The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

The Afternoons

My afternoon route ended at three-forty. I would park the bus at the garage, drive home, and walk out across the hayfield to the landing with a sandwich and a jug of water for my son.

The landing was a dirt clearing by the field road where the logs would be piled until a truck could come get them. It grew a little every day. First it was a few logs. Then it was a pile as high as my waist. Then as high as my head.

By the second week of October the aspens had gone full gold. On a sunny afternoon the whole forty would light up like something you would see in a painting at church, and the leaves would come down in the wind and land on everything, on the logs and on the skidder and on my son’s orange hard hat.

He wore that black hooded sweatshirt every single day. I washed it every Saturday night and it was back on him by Sunday afternoon.

I would stand by the landing pile with my hand up against the sun and watch the skidder come grinding out of the woods, Torin high up in the seat with his shaggy brown hair sticking out from under the hard hat, a bundle of aspen dragging behind on the chain. And I would think, that is my boy. That is my boy doing that.

I am not too proud to tell you I cried more than once out there, standing in my old red flannel shirt, glad nobody could hear me over the engine.

But the person I want to tell you about is Agnes.

The Thermos

The third day Torin was in the woods, Agnes came out.

She drove her Buick down the field road as far as she dared and then walked the rest of the way in her church shoes, carrying a green metal thermos and a folding cushion. She found a big aspen stump at the edge of the landing, set the cushion on it, sat down, and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Torin shut the skidder down and climbed off.

“Mrs. Tolliver, you shouldn’t be this close. If a log rolls…”

“I’m sixty feet from anything you’re doing, young man. I measured,” she said. “My husband used to log this forty with a team of horses with his daddy, back in 1974, the year before we got married. I used to bring the coffee then too. Go back to work.”

So he did.

She came out the next day, and the next. Every afternoon that it wasn’t raining, from the middle of September on, Agnes Tolliver sat on that stump with her thermos and watched my son work her land. She did not say much. She did not need to.

Some afternoons I would come out and find the two of them sitting side by side on the stump and the tailgate of his pickup, his hard hat in his lap, drinking her coffee out of the thermos cap and talking about her husband and the horses and what the woods looked like when she was a girl.

One afternoon near the end of September I came across the hayfield and stopped at the edge of the landing, because I could hear her talking, and I did not want to walk in on it.

“We never had a son,” she was saying. “We tried for a long time. It wasn’t the Lord’s plan. He would have liked you, Torin. He would have liked how you leave the trails clean.”

Torin did not say anything for a while.

Then he said, “I’m going to leave the big pine by the creek, Mrs. Tolliver. The one with the double top. Dad said that was the one Mr. Tolliver always talked about.”

She put her hand on his arm. It was a small hand, spotted and thin, and it stayed there.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s the one.”

I turned around and walked back across the hayfield and stood behind the machine shed for a while before I could go back out there.