The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

“You’re a truck driver, Cal,” he said, not unkindly. “I’m the one who grades. I’ve been grading logs twenty-five years. There’s rot you can’t see from the end. I’m doing him a favor taking them at all.”

“Then we’re not selling at that,” I said. “We’ll take them back.”

He shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. “Suit yourself,” he said.

“Nobody’s buying cherry this fall. You’ll haul them around for a week and bring them right back here, and the price will be the same.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t raise my voice. I nodded to him, and I walked back to the truck, and I looked up at Mason, who was already standing by the loader with his gloves on.

“Load them,” I said.

Mason climbed up into the loader seat. He’s run that knuckle boom since he was tall enough to reach the levers, and he’s smoother with it than I am.

He swung the grapple out over the deck and picked up the first log like it was a pencil.

One at a time, he set all 22 back on my trailer. The yard man stood there with his hands in his pockets and watched.

Lyle stayed in the doorway with his coffee. Nobody stopped us, and nobody said a word.

When the last log was on and chained down, I climbed back in the cab. Dad was still holding the check.

He folded it once, very neatly, and put it in the inside pocket of his plaid coat.

“You’re not going to cash that,” I said.

“No,” Dad said. “I don’t believe I am.”

We drove home on the county road with the logs behind us. Dad looked out the side window at the hills.

The leaves were all down and the oaks were bare and brown on the ridges, and the corn was mostly picked.

Mom was on the porch when we pulled into the yard, and she saw the logs still on the trailer, and her face changed.

She came down the steps in her house shoes and stood by the truck door while Dad climbed down.

“What happened, Arvid?” she said.

“Lyle says they’re pallet wood,” Dad told her. He took the check out and showed it to her.

She read it, and then she folded it back up and handed it to him, and she didn’t say anything at all.

Then she put her arms around him right there in the yard, and held him, and he let her. I looked away.

Mason looked at his boots. It was the middle of a bright afternoon and the wind was moving the dry leaves along the gravel.

That afternoon, I made one phone call.

Two years ago I hauled a load of white oak down to an Amish sawyer named Levi Yoder, who runs a mill on his farm about sixty miles south, back in the hills where the roads turn to gravel and the buggies have their own lane.

I’d liked him. He was quiet, he was square, and he paid me in cash out of a coffee can before I left the yard.

I remembered he’d said that if I ever came across good cherry, I should bring it to him first.

Levi doesn’t have a phone in the house, but he has one in a little shed by the road, the way a lot of Amish farms do for business.

I called the number and left a message, and he called me back in an hour.

I told him what we had. Twenty-two black cherry logs, sixteen to twenty inches, cut by my father on his own land.