The Stamp on Every Log

That is what a scaler does. He walks each load with a scale stick, measures every log, the small end diameter and the length, takes off for rot or crook or seams, and writes it all on his tally. Those numbers become your board feet, and your board feet become your check.

The scaler at that mill was Avery Thibodeau. He is fifty-eight, with a gray beard he keeps short, and he has scaled every log my crew has delivered for fifteen years. He is the fairest man I know. Loggers complain about every scaler in Maine, and almost nobody complains about Avery.

I parked by the scale house and went in. Philena, who runs the office, looked up from her computer and her face changed.

“Mercy,” she said. “I didn’t expect you this morning. Your trucker’s not on my list till afternoon.”

“I know,” I said. “Phil, did a lot of oak come in yesterday?”

She looked at me a second longer than she needed to. “Eleven loads,” she said. “Sunday. Duane Ploof. They dropped them in the yard and left the trip tickets in the box. We don’t usually take Sunday wood, but he called Saturday and said he had a landing he had to clear before the rain.”

There had been no rain in the forecast. She knew that, too.

“Has Avery scaled them yet?”

“He’s out there now,” she said. “Started on them about twenty minutes ago.”

“Can I see the trip tickets?”

In Maine, every load of wood that goes down the road has to carry a trip ticket that says where it was cut and whose land it came off. Philena pulled the eleven tickets off the clipboard and laid them on the counter.

Every one of them said the wood came off Duane’s own lot, on the next road over from Hester’s.

I looked at them and did not say anything. Then I thanked her and went outside.

Avery was standing at the face of the first of Duane’s piles with his clipboard in one hand and his scale stick in the other. He had on the hi-vis vest the mill makes everybody wear in the yard, and his breath was coming out white.

He looked up when I walked over. He looked at my face, and then at the hammer in my hand, and then back at my face.

“Morning, Mercy,” he said.

“Morning, Avery.”

“You’re out early.”

“I’ve got a question about this oak,” I said.

He waited. Avery is a man who waits.

“I think if you look at the butt ends,” I said, “you’re going to find my grandfather’s mark on most of them.”

He didn’t answer right away. He looked along the pile, at the cut ends of the oak facing us, fat and pale and fresh, and then he took his glasses out of his vest and put them on and stepped close to the nearest log.

I didn’t have to point. He found it himself. A clean MP, pressed into the end grain about two inches high, just where I always put it.