The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

I pulled the feed lever. The carriage rolled forward. The saw went into the white oak, and the slab came off the log in one long curl of bark and sapwood, and the smell of fresh oak came up into that cold air like bread out of an oven.

The Farmall barked when the saw bit. I heard the governor open up and the engine dig in, and the belt slapped once, hard, and then held.

“Easy on the feed,” Silas called. “She’s not a diesel. Let her keep her speed.”

That was the whole lesson of the first morning. A circle saw is hammered for its speed.

If you feed too fast and pull the speed down, the blade loses its tension and starts to wander in the cut, and then you get boards thick on one end and thin on the other.

On the diesel, Tom could feed hard and the engine would hardly notice. On the Farmall, I had to listen. I fed with my ears more than my hands.

When the tractor started to labor I eased off the lever, and when it came back up I gave it a little more.

By ten o’clock we had sawed four logs and I had found the rhythm.

Silas turned the logs with the cant hook between cuts, and I set the head blocks with the setworks lever, one inch and an eighth for every board, a little heavy to leave room to plane.

Every board that came off, Silas tailed back to the stacks and laid it on the stickers, the thin dry strips that hold each layer apart so the air can move.

Stickered lumber looks like a layer cake. He kept it as neat as Tom ever did.

Then, around eleven, the belt started to slip.

It does that when it is cold and stiff and has not run in twenty-eight years. You hear it before you see it.

The note goes sour, and the belt starts to squeal on the pulley like a sick calf, and the saw slows down even when you are not cutting.

“Dressing,” Silas said. “Belt dressing. Your father-in-law kept a stick of it somewhere.”

The Farmall had a toolbox bolted under the seat. It was the kind with a hinged lid that rusts shut if you leave it for a year. I got a screwdriver under the lid and pried it open.

Inside were the things you would expect. A pair of pliers, two adjustable wrenches, a coffee can of bolts, a spare spark plug wrapped in a rag.

And on top, sitting by itself like somebody had set it there on purpose, a brand new stick of belt dressing still in the paper.

Tucked under it was a folded piece of paper from the pad Tom kept by the phone. I knew it before I opened it because I knew his handwriting better than my own.

It said, in his square carpenter’s letters, “Just in case, L.”

That was all. Three words and a letter. He must have put it there the summer before he got sick, or the summer before that.

I will never know which. I will never know what he thought the case would be.

I sat down on the drawbar of that old tractor with the note in my glove and I cried the way I had not let myself cry at the funeral.