.”

“I know what it is,” I said.

“Then call.”

“And then what?” I said. “Then a warden comes out and takes pictures of the tracks, and somebody writes a report, and in a year or two maybe there’s a hearing. You know how long those cases take. You remember what happened over in the next town.”

He was quiet. He remembered. A man over there had lost a whole woodlot to a crooked cutter four years before and was still waiting.

“Hester needs her check before the snow,” I said. “Not next fall. Now. And the mill saws oak fast. If those logs go through the headrig this week, there’s nothing left to prove anything with but sawdust.”

“Do you want me to come?” he said. “I can get somebody to cover.”

“No,” I said. “He’s my cousin. I’ll handle my own cousin.”

“Then take Zeke,” he said. “And Mercy. Don’t you lose your temper in front of those men.”

“I won’t,” I said, and I meant it.

Before I hung up, he said one more thing. “Your grandfather would have gone straight to that mill yard,” he said. “Not to Duane. To the yard.”

He was right, and he knew it was what I had already decided.