The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

I told him a mill had graded them as pallet stock. I told him I didn’t believe it.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Bring them Saturday morning. Early, if you can. I will saw them while you watch, and we will see what is inside.” And then he said, “Bring your father, too.”

When I told Dad, he nodded. He didn’t get his hopes up out loud.

But on Friday I saw him out in the barn, oiling the chain on his saw for no reason at all, humming to himself.

We left Saturday at first light. Mason drove his own pickup behind us so he could help unload.

Dad rode in the middle of the seat in my truck with his thermos between his knees and his seed cap pulled down.

The sun came up while we were crossing the ridge, and it came up bright and clear.

It was cold enough that the puddles in the ditches had skins of ice on them, but there was no snow yet. The hills were bare and gray-brown all the way to the river.

Somewhere past Westby, Dad started to hum. It was the old hymn Mom plays on the piano on Sunday mornings before church, the one about the sweet hour of prayer.

He hummed it most of the way down, low, under the sound of the engine.

I didn’t say anything. I’ve heard my father hum that hymn in the milk barn, in the hayfield, and at my grandmother’s funeral.

He hums it when something matters and he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Levi’s farm sits at the bottom of a long valley with a creek running through it.

There’s a white house, a big bank barn, a farm stand by the road where his wife sells eggs and baked goods and jam, and down past the barn there’s the sawmill.

The mill is an open-sided wooden shed with a roof on posts, long enough to hold a whole log on the carriage with room to work on both ends.

Sawdust covers the ground under it and all around it. Behind it, the wooded hills went up bare against the sky.

Levi came walking down from the barn as we pulled in. He’s 52, with a full brown beard and no mustache, the way the married men wear it.

He had on a black wide-brim hat, a blue work shirt and black suspenders, and he shook Dad’s hand first.

“You are Arvid,” he said. “Cal told me you cut these yourself.”

“Every one,” Dad said.

Levi walked the whole length of my trailer and looked at every log. He looked at both ends of each one.

He ran his hand along the bark of a couple of them. He didn’t say a word the whole time, and none of us did either.

Then he nodded to Mason, and Mason climbed up to the loader and set the logs off one by one onto Levi’s log deck by the mill.

When they were all down, Levi rolled the first one onto the carriage with a cant hook and dogged it down.

He went to the back of the shed and started the engine. It’s a big old diesel that runs the whole mill through belts and shafts, because there aren’t any power lines on Levi’s place.

It caught on the second try and settled into a deep, even rumble.