The Stamp on Every Log

“Anybody can stamp a log.”

“Anybody with that hammer can,” Avery said. “And Hester Libby watched your truck come out her road yesterday with a load on it.”

Duane looked at Hester then, for the first time, and something went across his face. She didn’t look away from him. She didn’t say anything at all.

“My skidder’s transmission went in August,” Duane said. He said it to Avery, not to me. “Rebuilt it’s eighteen thousand. The bank’s sending letters. I’ve got maybe three weeks before they come for the machine, and then I’ve got nothing. You know what that’s like, Avery. You’ve seen men lose everything.”

“I have,” Avery said.

“And that hammer,” Duane said, and his voice went hard, and he pointed at it in my hand, “should have been mine. I’m the oldest. Everybody knows it should have been mine.”

I didn’t answer that. I had answered it a hundred times in my head over six years, and none of the answers would have helped anything that morning.

Avery tore the top sheet off his tally pad. Then he walked to the scale house, and we all stood there in the sun and waited while he went in. Through the window I could see him talking to Philena, and I could see her nodding and typing.

He came back out with Duane’s eleven trip tickets in his hand.

“Here’s what I’m doing,” Avery said. He said it to Duane, but he said it to the whole yard. “These two hundred and fourteen logs are going on Mercy Ploof’s account, off Hester Libby’s lot, under the landowner paperwork that’s been on file in that office since September. That’s what the wood says, so that’s what the scale says.”

He held up the tickets.

“These are void,” he said. “I’m not crediting a stick of this to you, Duane. The two unmarked logs I’m holding till somebody tells me the truth about where they came from. And the owner’s going to want to talk to you before this mill takes another load off your truck. I’d call him today.”

He handed Duane the tickets. He didn’t tear them up or throw them. He just handed them over, the way you’d hand a man his hat.

Duane stood there with eleven pieces of paper in his hand.

Nobody in the yard said anything. The loader operator didn’t start his machine. The truck drivers didn’t move. Those were men Duane had sold wood beside for twenty years, men he’d see at the fuel pump and the parts counter and the diner. They just looked at him.

He turned around and walked back to his truck. He climbed up in the cab and sat there a minute, and then he started it and pulled out of the yard, empty, the trailer rattling over the frozen ruts, past every one of them.

Nobody waved and nobody jeered. They just watched him go.