Nobody laughed, but nobody said anything either, which amounted to the same thing.
Ryland looked at his boots. The loader operator suddenly needed to check something on his machine.
Colleen stood beside her flatbed with her hand resting on the chain she'd been tightening, looking at Wade Prescott the way bedrock looks at weather: something that was there before he arrived, something that would be there long after he moved on.
She didn't respond. Not because she couldn't, but because she'd learned a long time ago that a man like Wade Prescott feeds on responses the way a fire feeds on kindling, taking whatever you offer him, no matter how reasonable, and twisting it until it burns in a shape he prefers.
The best thing you could give a man like that was nothing at all.
She finished chaining down the load, climbed into the cab of the borrowed truck, and pulled out of Brier Creek with eleven twisted logs rattling behind her on a flatbed that had seen better decades.
In the side mirror, she could see Wade still standing there, hands on his hips, watching her go with the satisfied expression of a man who believed he'd just witnessed the last foolish act of a dying business.
He was half right about one thing. The business was dying.
He was wrong about everything else.
She hauled the eleven logs home, backed the flatbed up to the shop, and spent the rest of that afternoon unloading them by hand with a peavey hook because hiring help would have cost money she no longer had to spend.
By evening, her shoulders ached in places she'd forgotten shoulders could ache.
The logs lay in the yard behind the shop like patients waiting outside a hospital. Nobody trusted each one, heavy with water weight from the storm, bark still dark with moisture, grain hidden somewhere inside where no light had touched it yet.
Quarter-sawing a straight log is simple enough for anyone who's spent time behind a mill. You split the log into quarters first, then cut each quarter into boards with the blade running perpendicular to the growth rings.
It wastes more wood than plain sawing, but it produces boards with vertical grain that resist warping better, last longer, and show straighter figure.
It's the method serious furniture builders have used for centuries. The method Emmett taught Colleen when she was twenty-three years old, standing right there in the same shop with sawdust in her hair, learning to read the end grain of an oak log the way a navigator reads a chart.
Quarter-sawing a twisted log is closer to negotiation.
The grain doesn't run straight. It spirals, dips, reverses direction without warning, like a river that keeps changing its mind about which way the ocean is.
Every cut is a guess informed by experience. Every board is a small gamble that the wood will hold together once the tension locked inside it for decades finally gets released by the blade.
Colleen spent the better part of two months learning how each log wanted to be cut. Marking chalk lines along the bark, cutting a few inches, stopping to reassess when the grain shifted direction on her without warning, reading each fresh cut the way she'd once read the worry on Emmett's face.
Looking for the thing he wasn't saying, the stress he was carrying where nobody could see it until it was too late.
The first log split clean along a hidden crack she hadn't seen, a fault line buried so deep in the heartwood that no amount of surface reading could have warned her.
The sound of it splitting apart in the yard was enough to bring Norah to the window. A sound like a rifle shot, sharp enough to scatter the birds off the shop roof, followed by the heavy wet thud of two halves falling away from each other onto the ground.
Colleen stood over the ruin for a while. Two weeks of careful measurement, gone.
The second log wore through two of her best blades before she'd cut it halfway. Carbide-tipped blades that cost more than she wanted to think about dulled so fast by the dense, spiraling grain that the teeth looked like they'd been chewing gravel.
She finished the cuts with a blade she normally would have retired, producing boards so rough they looked more like driftwood than furniture stock.