Today I asked a colleague who grew up in the vicinity of The Logger if she knows him. It’s a small community, after all, and she seems to know everybody.

We were walking to the cafeteria to pick up our students from lunch when I asked her, and all at once she was no longer walking beside me, but was instead perched on her high (and I mean high) heels and swaying a bit as if she would lose her balance, planted as she was there in the middle of the hall.

“Yes,” she said, covering her mouth. “We dated for five years. We were young, 16-22.”

I quickly assured her that it was just a question out of the blue, and explained the situation. She said that normally he would be true to his word, but she’s heard through the grapevine that he may have “fallen off the wagon. He’s such a redneck [not a derogatory term at my school], and he was always all about seeing how hard he could work, and earning a good name for himself, so I’m surprised at this. Maybe something’s wrong.”

“If his dad knows about it, though, it’ll get done,” she said, and recited to me the man’s parents’ home number.

And then she added, “He’s sort of stalkerish,” she said. “He knows when my husband leaves for work, and at our wedding I had a friend who’s a cop on the lookout in case he showed up. Now his brother’s dating the girl who lives across the street from me, so I think that’s how he keeps tabs.”

So for now I might continue sitting back and waiting to see what will happen next. Might my colleague’s grapevine shiver with its exciting gossip–Has The Logger indeed fallen off the wagon?–and firewood show up at my house?

I’m tempted to bet on it, even without calling his dad.

I’m pretty good at getting what I want (remember the washer/dryer fiasco?), so when the load of logs that was to become “4-4.5 cords” turned out to be only 2.46 cords (with generous measuring), I went straight to the phone to call the guy whom we’d overpaid $105.

As soon as I explained to the logger about the amount of firewood I’d received, he said, “I’ll make it right to you. Would you like the money, or more logs?”

I was a bit taken aback at his non-defensiveness. “Logs,” I said, and he said to expect a call and logs from him in the next two weeks.

But when two weeks passed and I hadn’t heard a peep, I called him again.

“I was sick,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it right to you.”

Two weeks later, he said, “It’s been so wet, I haven’t even been able to get out to bring in logs.”

Two or three weeks later, when I said I’d like the money back if he couldn’t get logs, he offered to bring me a cord of seasoned and split wood instead of the logs.

“That’d be great,” I said.

“I’ll call you the night before I come,” he said. “I’ll be there Thursday or Friday.”

By Friday evening, I was a bit peeved. As I loaded our wheelbarrow to bring in wood from the stack left behind by the previous residents, I pondered and plotted: I could tell him I’d advertise myself on craigslist as a reference for him; I could ask him point blank if he was just saying he would bring wood, or will he, really? Or maybe I could call him and say something like, “Well, I don’t like being ripped off, and I’ll never buy firewood from you again, so there!”

But then the truth of capital punishment–that when we kill murderers we become murderers ourselves–dawned on my furrowed brow, and I realized that I could just simply choose not to be a jerk even though he’s a crook.

So maybe I have been ripped off. At least I still have my self respect.

When I called Dad to ask him to bring along his chimney brush next weekend, he said that he had thought their water tank would be installed in July–and just this morning he wrote out the check paying for the completion of the project earlier this week.

It’s possible; maybe the rest of what’s due will one day come my way. In the meantime, becoming a non-Scrooge sits higher on my bucket list than does holding a contentious grudge or acting nastily.