Wendell Lindgren handed my son an envelope on the last Saturday in August, standing in our yard by the machine shed, and he did not even shut his truck off.
Torin opened it right there. He is seventeen and he still opens things the way he did at seven, all at once, like whatever is inside might get away from him.
Six one-hundred-dollar bills. He counted them twice. Then he looked up at his father’s cousin with his mouth a little open, the way you look at a man who has just told you the sky is green.
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“That’s six hundred,” Torin said.
“That’s what’s left,” Wendell said. He leaned one arm on the open door of his pickup. “You broke a chain on the Deere back in July. Tire chain. Do you know what those cost? I had to buy a pair. The rest went to that.”
I was standing on the porch steps with a dish towel in my hand. I had come out because I heard the truck and I wanted to see my boy get paid. I had been looking forward to it for a week.
Torin had run Wendell’s skidder all summer. Eleven-hour days, sometimes twelve, out on a timber sale north of Park Falls, dragging aspen and a little balsam out to the landing while Wendell ran the saw and loaded the truck.
Wendell had paid him every Friday through June and July, cash, fifteen dollars an hour. In August he said the mill was slow paying him and he would settle up at the end.
Torin wrote his August hours in a little spiral notebook on the dash. One hundred ninety-four hours, two thousand nine hundred and ten dollars. Wendell said call it twenty-nine hundred, and Torin said that was fine.
“I never broke a chain,” Torin said. His voice was quiet. “We never ran chains. They were hanging on the nail in your shed the whole summer. It was dry, Wendell. It didn’t rain for three weeks in July.”
Wendell smiled at him. It was not a mean smile, exactly. It was worse than mean. It was the smile of a grown man who had already decided how the conversation was going to end.
“You were in that machine every day, bud. Things break. That’s logging. You’ll learn.”
Then he looked at me on the steps, nodded like we had all agreed on something, got in his truck, and backed out onto the town road.
I stood there with that dish towel for a long time. My son stood by the machine shed holding six hundred dollars, and neither of us said a word until the sound of the truck was gone into the trees.