Nine Hundred Firs and a Forty Dollar Funnel

Three O’Clock

At three o’clock the tally said seven hundred and ninety.

The trailer was nearly full, the butts stacked tight against the walls clear to the roof, a wall of netted green filling it back to front, and Delmer was working inside the last few feet.

That is when Kip drove past. The landing sits above the state road, and you can see down onto it for about a quarter mile where the road runs along the river bottom.

I heard his truck before I saw it. I would know that exhaust anywhere.

He was not pulling the trailer. He had left the shaker and the netter somewhere, and he was just driving the road, slow, the way a man drives when he wants to see something without being seen looking at it.

He looked up at the landing. I know he did, because his truck slowed for half a second on the straight.

He saw the white trailer with its doors open and the trees stacked almost to the doors. He saw Opie Greer at the tail, handing them up.

He saw my mother in her lawn chair with her clipboard, and he saw me at the funnel. I raised one glove to him.

I did not wave it. I just held it up, open, the way you would to anybody you knew driving past your place on a Saturday.

Kip did not raise his hand back, and he did not slow down.

He went on up the road toward the store and was gone around the bend, and that was the last I saw of him that year.

Opie watched him go. He did not say anything for a while.

Then he handed another tree up into the trailer and said, “I sold that boy his first chainsaw,” and shook his head, and went back to work.

The Count

The last tree came through the funnel at nine minutes till four.

I pushed it, and Aurelio pulled it, and when the top cleared the throat he cut the sleeve and tied it off himself and held it up so everybody could see it.

My mother put her last stroke on the clipboard and drew her slash through the last five, and then she counted the whole page over again with her finger, every line, slow, her lips moving.

It took her a good while. Nobody said a word.

“Nine hundred,” she said finally. “Nine hundred, and not one more or less.”

And she set the clipboard down in her lap and folded her hands on top of it like a woman finishing a prayer.

Delmer handed down from the trailer and stood by the doors and counted the rows the way a trucker does, top to bottom and back to front, and he came up with nine hundred, too.

He wrote it on his bill of lading and had me sign it on the side of his trailer.

I could not hold the pen at first. My hand had cramped into the shape of a tree trunk.

Aurelio took my hand in both of his and worked my fingers open one at a time until I could close them on the pen, and I signed my name crooked.