The Week an Old Farmall Ran Our Mill

They worked without talking much. Silas handed Asa a wrench and Asa handed it back. Twice Silas said something low and Asa laughed, short, the first time I had heard him laugh since the funeral.

The men at the fence did not leave. None of them came over or said a word. They just stood there with their coffee and watched Tom’s son bolt his father’s engine back down where it belonged.

When the last bolt was torqued, Asa straightened up and looked at the V-belts hanging slack off the sheave.

“You want to hook it up?” he said. “You could finish on the diesel. Be done by dark.”

I looked at the Farmall, idling in the sun on the end of its long belt. I looked at the stacks. I had seven hundred feet to go, more or less, and one more day before Odette’s kiln.

“I think I’ll finish on the tractor,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

Asa looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded like he had been hoping I would say that.

“Can I tail for you?” he said. “Silas looks tired.”

“I am not tired,” Silas said. “I am sixty-seven.”

But he let Asa take the back of the saw. And for the last hour of light on Thursday, Tom’s oldest son tailed boards off his father’s mill while his father’s widow sawed and his father’s helper turned the logs, and the old Farmall sang on the end of its belt.

Charla came Friday morning.

I saw her car pull onto the shoulder a little after nine. She did not get out for a long time.

Through the windshield I could see her looking at the power unit bolted down on its mount, and at the belt running out across the yard to the tractor.

Then she got out and walked to the fence. The men at the rail made room for her too, the way they had for Asa.

Nobody said anything to her. Nobody had to. Half of them had watched her son bring that engine back the day before.

I finished the cut I was on and pulled the carriage back. Then I told Silas to keep her idling, and I took off my gloves and walked across the yard to the fence.

We stood there with the top rail between us. Up close she looked tired. She looked like a woman who had not slept much either.

“He came home last night and didn’t say a word to me,” she said. “Went right to bed.”

“He worked hard yesterday,” I said.

“I know what I did,” Charla said. She said it to the fence rail, not to me. “I waited twenty years for somebody to say I was owed something. Then Tom died and I thought, now or never.”

I did not tell her she was wrong. She knew. Everybody at that fence knew. She was standing in front of all of them, in the bright cold sun, and that was more than anything I could have said.

“Charla,” I said. “There’s coffee in the urn. And Asa’s welcome here to saw any day he wants. You’re welcome to come watch him do it. That goes for the grandkids too, when there are some.”

She looked up at me then. Her eyes were wet. She did not take the coffee. But she nodded once, and she stood at that fence and watched for a full hour before she got back in her car.