The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

The Old Man’s Skidder

Nils did not like it at first. He did not like the idea of his only son out in the woods alone on a thirty-seven-year-old machine. He said so plainly, and I respected him for it.

But on Monday afternoon after my route he drove out to the old logger’s place with us anyway, and he spent an hour and a half crawling around under that skidder while the old man sat on an upturned bucket and told him what was wrong with it.

“Winch line’s good. I put new cable on it the last year I ran,” the old man said. “Clutch on the winch is a little grabby. Front tires are bald as my head. The articulation pins are tight. Engine starts every time if you let the glow plugs work.”

Nils climbed up into the seat and turned it over. It took a second. Then it caught with a cough of black smoke and settled into a low, rough rattle that you could feel in your back teeth.

It was yellow, or it had been once. Most of the paint was gone. The blade on the front was dented and scraped from a thousand stumps. The cab had no doors and a crack across the windshield.

It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen, and Torin looked at it like it was a horse he had raised from a colt.

His wife, Ardis, brought out lemonade in jelly glasses. She stood by me while the men talked and she said, “He won’t sell it to the young fellow from Ogema. He says he’d scrap it for the steel.”

“Torin won’t scrap it,” I said.

“No,” she said, watching my son run his hand along the winch drum. “I don’t expect he will.”

Nils came down off the machine and wiped his hands on a rag and walked over to the old man.

“Ninety-five hundred is fair,” he said. “It’s more machine than I thought.”

“Ninety-five for the boy,” the old man said. “Eleven for anybody else.”

I wrote the check that night at the kitchen table. Torin counted out his four thousand in cash from the coffee can in his closet and laid it on the table in neat piles, and then I wrote fifty-five hundred out of my bus account. My hand was steady. I was surprised at how steady.

When I was done there was three hundred dollars left in the account I had been filling for six years.

Nils looked at the check, and then at me.

“The furnace will last another winter,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “It will,” he said. And then he said something I did not expect. “I’ll put new tires on the front. And I’ll weld that crack on the blade. I’ve got the rod.”