The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

We sawed the last log at two-twenty on Friday afternoon.

It was the biggest of the white oaks, twenty-eight inches at the butt, and Tom had told me the winter before that he was saving it for something special.

I sawed it slow. I let the Farmall take every board at its own speed.

When the last board came off, Asa tailed it back and Silas laid it on the stack and slid the sticker over it. The tally was three thousand and forty board feet. Forty feet over.

Silas pulled the clutch. The belt slowed down, slapping softly, and went still, and the saw spun down to a stop.

The men at the fence clapped. I am not making that up.

Twenty or so people in barn coats and feed caps, standing in the frosty grass by the road, clapped for an old red tractor and a sawmill, and the old dairy farmer from church took his cap off and waved it.

I raised my hand to them, went over and turned off the Farmall, and patted the hood the way Tom always did, twice, like a horse.

Noah and Brielle came Saturday morning at seven with two borrowed trailers and Noah’s father and two of his cousins. Asa came too, without being asked, with his skid steer.

We had the oak loaded by nine-thirty, every board still on its stickers so it would dry true.

Odette met them at the kiln at eleven-forty-five. Fifteen minutes to spare. She said that was cutting it fine, and she said it with something on her face that was very close to a smile.

Brielle hugged me before they drove off. She held on a long time. Then she pressed something into my coat pocket.

It was the rest of the money, four thousand two hundred fifty dollars, in the same coffee can, with the lid taped down and a note on top in her round handwriting that said, “For the tractor.”

The toolbox is still bolted under the Farmall’s seat, with the belt dressing back in it, and Tom’s note back on top where he left it. I put it back there myself. Just in case.

The belt went back up in the loft. Silas checked the lacing first, and it was still good.

The power unit runs the mill now, the way it did before, and Asa comes up on Saturdays to tail and sometimes to saw.

He is better at it than I am. He has his father’s ear for the feed.

Charla has come to the fence twice since. She has not come into the shed.

The second time she brought a pan of brownies and set them on the bench by the door, and she nodded to me, and I nodded back. It is a beginning. I am not in any hurry.

The oak went through Odette’s kiln all winter and came out in the spring at seven percent. A planing mill in Brandon ran it into tongue and groove.

Noah and Brielle’s baby girl came home in April to a house with plywood subfloors and a bassinet in the corner.

The oak sat stacked in their living room all summer to settle to the house. Noah laid it in December, with his father and Asa helping, one row at a time on their knees.

Noah and Brielle’s floors went down at Christmas, and the last board has “Tom” written on the underside.