He drew a line.
“Then the second cuts above them. Ten foot, about two hundred foot each. Six hundred foot of saw log at four dollars. Twenty-four hundred.”
He added it and turned the paper around.
“Ninety-six hundred dollars. And I am being careful.”
Nobody spoke.
“He made close to seven thousand dollars off you for one morning and a tank of diesel,” Yoder said. “These men drive the back roads looking for a walnut in the yard and a truck in the driveway that needs tires. They pay cash and they are in the next county by dark. He did nothing against the law. You said yes.”
Darren had gone the color of the sapwood.
“So I didn’t just take them,” he said. “I gave them away.”
“You sold your mother’s trees for twenty-eight cents on the dollar. I am not saying it to shame you. I am saying it because it is the number.”
That did what I could never have done. Coming from me, it would have been a mother’s grief, and a son can argue with grief. Coming from a sawyer with a pencil, it was arithmetic.
Darren sat down on the tailgate of Ray’s pickup and put his elbows on his knees. Ray sat down beside him. Neither one said a word, and I thought that was about right.
Yoder folded his tape.
“There is one more thing,” he said. “A buyer like that does not own a mill. He sells to a log yard, and the yard sorts and ships. Veneer logs go out on a container truck inside a week. But every log gets a metal detector run down it first.” He looked at me. “Was there ever iron in these trees? Nails? Wire? A hook?”
I felt it go through me like a hand laid on my back.
“A clothesline hook,” I said. “In the middle one. My father put it in the year I was two. The tree grew over it.”
It was the nearest I ever saw that man come to smiling.
“Then one of those butt logs is not veneer. No veneer mill will put a knife to a log with iron in it. It will be lying in a cull pile somewhere. May I use your telephone?”
He found it on the second call.
It was at a log yard outside Greensburg, twelve miles off. We went Wednesday. Ray took a half day, the first one I can remember, and I rode in the middle of the truck seat between my husband and my son.
The log lay by itself at the edge of the lot, twelve feet long and so big around I could not have reached halfway. Yoder said it would weigh better than a ton. Somebody had sprayed an orange ring on the bark a little over five feet from the butt end.
I laid my hand inside that ring. It was just about as high as a woman’s shoulder.
The yard man’s name was Dale, and he had no quarrel with any of us. “Wand went off on that one like a fire bell,” he said. “I paid good money for the other two, and they left here on a truck last Thursday. This one I got docked down to nothing. I’d take a dollar a foot to see it gone. Three hundred.”
Darren got out his billfold.
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