The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

Dad was sitting in the cab of my log truck when I came back across the mill yard.

He had both hands on a check, holding it flat against his knee the way you’d hold down a map in the wind.

I could read the number from the running board. Six hundred dollars.

Under it, in my cousin Lyle’s square printing, it said “22 logs, pallet grade,” and his signature ran off the end of the line.

Behind me, our logs lay in a row on the grading deck where Lyle’s yard man had rolled them off with the loader.

Every butt end had a crayon mark on it now. The same mark, twenty-two times.

I opened the door and climbed in beside him. The cab still smelled like the coffee he’d poured at five that morning, and the heater ticked while the engine idled. He didn’t look up from the check.

“He said they’re pallet wood, Cal,” Dad said. His voice was even, the way it gets when he’s working out a problem with a balky tractor. “Every one of them. He said the hearts are bad.”

“The hearts aren’t bad, Dad,” I said. “I watched you buck every one of those logs. I saw the ends. That’s red heart all the way through, and you know it better than I do.”

He finally turned his head. My father is 80 years old, thin as a fence post, with white stubble he only shaves on Sundays.

He had on the green-and-black wool plaid coat he’s worn every fall I can remember.

“Lyle walked that hill with me in August,” he said. “He put his hand on that big one by the spring and said it was the nicest cherry he’d seen in this county. He offered four thousand dollars standing.”

“I know,” I said. “I was there.”

“Four thousand in August,” Dad said, and he looked back down at the check. “Six hundred in November. I guess cherry went down.”

He tried to make it sound like a joke, and it didn’t come out like one.

I sat there a minute with my hands on the wheel. I’m 48 years old.

I’ve driven a log truck in these hills for twenty-six years, and I’ve seen a lot of graders call a lot of logs, and I’ve never seen a call like that one.

You don’t fight a sawmill grade with words. Words are free, and the man holding the crayon has heard every one of them.

You take the logs to a man who will saw them open in front of you, and you let the boards talk.

That’s what I was thinking when I looked out the windshield and saw my son Mason standing by the trailer, looking at me and waiting.

He’s 19, tall as a door, and he has worked beside me since he got out of school.

I didn’t say anything to Dad yet. I just opened the door and got back out into the cold.

To understand why that check hurt the way it did, you have to understand the hill behind my father’s barn, and you have to understand what those trees were going to pay for.

The home place sits in the hill country outside Viroqua, in southwest Wisconsin, where the ridges are farmed and the slopes are left to timber because nothing else will stay on them.

My grandfather bought it in the thirties. Dad has farmed and logged it for sixty years.

The steep hill behind the barn faces northeast, and it’s always grown good cherry.