The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

I backed the Farmall into place an inch at a time while Silas stood at the mill pulley with his hand up, motioning, sighting down the face of the tractor pulley like a man aiming a rifle.

When he was satisfied, we put the belt on. You do that with the tractor shut off.

You hang it over the mill pulley first, put the half twist in it, and then roll it onto the tractor pulley by hand, turning the pulley as you go.

Then I backed the tractor a few more inches to take up the slack, set the brakes, and Silas drove oak chocks in front of and behind both back wheels and hammered them tight.

It was nearly four. The sun was going behind the ridge across the road and the cold came right down out of the sky.

“Monday,” Silas said. “First light. We’ll want the whole day.”

I went to church on Sunday because I always had, and because if I had stayed home I would have spent the whole morning standing in the mill shed looking at that belt.

We sang “Come Thou Fount,” which was one of Tom’s. I got through the first verse and then I just held the hymnal and let the people around me carry it.

An old dairy farmer from up the road, who must have been eighty-five, caught me in the vestibule and took hold of my wrist with a hand like a root. “Belted?” he said. “Off the M? Nobody’s done that around here in twenty-five years.”

“Somebody’s going to do it tomorrow,” I said.

He laughed out loud, right there in church, and his wife hushed him.

Monday morning was twelve degrees on the thermometer by the back door.

I put on two pairs of socks, my green canvas barn coat, my good leather gloves, and hung my ear muffs around my neck where I could get them quick.

I had braided my hair down my back that morning, the way I used to before Tom and I started sawing on a cold day.

Silas was already there. He had the first log rolled onto the carriage with the cant hook and dogged down tight against the head blocks.

It was a white oak about twenty inches across, clean and straight, with bark like gray armor.

I stood at the carriage lever. Tom stood there for fourteen years and I tailed for him, taking the boards off the back of the saw and stacking them.

I knew every inch of this mill. But I had only sawed on it alone a handful of times, and never once on a belt.

Silas climbed on the Farmall. He opened the hand throttle partway, pushed the belt pulley lever in, put the gearshift in neutral, and looked back at me.

I nodded. He let the clutch out slow.

The belt jumped. It slapped once against itself where the twist crossed, and then it began to move, slowly at first, then faster, and the big circle saw on the mill began to turn.

It came up to speed with a sound I had never heard in my life, and I have been around mills since I was a girl.

The tractor thumped, the belt sang a long low hum like a fiddle string, and the saw whispered.

Silas opened the throttle the rest of the way. The governor caught. The belt settled down into one steady note. He set the hand throttle and left the Farmall on its governor, because between logs he walked over to turn the next one, never more than a dozen strides from the clutch. The lacing ticked every time it went around the pulley, tick, tick, tick, like a clock.