The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

Then he engaged the saw. The blade came up to speed with a whine that settled into a hum, and Levi stepped up to the lever, and the carriage ran the log forward into the blade.

The first cut is always the slab, the curved outside piece with the bark on it.

It fell away onto the rollers, and Levi’s oldest boy, a boy of maybe fourteen, carried it off to the slab pile without being told.

Levi set the log over and made a second cut, another slab.

Then he turned the log a quarter turn with the cant hook and made a third cut, and a fourth, until the log was squared up on all four sides into a cant.

The face of that cant was red. Not pinkish, not streaked. Clear, deep reddish brown, the color cherry is when it’s fresh cut, with the grain running straight down the length of it like it had been drawn with a ruler.

Levi made the next pass, and the first board came off the saw and slid onto the rollers, and Mason picked it up in his leather work gloves and carried it over to start a stack on the sawdust beside the mill.

It was twelve feet long and ten inches wide and an inch thick, and there was not a knot in it.

Not a check, not a streak, not a speck of rot. It was as clean a cherry board as I have ever seen in my life.

Dad walked over. He stood by that first board for a long time. Then he laid one hand flat on the top of it, and looked down at it, and didn’t move.

Levi kept sawing. Mason brought the next board and laid it on top, and Dad moved his hand to that one.

I stood a step behind my father. I didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say.

The boards were saying it all, one after another, coming off that saw red and clean in the bright November morning.

Levi sawed straight through the morning. He’d run a log, flip it, square it, and slice it into boards, and the boards came out the same every time.

A few had a pin knot or a little sapwood on an edge. Most had nothing at all.

On the fourth log, he found something. There was a small dark streak near the heart where a limb had broken off years ago and let water in.

Levi showed it to Dad. He cut around it and threw that piece in the slab pile.

“That one, maybe your cousin saw,” Levi said. He was being kind about it. “One log, a little bit. Not twenty-two.”

He went back to sawing, and he didn’t say anything else about Lyle all day.

By about ten, Levi’s wife came down from the house with a basket.

She had coffee in a big blue enamel pot and a plate of cinnamon rolls still warm from the oven, and she set them on a stump by the shed and went back up without a word.

We stood in the sun and drank coffee. Levi bowed his head for a moment before he ate, and Dad did the same, and after a second so did Mason and I.

Then Levi wiped his hands on his pants and went back to the saw.

Around the middle of the morning, Dad did something I didn’t expect. He walked down the stack, which was getting tall by then, and went through it board by board.

He picked out the twelve best boards he could find and set them to one side.