The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

Silas walked off down the lumber stacks and fussed with stickers that did not need fussing, and he did not come back until I called him.

When I could stand up, I handed him the note. He read it and gave it back to me and nodded, and he did not say anything, which was exactly right.

Then I unwrapped the stick of dressing, and Silas started the Farmall, and with the belt running slow and nothing on the saw, I held the stick against the inside face of the belt the way Tom had shown me on a clothesline pulley when we were first married, as a joke.

It smelled like pine pitch. The belt took it in and turned dark and tacky, and the squeal went away, and the note came back clean.

Our mill sits right beside the road. Tom’s father built it there so people could see it, because a mill people can see is a mill people buy from.

The shed is open on three sides, and from the road you can see everything.

By two o’clock there were three trucks parked along the road. Men in barn coats and feed caps stood at the fence with their hands on the top rail, watching the belt go round.

One of them, a fellow about seventy I knew from the feed store, walked right up into the shed. He watched for a while with his head tipped, listening.

“My dad ran a Farmall H on a buzz saw,” he said. “Every fall, cutting stove wood. I haven’t heard that sound since 1971.”

The school bus came by at three-fifteen and slowed to a crawl. Every window on the mill side was full of faces and little hands pressed on the glass.

The driver honked twice and waved. I waved back with my glove full of sawdust.

We sawed until three-thirty, when the light started going. You do not saw in the dark. Silas and I tallied the boards on the stacks. Seven hundred and twenty feet.

“Four days of that,” Silas said, “and you’re there.”

“Four days of that,” I said, “and I’ll need new shoulders.”

Tuesday was just as cold, eleven degrees at sunup. The Farmall did not want to start.

Silas put a heat lamp on the manifold for half an hour while I fed the stove in the house and made coffee for the thermos.

People came again. More of them. A woman I did not know brought a pan of cinnamon rolls and set them on the bench by the shed door without a word and drove off.

Odette came over at noon, still in her kiln coveralls, and stood with her arms crossed watching the carriage run. She is not a woman who smiles much.

“You’ll make it,” she said. “I’ll hold the kiln till noon Saturday. Not one minute past.”

“Noon Saturday,” I said.

She looked at the belt going round, singing. “My grandfather sawed on a belt in Quebec,” she said. “I’m going to bring my mother over tomorrow. She’s ninety-one. She’ll want to hear this.”

She did bring her. On Wednesday afternoon a little woman in a wool coat sat in a lawn chair at the edge of the shed for two hours with a blanket on her knees, and every time the saw went through a log she tapped her foot.