The Boy Who Bought His Own Skidder

The Scale

The first full loads off Agnes’s forty went to the mill yard on a Thursday in the third week of October.

Torin wanted to ride along. He had a half day of school that day for teacher conferences, so I took the afternoon off my route for the first time in four years. The old logger’s wife had told me once you only see your son’s first load go across the scale one time in your life. I did not want to miss it.

We followed the log truck in my car down Highway 13 and out to the mill. It was a bright cold afternoon. The aspens along the highway were past their best but still yellow, and the sky was the hard clean blue you only get in October.

The mill yard is a big gravel lot with mountains of logs on one side and the scale house on the other. The trucks line up and pull across the scale one at a time, and the scale man sits in a little booth with a window and a microphone that crackles out over a speaker on the pole, so the drivers can hear their weights without getting out.

There were four trucks ahead of us.

And two trucks behind us, I saw when I looked in the mirror, was Wendell’s.

I knew it right away. I have known that truck for twenty years. My stomach went tight.

“Torin,” I said quietly. “Look behind us.”

He looked. He did not say anything. He turned back around and sat with his hands on his knees and his jaw set exactly like his father’s.

“You don’t have to get out,” I said.

“I’m getting out,” he said.

The Ticket

When our load pulled up on the scale, Torin got out of my car and walked over to stand by the booth. I got out too and stood beside the car. I had my red flannel on, and I remember I put my hands in the pockets because they were shaking.

The scale man leaned to his microphone. He was a heavy, gray-haired man with a voice like a radio announcer, and he had been calling weights at that mill for longer than Torin had been alive.

He looked down at the ticket. Then he looked up and out the window at my son standing there in his orange hard hat and black sweatshirt, and his eyebrows went up.

Then he keyed the microphone and read it out across the whole yard, slow and loud, the way he must have read ten thousand tickets.

“Load from the Tolliver forty. Supplier, Torin Lindgren. Twenty-nine point four tons.”

Then he let go of the button, and then he pushed it again.

“First load, son?” he said over the speaker.

“Yes, sir,” Torin called back.

“Well, welcome to the yard,” the scale man said, and every driver in that line heard it.