Chapter 42 - The Man in the High Cab
The mud at the bottom of the driveway was nearly knee-deep where the run-off from the logging trail had washed over the drainage ditch. The headlights of the 1978 Ford were dim, yellow pools of filament light that barely pierced the sheeting rain. The vehicle idle had that peculiar, lope-sided cadence of a thirty-five-one Windsor engine with a worn camshaft—a mechanical heartbeat I had listened to every afternoon from the summer of our marriage until the winter the timber company folded.
As we reached the cattle guard, the driver’s side door swung out with a groaning shriek of unoiled hinges. A pair of heavy, split-leather boots caked in red clay hit the gravel.
The man who stepped down was tall, slightly stooped at the shoulders, wearing a storm coat made of duck canvas that had faded to the color of wet bone. A wide-brimmed felt hat was pulled low over his brow, but when he raised his chin to squint into our flashlight beam, the lineage was undeniable. He had Arthur’s long, straight nose with the slight deviation where a kick-back from a two-man saw had clipped the cartilage in his youth. He had the same deep-set, steel-gray eyes that looked as though they were perpetually searching a timber stand for signs of rot.
"You look older, Carmen," he said, his voice competing with the roar of the creek twenty yards away. "Though I suppose none of us cheated the clock."
"Thomas," I breathed, the beam of my torch wavering for a fraction of a second before I steadied it against the iron pickets. "Thomas Blackwood. We buried a stone for you in the family plot twenty-two years ago."
"Arthur always was hasty with the limestone," Thomas said, stepping up to the gate. He didn't touch the iron. He kept his hands deep inside the pockets of his canvas coat. "He wanted the county records closed. If the register in town thought there was only one living Blackwood heir, the tax liens couldn't be cross-indexed to the timber contracts in Idaho. That was the agreement we made the night the mill burned down."
Daniel took a step forward, his fingers tightening around the brass ring he had retrieved from the kitchen. "My uncle Thomas died in the fire at the lumber yard. The death certificate was signed by the coroner in Oakhaven."
Thomas looked down at Daniel, a faint, melancholic shadow passing over his weathered face. "Your father paid the coroner four hundred dollars and three cords of seasoned white oak to sign that parchment, nephew. Because if I stayed alive on paper, the sovereign trust our grandfather established in thirty-four would have been broken by the bankruptcy court. The creditors wanted the land, Danny. They’ve wanted the ridge since the day the first railroad survey was run through the gap."
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"Why now?" I asked, refusing to lower the beam from his face. "Why come back after twenty years of silence, on the night the eastern wall collapsed?"
"Because the wall wasn't knocked down by the rain, Carmen," Thomas said, his voice dropping an octave as he glanced toward the ridge road behind his truck. "Someone used an excavator with a ripper tooth on the lower foundation three nights ago to weaken the stone. And the man who rented that excavator didn't come from the bank. He came from the state surveyor’s office with a set of blueprints that Arthur stole forty years ago."
