The Stamp on Every Log

“Those aren’t mine,” I said. “I don’t know where they came from. I won’t claim a log I didn’t stamp.”

He nodded and wrote something different next to those two.

A little later we found one where the mark was half gone, split along a check in the end grain. You could see the M plain and only the curve of the P.

“Call it what you want,” I said. “I’m not going to fight you over one log.”

Avery looked at it a long time. “That’s yours,” he said. “Your grandfather’s P has a little tail on the bottom where the casting was off. I’ve been looking at it for fifteen years.” He marked it.

I hadn’t known that. I hadn’t known anyone but me knew the P had a tail.

By the sixth pile my arm was tired from holding the hammer up and the frost had started to burn off the gravel in the sun. Hester had come over and was standing at the end of each pile we finished, with her hands folded in front of her, watching Avery write.

She didn’t speak to anybody. She didn’t have to. Every man in that yard knew who she was by then.

It took a little over an hour. Eleven piles. When we finished the last one, Avery stood back and added up his tally on the clipboard, slow, moving his pencil down the columns twice.

“Two hundred and sixteen logs in Duane’s eleven loads,” he said. “Two hundred and fourteen with your mark. Two without.”

He said it loud enough for the yard to hear. I don’t think he meant to. It was just very quiet.

That was when Duane’s truck pulled in.

I heard it before I saw it, that green cab with the loader folded on the back, coming through the gate empty with the trailer bouncing. He had come in to pick up his tickets and see what the scale was going to come to. Philena told me later he’d called twice that morning to ask.

He parked by the scale house and got out and saw us, and he stopped.

My cousin is a big man, bigger than he was when we were kids, and he looked tired. He had on the same canvas coat he’d worn for ten years. He stood by his truck and looked at the yard, at the loader shut down, at the men standing by their rigs, at Hester, at me with the hammer, and I watched him understand.

He walked over anyway. I’ll give him that. He walked over.

“Avery,” he said.

“Duane.”

“Scale done on my oak?”

Avery held up the clipboard. “It’s done,” he said. “It’s not your oak.”

Duane looked at me. “You’re going to stand in a mill yard and call me a thief, Mercy? In front of everybody?”

“I didn’t call you anything,” I said. “I haven’t said a word to you. I showed Avery my mark. He did the rest.”