The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

The Mill

Aspen in our part of Wisconsin mostly goes to the pulp and board mills, sold by the ton. A trucker with a log truck and a loader picks it up at the landing and hauls it to the mill yard.

There it goes across the scale, and the mill writes a ticket with your name and the weight on it. The check goes to the name on the ticket.

We had to set up the account in Torin’s name with me signing as his mother, since he was not eighteen. The woman at the mill office in town looked at the paper for a long time, then over her glasses at me.

Then she signed it and stamped it and said, “Good for him,” in a voice like she meant it. That was the first time anybody outside our family had said it.

The trucker Nils found was a man from Prentice who hauled for half the small crews in the county, a toothpick always in the corner of his mouth. He looked at the landing pile the first week of October and whistled through his teeth.

“The kid did all this by himself?” he said. “With that old cable machine?”

“After school,” Nils said.

The trucker looked at Torin a long time.

“I’ll haul for you,” he said. “Same rate as I give anybody. Not a penny under.”

That was what Torin wanted. Not a favor. The same rate as anybody.