The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

“Charla,” I said. “And Asa.”

He nodded slowly. He had a white beard he kept short in the winter and blue overalls he wore every day of the year, and he smelled like wood smoke and two-stroke oil.

“Well,” he said. “That boy hasn’t been right since his dad. Neither has she, maybe.”

“I have the Kittredge oak due Friday,” I said. “Three thousand feet. Odette’s got the kiln held.”

Silas looked out the open side of the shed toward the pole barn. Inside the pole barn, under the hay elevator and a pile of feed sacks, sat Tom’s old Farmall M.

It was red where the sun hadn’t taken the paint, and it was older than both of us.

“Lacey,” he said. “How do you think this mill ran before 1998?”

I knew the answer, of course. Everybody around here who is old enough knows it. Before power units got cheap, a lot of little circle mills ran off a flat belt from a farm tractor.

Tom’s father had sawed on this exact mill with this exact Farmall, belted across the yard, from 1962 until the year Tom bought the diesel.

Tom had run it that way himself as a teenager, and he used to tell me about it on winter nights like it was a love story.

When he put the power unit in, he drove the saw arbor off it with V-belts on a new sheave.

But he never took the old flat-belt pulley off the far end of the arbor. I asked him once why he left it there, collecting rust.

“You never know,” he said. That was all he said.

The belt itself was up in the loft over the shed, coiled like a sleeping snake on a pallet.

Silas and I climbed up and looked at it. Six inches wide, four-ply rubber, a little over eighty feet laced into a loop.

We got it down with a rope over the beam. It weighed nearly as much as I did. Silas walked the whole length of it in the sun, flexing it every few feet with his hands, looking for cracks.

“It’s stiff,” he said. “But it’s good. The lacing’s done, though.”

The old steel lacing at the joint had rusted thin. Silas drove to the farm supply in Middlebury and came back with new hooked lacing and the little hand lacer to set it with.

He spent the afternoon on his knees on a sheet of plywood, setting hooks.

While he did that, I went to get the Farmall running. It had been used all summer for raking hay and it started on the second try, coughing blue, then settling into that slow, even thump that every farm kid over sixty can hear in her sleep.

Lining up a tractor to a belt is not hard, but it is fussy, and if you get it wrong the belt walks right off the pulley and tries to take your head with it.

Silas paced it out. The tractor had to sit about forty feet back from the mill, square to the saw arbor, so the belt ran long and flat with a little sag in it.

He drove two stakes and ran a string between them to sight along.

“Your father-in-law crossed it,” he said. “Half a twist. Turns the saw the right direction and gives you more grip on both pulleys.”