Mr. Lindberg turned the page over and read the signature at the bottom, and I saw his glasses slide down his nose. For thirty four years that man had looked at me over the top of those glasses, the way a person looks at a stain. Now he took them off completely. “Haugen Lumber,” he said. “Two mills. Sixty four employees. Purchase price, nine million, three hundred thousand dollars.” He lowered the paper. The fire popped. Outside, the snow kept falling on the woodpile where I had split two cords that morning for twenty dollars. “Merle,” he said. “You sold the mill. In August.”
“In August,” I said. “To a national lumber company in Minneapolis. All sixty four of my people kept their jobs, and the oak contract with the flooring plants runs for ten more years.” I took off my gloves finally, and laid them on the card table, one on top of the other. “I did not tell anybody. I wanted to give Karen a trip to Norway. I wanted to give Erik a check at Christmas. A check big enough that he would never have to work for anybody again, not even his father.” I looked at my son. “I did not think he would decide, before Christmas, to sell the loader.”
Erik had stopped moving. He sat in the blaze orange with his drink in his hand, a big blond man with sawdust still in the creases of his knuckles, and the look on his face was not guilt yet. It was disbelief. “Nine million?” he said. “Dad, you told me the flooring market crashed.” I said, “It did crash, son. In the spring. And I sold the mill in the summer, the way a smart man sells a barn before the roof falls.” I paused. “I told you that so you would not worry. I see now that you heard something else.”
A log loader parked in the driveway of a son and a sheet of paper laid on a card table gave one sawmill man the weekend to bring his boy back from the Lindberg name.
Karen came to the card table. She had been standing by the kitchen door the whole time, holding a dish towel, and I watched her fold it very small, the way she does when she is trying to keep her hands still. “Dad,” she said to her father, and her voice was cold in a way I had not heard in thirty four years. “You called Merle a sawdust guy. You said it in front of Erik, a hundred times, since he was ten.” Mr. Lindberg opened his mouth. “And you said a real outfit has to have the Lindberg name. Erik heard you. He wanted to be a Lindberg because you made him feel that a Haugen was not enough.”
Erik put his drink down. He wiped his hands on his orange vest. “It is true,” he said, very low. “I wanted him to be proud of me. I have wanted it since I was a kid. I took the loader because I thought, if I can run my own outfit, with the Lindberg name, he will finally look at me the way he looks at Karen.” He gestured at his grandfather. “And the skidder. And the forklift. I have already sold the forklift, Dad. Forty thousand dollars. I have it in the bank.” His voice cracked. “I am so sorry.”
I should tell you that what I felt was not anger. It was weariness, and under the weariness, a kind of rueful understanding. I am not a man who says what he feels. My father was not either. We show it with a board. We show it with a hand on the shoulder at the end of a long day. I had never told my son that I was proud of him, not once, in thirty six years, because I thought he could read it in the way I handed him the keys to the loader. He could not. “Erik,” I said, “I have been proud of you since you were twelve and stacked your first cord. I should have said.”
The terms were short. The loader and the skidder were returned to the mill on River Road, by Monday, and Erik would give back the forty thousand dollars from the forklift, to the buyer, with a letter. He would go on working at the mill, under the new owners, for the next year, at the same pay as any hired man. And in return, I would put the check I had meant for Christmas into a trust in his name, for his daughter, and he would not see a penny of it for ten years. “It is not a punishment,” I said. “It is a log pile. You have to season it.”
Mr. Lindberg had been standing by the fireplace this whole time with his drink in his hand. He put it down on the mantel. He came across the cabin and stopped in front of me, a tall man in a plaid hunting coat, seventy years old, with three dealerships in his name and a face like a closed hymnal. “Merle,” he said. “I called you the sawdust guy because I could not stand that you were happier than me.” He said it just like that. “You came to my cabin for thirty four years and split my wood without complaint. You looked content.” His mouth worked. “I did not know what to do with a man who looked content.”
That, I thought, may be the truest thing a man has ever said to me. I did not know what to answer. So I picked up the axe from the woodpile by the door, and I held it out to him, handle first. “It is still twenty dollars,” I said. He stared at me, and then, to the astonishment of every hunter in that cabin, he took the axe. He went out into the snow in his good coat and split a log. It took him eleven swings. He came back red faced and puffing, with a bit of bark on his lapel, and said, “That is harder than it looks.” “Yes,” I said, “it is.”
The mill is still running. The buyer kept the name, and the new sign on River Road says Haugen Lumber, in the hand painted letters of my father, because I asked. Erik is on the log yard, six days a week, in the same yellow loader. He is good on it, better than I ever was. In November, the morning of opening weekend, he handed me a twenty dollar bill across the cab of the machine. “Rent,” he said. “For the loader.” I put it in my breast pocket. I did not tell him that I would frame it. I think he knew.
