The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

Three thousand board feet. That is about right for a modest house with oak in every room but the bath and the kitchen, sawn a little heavy so there is room to plane it down to tongue and groove after it dries.

I priced it at a dollar seventy-five a foot, green, which was fair for white oak off our mill and maybe a little kind.

Five thousand two hundred fifty dollars. They paid a thousand down out of the coffee can and Brielle cried a little, and I pretended not to see.

Then she told me she was expecting in April. They wanted the baby to come home to a house that was theirs, all the way to the boards.

The deadline was Friday. Our neighbor Odette ran a small dehumidification kiln two roads over, and she had held a charge for the Kittredge oak starting Saturday. If they missed it, her next opening was March.

Green white oak sitting through a Vermont winter does not dry. It just sits there and checks at the ends and waits.

If the oak did not go into Odette’s kiln that Saturday, the floors would not be ready to lay until the baby was walking.

So when Charla said find another engine, I was already doing the arithmetic. A used diesel power unit for a mill our size runs five to eight thousand dollars, if you can find one in November.

I could not find one by Friday, and I could not pay for one if I did.

People have asked me since why I did not call the sheriff, or a lawyer, or anybody at all.

The engine was bought with money from a marriage that ended twenty years ago. Whatever their divorce papers said about it, I had never seen them, and Tom was not here to tell me.

A sheriff’s deputy was not going to sort out a 1998 receipt and a 2006 decree on a Saturday morning in a mill yard.

He would have told us to take it up in court, and court takes the winter.

A fight that long would have kept the mill shut until spring. It would have cost Noah and Brielle their kiln slot and their floors.

And it would have put me across a courtroom from Tom’s son, which I was not going to do.

So I let them leave. Asa pulled the last binder tight, climbed into his truck, and drove out the lane with the engine riding behind him. Charla followed in her car.

At the bottom of the lane Asa stopped for a long time, longer than the road needed. Then he turned left toward Middlebury and was gone.

I went into the shed and sat down on the carriage. The saw was cold. Sawdust from Tom’s last week of sawing was still drifted in the corners where I had not had the heart to sweep it out.

Silas Grenier came up the lane at ten o’clock in his truck, the way he did every Saturday, to see if I needed anything split or moved.

He was sixty-seven and had worked for Tom off and on for thirty years.

He got out, looked at the empty mount, looked at the loose bolts, and looked at me. He did not ask a single question. He walked over and sat down on the carriage next to me.

“Charla,” he said finally.