The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

Agnes’s Forty

Torin finished cutting Agnes’s forty the second week of March, on frozen ground, with the snow up past the skidder tires.

On the last load the scale man read his name out loud again. “That’s the last of the Tolliver, son? Good clean job, I hear.” Torin went red to his ears.

All told, after Agnes’s stumpage, the trucking, fuel, two hydraulic hoses and a starter, Torin cleared a little over eleven thousand dollars on that forty.

He paid me back every cent of my fifty-five hundred before he spent a dollar on himself. He left the envelope on the kitchen table one night with a note on top in pencil. It said Furnace.

He started on the dairy farmer’s eighty in April and he has the cattleman’s twenty lined up for after haying.

He did not buy the truck from Prentice. He said he would rather put the money into a better winch clutch and a spare set of chokers.

He graduated in May. Agnes came to the open house in our machine shed and sat in a lawn chair by the door with her thermos, like she was still on the stump, and every person who came in had to stop and shake her hand first. She liked that very much.

The aspen on her forty came back that spring exactly like the forester said it would. Thick as hair, little red-green suckers coming up out of every stump by the thousands. By the end of summer they were up to my knees. In twenty years there will be a new stand there, and in fifty somebody will cut it again.

The big white pine by the creek with the double top is still standing. Torin left it. He left a little circle of oaks around it too, so it would not stand out there all alone.

Agnes goes out and sits under it sometimes, on a stump Torin cut level for her and sanded smooth.

The Blade

I want to end with the skidder, because that is where this all came from.

Nils welded the crack in the blade that first fall like he said he would. And in the spring, after Torin finished Agnes’s forty, the two of them pulled it into the machine shed and spent a Saturday on it. They greased every fitting and changed the oil and put new pins in the front articulation.

Then Nils brought out an old can of paint from the back shelf and handed Torin a brush.

He painted two letters, T.L., in black paint and a little crooked, because he did them freehand.

I still walk out to the landing some afternoons after my route. I stand by the pile with my hand up against the sun and watch for it to come grinding out of the woods.

The skidder is yellow and ugly and has Torin’s initials painted on the blade.