The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

Agnes Tells the Church

We go to a little Lutheran church in town. There are maybe ninety of us on a good Sunday. After the service everybody goes down to the basement for coffee and bars, and that is where the real news in our county gets told.

I had told nobody about Wendell. Not my sister. Not the women on my route. Nils had told nobody either. It was family, and you do not air family.

But Agnes Tolliver did not consider it her family.

The second Sunday in October she stood up in the church basement with her coffee cup in one hand, in front of the bars table, in front of God and the Ladies Aid and half the farmers in the township, and she said, “I want everybody to know who’s cutting my forty.”

The room got quiet. Agnes is not a woman who stands up in the basement.

“It’s Torin Lindgren,” she said. “Nils and Jody’s boy. He bought that old skidder off the road with his own money and his mother’s, and he cuts after school every day, and he leaves my trails clean, and he pays me the full rate when I offered him less. I’ve sat out there and watched him every afternoon for a month.”

She looked around the room.

“And I’ll tell you why he’s doing it,” she said. “Because a grown man paid that boy six hundred dollars for a summer of eleven-hour days and told him the rest went to a chain he never broke. I won’t say the man’s name in church. Most of you can figure it out.”

Then she sat down and ate her lemon bar.

I sat there with my face hot as a stove. Nils sat next to me very still. I did not know whether to be angry with her or to go over and hug her. Torin, on the other side of Nils, was looking at the floor.

But I will tell you what I saw.

I saw an old cattleman from the far side of the Spirit River put his cup down and look at Torin. I saw two of the Ladies Aid women look at each other.

And I saw a dairy farmer in the back row, a man with a hundred acres of timber north of us, take a little notebook out of his shirt pocket and write something down.

Nobody said anything else about it that day. In a church basement, nobody has to.

The Calls

The dairy farmer called on Tuesday. He had eighty acres of mixed aspen and maple that he had been meaning to get cut for five years and he had been waiting on a logger who never showed up. He wanted Torin to come look at it once he was done at Agnes’s.

The old cattleman called on Thursday. He had a twenty-acre aspen stand behind his cow barn that he wanted thinned out next summer.

I stood in the kitchen with the phone in my hand after he hung up and I looked out the window at the forty, all gold, and I could hear the skidder grinding somewhere out in it.

Two jobs. Before Thanksgiving. For a seventeen-year-old with a thirty-seven-year-old machine.

When Torin came in that night I told him. He did not say anything. He just stood in the doorway with sawdust in his hair, and his face did something complicated.

Then he went upstairs to wash up, and I heard him through the floor, in the bathroom, laughing to himself like he had heard a good joke.

Wendell Hears

Of course Wendell heard. In a county like ours, a story told in a church basement on Sunday is at the feed mill on Monday and the bar in Phillips by Monday night.

He did not call. He did not come by. Nils’s mother asked him in a careful voice whether something was going on with Wendell, and he told her it would get worked out.

Nils went quiet that week. He went out to the cows early and came in late. On Thursday night after Torin was in bed I found him sitting in the truck in the yard with the dome light on, not going anywhere.

I got in the passenger side.

“I keep thinking about the funeral,” he said. “Dad’s funeral. Wendell stood in the back of the church the whole visitation. Four hours. Shook every hand. I was so grateful I couldn’t see straight.”

“I know.”

“And then he does this to my boy. To his own blood. Over a skidder payment.”

“He was scared,” I said. “He was behind and he was scared, and he figured a kid wouldn’t push back.”

Nils looked at me. “You’re defending him?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing makes it right. A boy worked eleven-hour days for him all summer. I’m just saying I understand how a man gets there. That’s not the same as letting him stay there.”

He sat with that a long time.

“What do we do?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said. “We don’t do anything. Torin’s doing it.”