The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

The Number

We live on a hundred and sixty acres in Price County, Wisconsin, about twelve miles out of Phillips. My husband Nils runs forty-some beef cows, mostly Angus crosses, and he cuts hay and works part of the winter plowing for the township. I drive a school bus for the district. I have driven the same route for eleven years. I know every mailbox and every dog on it.

We are not poor and we are not anything else either. We are the kind of family where a boy’s summer money matters, and where everybody knows exactly what it is going to.

Torin’s was going to a truck. He had four thousand dollars saved from two summers of baling hay and one of logging, and the twenty-nine hundred was going to put him close enough to buy the half-ton he had been watching on a lot in Prentice since spring.

That night Nils came in from checking the cows and Torin showed him the envelope and the notebook. Nils sat at the kitchen table and read the notebook page by page with his reading glasses down on his nose. He did not say anything for a while.

Wendell is his first cousin. Their fathers were brothers. They grew up a mile apart and hunted the same swamp every November of their lives. When Nils’s dad died, Wendell was a pallbearer. When Wendell’s boy got married, Nils was the one who cooked the hog.

“He’s behind on that new skidder,” Nils said finally. “I heard it at the co-op. Payments on that machine are more than our mortgage. He’s been scrambling since spring.”

“That doesn’t make it my chain,” Torin said.

“No,” Nils said. “It doesn’t.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. I could see what it was costing him. A man does not like to find out a thing like that about someone who carried his father’s casket.

“I’ll go over there tomorrow,” he said.

I put my hand on his arm. I had been thinking about it all afternoon, standing at the sink, scrubbing a pot that was already clean.

“And say what?” I said. “He’ll say the chain broke. You’ll say it didn’t. Then you two won’t speak at Christmas, and your mother will cry, and Torin still won’t have his money.”

“Then we get a lawyer.”

“For twenty-three hundred dollars?” I said. “Against your own cousin? It’d be a year, and we’d spend half of it getting the other half, and the whole family would pick sides.”

I am not a hard woman. But I had done the arithmetic in my head that afternoon, and the arithmetic kept coming out the same way. It was Nils’s cousin and it was twenty-three hundred dollars, and I had decided my son would earn it back faster than any court would ever hand it over.

I just did not know how yet.

Torin’s Idea

It was Torin who knew how. He usually does. He gets that from Nils.

He sat on the porch steps the next morning before church with his coffee, looking out over the hayfield toward the Tolliver place, and he said, “Mom. What if I didn’t work for anybody?”

I sat down next to him. The grass was wet. The aspens along the fence line were just starting to go, a few yellow leaves here and there like somebody had been careless with paint.

“You’d need a machine,” I said.

“Old Gunnar up the road is selling his skidder. The old Timberjack. It’s been sitting behind his shed since he quit. I saw it on the board at the feed mill.”

He had logged around here for forty years and quit when his knees gave out. He was eighty-one now. I had his great-grandkids on my bus.

“That thing’s older than you are,” I said.

“It’s a 1989,” Torin said. “It’s a 240 cable. Single drum winch. He wants ninety-five hundred. Mom, it runs. I talked to him after the Fourth. He just doesn’t want to sell it to somebody who’s going to part it out.”

“And where are you going to cut?”

He tipped his coffee cup toward the east, toward the forty acres of aspen that sat between our hayfield and the county road.

“Agnes,” he said. “She told Dad two years ago that stand was getting old and she ought to have somebody cut it before it falls over. Nobody’s come. It’s too small for the big outfits.”

I looked at that stand of aspen and I looked at my son, and something in my chest went very still.

Ninety-five hundred dollars. Torin had four thousand. I had been putting my bus money away for six years, a little out of every check, for a furnace we were going to need someday and for whatever came up. There was fifty-eight hundred dollars in that account.

“Let me pray on it through the service,” I said.

He grinned at me. “You already decided.”

“Let me pray on it anyway,” I said.