The Cherry Logs From the Home Hill

He folded the envelope and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, right next to Lyle’s check, and buttoned the coat over both of them.

Mason and I loaded the twelve boards into the back of Mason’s pickup, wrapped in an old moving blanket I keep behind the seat of the truck.

Levi helped us sticker them so they wouldn’t rub. He handled them like they were glass.

While we were doing that, a car pulled in at the farm stand up by the road, and then another one.

Saturday morning is busy at an Amish farm stand in the fall. People come for eggs and pies and apple butter.

One of the people who walked down to look at the mill was Orrin, the farmer from the next ridge over from Dad’s place.

He and his wife had driven down to buy a bushel of squash, and he recognized my truck.

He stood by Levi’s stack of cherry and looked at it, and then at the slab pile, and then at Dad.

“These from your hill, Arvid?” he said. Dad said they were. Orrin asked what Levi paid, and Dad told him.

Orrin let out a low whistle. Then he asked what the mill in town had offered, and Dad hesitated, and then he took the check out of his pocket and showed it to him without a word.

Orrin read it. He read it twice. Then he handed it back, and he said, “Huh,” and that was all he said.

But I saw his face, and I remembered his oak logs, and I knew that wasn’t going to be the end of it.

We drove home that afternoon in the sun. Dad didn’t hum on the way back.

He sat in the middle of the seat with his hand resting flat on the front of his coat, over the envelope, and he looked at the hills like he’d never seen them before.

When we pulled into the yard, Mom was on the porch again. Dad climbed down out of the truck and walked up the steps, and he took the envelope out and put it in her hands.

She opened it and looked inside and sat down hard in the porch chair.

“Arvid,” she said. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said. “The trees did it. And Levi Yoder. And these two.”

He nodded at Mason and me. “You call that dentist on Monday, Ingrid. You tell him you’re coming in.”

She started to cry then, and she laughed at the same time, and she pulled him down and kissed his stubbly cheek.

Mason found something very interesting to look at in the bed of his pickup.

By Monday morning, the whole cafe knew. I didn’t tell anybody. Dad didn’t tell anybody.

But Orrin goes to the cafe every morning at six with the same four men he’s had coffee with for thirty years, and Orrin talked.

When I stopped in for coffee on my way out to a job, the waitress set my cup down and said, “I heard about your dad’s cherry.”

The man on the next stool said he’d heard Levi paid cash. Somebody at the end of the counter said a number, and it was the right one.

Nobody said much about Lyle out loud. That’s not how it works in a town this size.

But I heard a man at the corner table say he had some walnut he’d been meaning to sell, and he believed he’d make a phone call to that Amish fellow first.