The Stamp on Every Log

He ran his thumb over it. Then he stepped to the next log. Then the next.

“Huh,” he said.

That’s all he said. Huh.

“Duane’s tickets say this came off his lot,” I said. “It didn’t. It came off Hester Libby’s south slope. My crew cut it last week and decked it Friday. Somebody hauled it Sunday while we were home. Hester saw his truck.”

Avery looked past me. Hester had gotten down out of the pickup by herself and was standing by the front bumper in her wool hat, holding the hammer’s feed sack folded over her arm like a dish towel.

“That’s Hester Libby?” he said.

“That’s her.”

“I scaled her husband’s pulpwood when I was twenty-three years old,” Avery said. “He brought me a thermos of coffee every single time.”

He took his glasses off and put them back in his vest. Then he looked at me square.

“Mercy,” he said, “I’m not going to take your word for it and I’m not going to take his. I’m going to look at every log. You want to walk it with me?”

“That’s why I came,” I said.

So we walked it.

I want to tell you what that looked like, because I’ve thought about it a hundred times since. It was not dramatic. Nobody yelled. It was the slowest, quietest, most careful hour of my life.

Avery went log by log, the way he always does. He would put the scale stick across the small end and read it, and call out the diameter and the length, and write it down. Then he’d step to the butt end, and I would point to the mark with my finger, and he would look.

“MP,” he’d say. And he’d make a little mark on his tally.

Then the next one. “MP.”

Then the next one. “MP.”

Some of the ends faced in toward the middle of the pile, the way logs land when a loader drops them. For those we walked around to the back side, through the frost, and found them there. Once Avery had to get up on the first tier and crouch to see a log in the middle, and Zeke came over and gave him a hand down.

After the first pile, the yard got quieter.

I didn’t notice it at first. Then I realized the big loader had stopped at the far end of the yard. The operator had shut it down and was sitting up in the cab with the door open, watching.

Two truck drivers who had come in to unload were standing by their rigs, not unloading. A couple of men from the mill crew had come out the side door of the building with their gloves on and just stood there.

Nobody said a thing. They watched Avery’s stick, and my hammer, and they listened.

“MP.” Mark on the tally.

“MP.”

On the third pile we found two logs with no mark. I’d been afraid of that and expected it both. Avery looked at me.