The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

He dropped them uphill so they wouldn’t run. He bucked them to length, ten and twelve feet, with a few eights where the tree forked.

He painted the ends with wax so they wouldn’t check. He stacked them on skids in the barn lot like he was laying up firewood for the queen.

By the last week of October there were 22 black cherry logs in a row behind the barn, and they were beautiful.

Even with the bark on, you could see they were straight. The ends showed deep red heartwood with a thin ring of pale sapwood.

Mom would bring him coffee in the afternoons and stand there with him looking at them.

One day I saw her put her hand on his back while they stood there, and neither one of them said anything for a long time.

On Thursday morning, Mason and I loaded them with the knuckle-boom loader on my truck.

Twenty-two logs makes a good load but not a heavy one. Dad rode along to town because he wanted to see them scaled.

Lyle came out of the office when we pulled in. He shook Dad’s hand and said the logs looked good.

Then he had his yard man roll them off onto the grading deck so he could scale them and grade them one at a time.

That part is normal. A mill measures every log for board feet, and grades every one for what’s inside it.

I’ve watched it done a thousand times. Dad sat on an upturned bucket by the deck and watched with his hands in his coat pockets.

Lyle walked down the row with his tape and his crayon. He’d tap a log, look at the end, write a number on it, and move on.

He did not roll a single one over to look at the other side. He went fast.

When he was done, he went back in the office and came out with the check.

He handed it to Dad and said, “Sorry, Uncle Arvid. Lots of heart rot in there. Shake, too. They’re going to pallet stock. That’s the best I can do.”

Dad looked at the check, and then at Lyle, and then at the logs. He didn’t say a word to him.

He just got up off the bucket and walked to my truck and climbed into the cab and shut the door.

That’s where I found him.

Now, I want to be fair to Lyle, because he’s my cousin and I grew up with him. I knew the mill had been behind on its payments since spring.

Everyone in town knew it. Lumber prices had dropped, and he’d bought a new headrig right before they did.

I also knew he’d been cutting corners on people. A man named Orrin, who farms on the next ridge, told me at the elevator in September that Lyle had scaled his oak logs about a third short. Orrin didn’t fight it. Most people don’t.

A man in trouble with the bank does things he shouldn’t. I understand that.

But doing it to your own uncle, a man who taught you to run a chainsaw, a man who’s 80 and cutting his own trees to pay for his wife’s teeth, that’s a different thing.

I walked over to the office. Lyle was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee, and he watched me come.

He knew what I was going to say, and I could see he’d already decided how he was going to answer it.

“Lyle,” I said. “Those are not pallet logs. You and I both know what’s in them.”