The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

Tuesday’s tally was seven hundred and sixty feet. We were at fourteen hundred and eighty.

Noah and Brielle came on Tuesday evening, as the light was going. Somebody had told them in the hardware store.

They stood in the shed among the stacks and Brielle put her hand flat on a board of their oak and held it there.

“We heard what happened,” Noah said. “Lacey, if you need more time. If you need to push it. We’ll figure something out.”

“You have a kiln slot Saturday,” I said. “You’re going to have your floors.”

Brielle looked at me. “We could pay more,” she said. “For the tractor and the fuel.”

“You’ll pay what we said,” I told her. “That’s the number Tom would have given you. I’m not going to change it.”

Wednesday the belt threw.

It was my fault. I got greedy on a big log, twenty-six inches, and fed too hard, and the Farmall dug in and the belt slapped and climbed the edge of the tractor pulley and came off in one big loop that hit the frozen ground like a bullwhip.

Silas was already running for the tractor before I could yell, and he had the clutch in before the belt stopped swinging. Nobody was close to it.

That is why you keep people away from a running belt, and why we had put up a rope that morning to keep the watchers back by the fence.

We stood there in the quiet for a moment, both of us breathing hard.

“Well,” Silas said. “Now you’ve sawed on a belt.”

It took us forty minutes to get it back on, square it up, and dress it again.

A man at the fence I had never seen before climbed over the rope and helped us roll it on without being asked, then climbed back over and went back to his truck.

We tallied eight hundred feet on Wednesday anyway. Twenty-two hundred and eighty. Seven hundred and twenty to go.

Silas sat on the tailgate of his truck at the end of the day eating the last cinnamon roll.

He had been on his feet in the cold for three days. He was sixty-seven years old and he had never once complained.

“Silas,” I said, “you don’t have to come tomorrow. You’ve done enough.”

He looked at me like I had spoken in another language.

“Tom came every day when my wife was sick,” he said. “Every day for a year. You think I’m going to sit home?”

Thursday morning was clear and bright and fifteen degrees, the kind of November morning where the sky is the color of a robin’s egg and the frost on every fence post shines.

We started at seven-forty. By nine the road had trucks on it again.

Somebody had brought a folding table and a coffee urn and set it up by the fence, and the watchers were trading stories about every belt-run thing they ever saw.

At about ten o’clock a pickup I knew came down the road from the Middlebury side, slowed, and pulled onto the shoulder across from the shed. It did not have the trailer behind it.

It was Asa.

He did not get out. He sat in the cab with the engine running and watched. I did not stop sawing. I fed the carriage, and pulled it back, and set the head blocks, and fed again.

Silas looked over at the truck once, and then he did not look again either. He turned the log with his cant hook and tailed the boards back and laid them on the stickers.