I got it loose and pried the lid up. The moment I saw what the man had hidden at that mill before he disappeared, I stepped back, because the box was full of fingers.
Wooden ones. Carved, sanded, oiled, sized like a man’s hand, forty-some of them loose in the bottom of that box, and I want to tell you that a steel box of fingers under a saw carriage is not a thing you are ready for at four in the afternoon by yourself.
Under them was a ledger, and the ledger explained it, and I sat down on the platform and read the whole thing before I moved.
Alton Prosser ran that mill from 1961 to 1989. The first entry in that book is his own hand and it is his own name, and it says: two fingers, left hand, taken by the edger, my own carelessness, no excuse.
Then it is other men. Eleven of them across twenty-eight years. Name, date, what was lost, and then a column I did not understand until the fourth page, which is money paid out, from Alton, to that man, weekly, for as long as the entry runs. Some of them run for decades.
There was no insurance to speak of at a mill that size in 1968. A man lost a hand and he went home and that was the end of him, and if the mill felt bad about it the mill was welcome to feel bad.
Alton put every man on his own payroll and kept them there. The ledger shows the mill running thin for years and shows why, and it also shows that he never once took a wage himself in a year when a payment came due.
The carvings are the part that undid me. He carved a replacement for every finger and thumb that mill ever took, life-sized, off a photograph, and the ledger notes which set went to which man and which men would not take them.
Some came back. There are four sets in that box marked returned, with the man’s name and the year he died, and it says his wife brought them back, she said he wanted them kept with the others.
The last page is 1989 and it is not a ledger entry at all.
Mill is done, creek’s fished out, and there’s four payments still owed and no way left to make them. Selling the timber off the north forty quiet and having Vern carry it to the men after. If I stay they will not take it. So I am not going to stay. Nobody drowned, nobody wandered off, I walked to the highway on a Tuesday and I am fine. Leave the box for whoever buys the place.
He did not disappear. He went to Coos Bay and worked at a boatyard and died in 2003, and his daughter is seventy-six and living in Roseburg, and she has known where he was the entire time and stopped correcting people around 1995.
She came up in the fall. She held those carvings one at a time and named most of the men without looking at the book.
The box is bolted back where it was. I do not run a mill and I never will, but a thing like that should stay under the platform it was built under.