The Stamp on Every Log

When the truck was out on the road, the loader operator started his machine back up, and the truck drivers went back to their rigs, and the yard was a mill yard again.

Avery stood beside me. “I’ll get these scaled for real this afternoon,” he said. “It’ll be on this Friday’s check.”

“Thank you, Avery.”

“Don’t thank me,” he said. “Thank whoever taught you to stamp your logs. Hardly anybody does anymore.” He looked over at Hester. “And tell her I still remember the coffee.”

“Tell her yourself,” I said.

So he did. He walked over to Hester and stepped over to her and told her about her husband and the thermos and the pulpwood, thirty-five years ago, and she put her hand on his arm and laughed, the first time I’d heard her laugh in a month.

I’ll tell you what I did not do, because people ask me.

I did not call the warden service, though I thought about it every day for a week. I did not call the sheriff. I did not put it on the internet. I did not go to Duane’s house. I did not say one word about it at church.

Some of the men in the yard told the story at the diner, I know they did, but I never told it.

Merritt asked me that night at supper if I was sorry I hadn’t pressed charges.

“No,” I said. “Hester’s getting her check. My men are getting paid. Every man he sells beside watched him drive out of there empty. The mill won’t take his wood. What would a judge give me that I didn’t get this morning?”

He thought about that. “Maybe nothing,” he said. “Maybe he learns nothing, either.”

“Maybe,” I said. “That part’s not up to me.”

Friday morning, Avery’s scale came through. Forty-seven thousand eight hundred board feet off Hester’s lot, good grade, very little cull. Philena handed me the mill’s check across the counter herself and said, “Tell Hester hello.”

I drove straight to the bank in Rumford, and then straight up to Hester’s, and I wrote her stumpage check at her kitchen table with her watching. Eleven thousand, four hundred and seventy dollars.

She took it in both hands the same way she’d held the hammer.

“Before the snow,” she said.

“Before the snow,” I said.

She put it on the table and smoothed it flat with her palm. Then she got up and went to the drawer by the sink and came back with her pocketbook.

“Your men,” she said. “Where do they eat lunch?”

“Hester, you don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to,” she said. “Where do they eat?”

So on Saturday, Hester Libby bought my crew lunch at the diner on the Rumford road. She made Zeke sit next to her. She ordered the haddock and a cup of chowder and made everybody else order pie, whether they wanted it or not.

Avery came in partway through, still in his work clothes. Hester waved him over and made him sit down and have pie, too.