“Source?”
“I don’t know.”
“Internal stress?”
“I don’t know.”
“Buyer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Intended use?”
“I don’t know.”
The old owner smiled.
“So what’s it worth?”
The apprentice glared.
“You already know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“Good.”
Then the owner handed him a broom.
That lesson irritated him for years.
Now he taught it himself.
Time had a sense of humor.
The storm-salvaged burl lost weight slowly.
Every six months, they recorded moisture.
The first year, still far too wet.
Second year, improving.
Third year, outer shell stable but core uncertain.
The apprentices who had first complained were no longer apprentices by then.
One became a machine operator.
One left for college.
One joined a timber-framing company.
New young workers arrived and asked the same questions.
“Why don’t we cut it?”
The answer remained:
“Because we don’t have a good reason yet.”
The mill had changed in other ways.
The great vertical band saw from the original story was no longer used every day.
Modern equipment handled much of the production.
Computer-controlled resaws.
Laser measurement.
Moisture tracking.
Digital inventory.
But the old saw remained.
Rebuilt twice.
Guarding upgraded.
Motor replaced.
The steel table scarred from decades of work.
Employees joked that the machine had become the only thing in the building more stubborn than the founder.
Visitors occasionally asked whether it was the saw that opened the famous first burl.
It was.
Mostly.
Original frame.
Different motor.
Different blade system.
Replacement electrical controls.
At what point did an old machine stop being the same machine?
Nobody knew.
That question amused the workers.
It sounded like something their founder would have enjoyed arguing about.
The mill still kept his wooden box in the office.
The original brass tube had eventually moved to the forestry archive, as his will required.
The original forty-dollar receipt went with it.
So did the provenance papers.
But the mill kept replicas.
The carved maple leaf remained original.
His employees had voted to keep it.
Technically the will had not mentioned the carving specifically.
The regional archive offered to take it.
The employees refused.
“Why?”
the archivist asked.
The shop manager answered:
“Because he’d haunt us.”
Nobody knew whether the founder believed in ghosts.
Probably not.
Still, the leaf stayed.
The box also held the buyer’s letter.
I spent my career learning what wood was worth. The kid taught me that knowing more does not entitle you to the difference.