The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

After half an hour Asa shut the truck off and got out. He came across the road and stood at the fence, behind the rope, with his hands in the pockets of his canvas jacket.

He stood there for an hour. I counted the boards to keep my hands from shaking. Eleven logs went across that carriage while Tom’s son stood at the fence and watched me saw on his father’s tractor.

When the belt started to sing a little sour, I stopped the carriage and walked to the Farmall and held the stick of dressing to the running belt.

I could feel him watching me do it. I did not look over.

When I turned back to the mill, Asa was walking back across the road to his truck. He got in and drove off toward Middlebury, faster than he had come.

Silas let out his breath.

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” I said, and pulled the feed lever.

At two o’clock Asa came back up the road. This time the trailer was behind the truck, and on the trailer, chained down, was the power unit. Behind it on the deck sat the skid steer.

He did not stop on the shoulder. He turned up our lane and drove right to the shed and got out. The watchers at the fence went quiet, all at once, like a church when the pastor stands up.

Silas shut the throttle down. The Farmall came down to an idle and the belt slowed and the saw spun down and stopped, and for the first time all week there was no sound in the mill shed at all.

Asa walked up to the carriage. He was chewing the inside of his cheek. He looked at the belt, and the tractor, and the stacks, and then finally, for the first time since Saturday, he looked at me.

“Dad taught me to line up a belt on that tractor when I was eight, for the firewood saw,” he said. “He had me stand right where Silas stands and sight down the pulley.”

“I know,” I said. “He told me.”

“I sat in the truck this morning,” Asa said, “and I could hear him. The belt. I could hear him in it.”

His voice went then. He stood there with his jaw working and his hands in his pockets.

“Mom isn’t wrong that she had it hard,” he said, when he could. “She did. We all did. But she’s wrong about this, and I helped her do it, and I’m sorry, Lacey.”

I took off my glove and put my hand on his arm. That was all I could do. I did not trust myself to say anything that would not come out crying.

“I told her this morning,” he said. “I said I’m taking it back. She said if I did I could take it back without her. So.” He shrugged. “Here I am without her.”

Silas came around the Farmall, wiping his hands on a rag. He looked at the power unit on the trailer and then at Asa.

“Mount’s right where you left it,” he said. “Bolts too. Nobody touched them.”

Asa unloaded the skid steer, picked the power unit off the trailer on the forks, and set it down on the mount so square that the bolt holes lined up on the first try.

Silas lay on his back on the planks underneath and threaded the nuts on.