The Inspector Took My Spruce Before The Last Note Faded

I closed my eyes and tapped the spruce billet three times. Then I left a beat of silence. Good wood kept speaking after my hand stopped.

That piece had a clear, thin ring. A fiddle maker in Pennsylvania would have liked it.

I was Stavros Antonakis, a thirty-four-year-old Greek American spruce tonewood cutter with olive skin, thick black curls, and a pale scar through my left eyebrow.

My father had taught me to hear a soundboard inside a tree. He had also taught me to put every sale in writing. Of his two lessons, the second saved my business.

We worked outside Rutland, where wet leaves stuck to the truck steps and the hills held low clouds. My rented yard stood behind a closed cider shed. Twelve spruce logs lay on rails under a tarp. Their best sections would become tops for guitars, fiddles, and mandolins.

I had paid $3,840 for those logs under a town roadside removal contract. With hauling and labor, I had $6,270 in them. The finished stock could bring about $18,000, though some pieces would fail when split.

Curtis Bale arrived while my two helpers were loading the first log onto the mill bed.

Curtis Bale was a sixty-year-old white man with a broad pink face, silver hair combed flat, and clean brown boots beneath pressed green trousers.

He wore his badge on his belt. He held a clipboard like a plate someone else should carry.

“Shut it down, boys.”

My helper Ben killed the engine.

Curtis laid a notice on the mill bed. It said the wood had come from a protected spruce stand above Alder Brook, beyond the town work limits.

“It came from the road job,” I said. “I've got the contract inside.”

He gave me a sad smile.

“Son, a young seasonal cutter doesn't always know which side of a boundary he's on.”

“I'm thirty-four. This is my work all year.”

He turned toward Ben and Lila.

“These young fellows never keep proper records. They think a handshake and a muddy receipt will do.”

Lila looked at the office window. Through it, she could see the gray cabinet where I kept my job folders.

I said, “Please wait while I get the map.”

“You can produce whatever papers you have at the review. For now, this material is being held.”

His notice covered all twelve logs and the billets already split from them. It listed no marks, lengths, or individual numbers. Just one line: suspected illegal spruce, assorted.

“You need an inventory,” I said.

“Let me help you,” he said, softer. “Take the notice. Be polite. People remember a cooperative attitude.”

“They should remember what you took.”

The smile went away.

“Push this, and I'll have to look at every load you've moved this year.”

I heard Lila take a breath. I kept my hands on the mill bed.

Curtis called a flatbed. While we waited, I asked Ben to film the loading from our yard. I wrote down the truck plate and made the driver count each log aloud.

Curtis watched me kneel beside the first one.

“More pictures won't grow you a permit.”

“No,” I said. “They won't.”

He didn't ask why each butt end already bore a small blue pencil number.

For two years, I had kept a purchasing archive for Mara Cole, an instrument maker who bought my best spruce. She wanted grain width, sweep, knots, pitch pockets, and the end of every log before I cut it. Each image included a ruler, the job card, and a blue number. I took both ends, then each major cut.

Mara paid me $400 a year to keep the archive. Our agreement left me the original files and gave her access to a copy. Each week's upload went to her shop before any wood was milled.

Curtis saw a cutter with sawdust in his curls. He didn't see that cabinet. He hadn't seen the camera beside my lunch box.

By three, the rails were bare.

I signed only the line that said I had received the notice. Beside my name, I wrote: Ownership and alleged origin disputed. Count incomplete.

“You're making a small thing large,” Curtis said.

“It's $6,270 large already.”

He folded his copy so my note faced inward.

After he left, Ben offered to stay without pay. I paid him and Lila through Friday instead. Then I called Mara and asked her to preserve the weekly uploads.

“What's happened?” she asked.

“Someone thinks I don't keep records.”

I pulled the town folder from the cabinet. Under the purchase receipt was the removal map, signed before we'd started work.

The approval at the bottom read Curtis Bale.

Before I could call him back, my phone rang. A woman named Zuri Mensah said she had heard about my seizure from the flatbed driver.

“Don't cut anything else from that job,” she said. “And don't let anyone clean your camera card.”