he had. He offered something better: his skill and his willingness to keep showing up while both of them worked out how the next invoice would be paid. That was how the real work began, before a blade touched the wood and before anybody else believed there would be a reason to celebrate.
The first person to tell Maren that her saw couldn't handle the new log was Luis. He told her while they were still cleaning up from the haul, standing where the mill building cast a narrow strip of shade onto the gravel. The throat of her band mill accepted logs with a diameter of about thirty-six inches, which had been enough for most of the work she'd taken in six years. The redwood was so far beyond that capacity it made the machine look like it belonged in a hobby shop. There was no clever angle, no extra pair of hands, no adjustment a careful operator could make to turn the impossible into the merely difficult.
They could saw the trunk into shorter, narrower sections first, Luis suggested. That would make it manageable, though he said the words with a hesitation Maren recognized. She walked him to the burned flank and showed him the thin exposed line she'd noticed at the auction. It rose gently along the length of the trunk, disappeared beneath a fold of old bark, and reappeared several feet away at a slightly different angle. Whatever figured wood lay beneath might depend on keeping those long fibers unbroken from one end to the other. Cutting the trunk into chunks before knowing the figure's direction could destroy precisely the material she'd bought it to find.
"So we need a saw bigger than the building," Luis said.
"Or a saw that doesn't need the building," Maren replied.
They had no such saw, and she could not afford to buy one. The statement might have sounded dramatic to someone unfamiliar with timber work, but it was simple mathematics. A machine with the capacity to handle coastal giants cost far beyond the value of Winslow Custom Timber's ordinary yearly sales. Even renting appropriate equipment and the trained operator required to use it would consume money she'd hoped to reserve for payroll and the next electric bill. They made a list anyway, because refusing to examine the options would not make the problem smaller.
During those days, Maren tried to keep the rest of the shop moving normally. A contractor needed redwood trim for a renovation in Fort Bragg. A cabinetmaker in Santa Rosa wanted two matched pieces in time for an installation already on the calendar. A local couple had ordered a dining table made from maple their grandfather had planted, and there was a small problem in the finish that Maren could correct only after the first coat cured. None of these jobs had anything to do with the giant log, and that was precisely why she kept tending to them. The customers who had trusted her before the auction deserved their work regardless of what she was risking on the side yard.