That was the beginning. Word travels in a small county on its own schedule, slowly, through the specific channel of men telling other men things at a parts counter on Saturday morning.

By the time Cordell was 16, neighbors were bringing him machines. A hay baler with a stripped knotter. A water pump. A generator that had not run since the Carter administration. He fixed most of them.

The ones he could not fix, he kept with permission, which was almost always granted and granted easily because a dead machine sitting in a boy's shed is worth considerably more to you than a dead machine sitting in yours. By the spring of 1990, when he walked across the stage at Wilcox County High School, Cordell Tarver had a shed of his own behind his parents' house containing, by rough count, 19 dead welders, 22 electric motors of assorted horsepower, three portable generators, and an air compressor with a cracked head. His classmates were talking about college. Cordell was talking about steel.

And here is the thing that everybody who retells this story gets wrong. So, let me be precise about it while it is still simple. He asked for two different things, and he never once confused them.

The dead welders and the burned-out motors, those he took for free, and those were tools. The dead machines lying in other men's fence rows and pasture corners, he never took at all. Those he made an offer on.

In the summer of 1989, a storm came through the Black Belt, and lightning took the top off a grain bin on the Tarver place. It came down in a heap of galvanized sheet and structural angle in the corner of a soybean field, and it sat there for 2 weeks while Alton figured out what to do about it. 4,000 lb of steel. The county had a word for that. The word was scrap, and the price was 4 cents a pound.

Cordell walked out to it on a Sunday afternoon and stood there a long time, not looking at the wreck, looking at the individual pieces of it, the angle, the channel, the sheet, and thinking about what each one already almost was. Then he got in his father's truck and drove to Tuskegee and spent an entire afternoon in the extension library with a legal pad and a pencil. Here is what he came home with. Scrap steel in Alabama in 1989 moved at 4 cents a pound. That same steel, cut clean, bent to tolerance, welded into a bracket or a hitch or a repair plate that a farmer actually needed on a Tuesday, moved at somewhere between 3 and $14 a pound, depending on how much labor was in it and how bad the man needed it.

A commercial fabrication setup capable of doing that work, a track burner, a press brake, a plate roller, ran $8,000 to $14,000 new. Cordell Tarver did not have $8,000. He had a shed full of dead motors and a bin his grandfather labeled in 1974.

Steel does not have a price. It has a price to somebody. And the entire distance between 4 cents a pound and $14 a pound is nothing on God's earth but which somebody happens to be standing there looking at it. He did not say a word about any of it to anyone for 3 days.

He built the rig that summer. Not from a kit, not from plans, from a yellow legal pad he filled over the course of about 3 weeks. And then from whatever he could put his hands on. The track burner ran on rails he assembled from salvaged farm material and checked repeatedly for alignment. The press brake and plate roller were built from reclaimed structural components and hydraulic parts, and the roller was the piece he was proudest of because nobody had told him how to make it.

Angle iron he bought at the salvage yard down in Pine Hill for 40 cents a pound. Total material cost, not counting the motors he already had, $438. He finished it in September of 1989, a few days after his 17th birthday. And the first thing that came off it was a gooseneck coupler, the ball mount that lets a farm truck pull a stock trailer, built to a drawing he had made by measuring a broken one with a pair of calipers.

Alton Tarver set his coffee cup down on the tailgate, walked the length of the shed, and picked it up. He turned it in the light. He ran his thumb along the weld, slow, all the way down one side and back up the other, the way a man checks a thing he already suspects is good and does not want to be wrong about. He did not say anything for close to a full minute.

"What you fixing to do with it?" His son said he was going to sell it. "How much?"

Cordell said he thought maybe $60. Alton looked at the weld one more time. Then he set the coupler down on the bench, picked his coffee back up, and said, "Hmm." And in Alton Tarver's vocabulary, that was a standing ovation.

Let me tell you about Wendell Prine, because you cannot understand what happened next without him. Wendell Prine was 53 years old in 1989, and had owned Prine Auto Parts and Machine on the Camden Square for 19 years. He was a big man with a big voice, and the particular confidence of somebody who has been the most knowledgeable person in every room he has walked into for two decades running.

He knew bearing numbers by heart. He knew which tractors ate clutches and which ones did not. He knew hydraulic fittings. He knew belt sizes. He knew what a rebuilt starter ought to cost. And he knew the credit history of every farming family in Wilcox County, including which ones paid at harvest and which ones paid when they could.

He held court at that counter every Saturday morning from 7:00 to 10:00, dispensing advice that was usually correct and always delivered with the certainty of a man who has never been wrong in a way that cost him anything. He was not a bad man. Understand that because the story does not work if you make him one. He was a man who had mistaken never being wrong about small things for being incapable of being wrong about big ones, which is a different condition entirely and a considerably more dangerous one.

Wendell Prine had opinions about metal fabrication. Specifically, he had the opinion that a serious fab operation could not be run out of a farm shed in a county like Wilcox, and he had arrived at that opinion honestly through a combination of genuine knowledge, real capital math, and the particular blindness that comes from knowing a thing well enough to stop asking questions about it. On a Saturday morning in October of 1989, Cordell Tarver walked into Prine Auto Parts and Machine with a gooseneck coupler tucked under his arm and told Wendell Prine that he had built a fabrication rig and intended to start selling parts. There were six men at that counter. Cordell would remember the number for the rest of his life.

Wendell looked at the coupler. Then he looked at the boy holding it. And then he laughed.

It was not a cruel laugh. That is important. It was the laugh of a man who thinks he is doing somebody a favor by saving them from an expensive embarrassment. The laugh that says, "I already worked this one, son. I already know the answer."

He picked the coupler up off the counter, turned it over once, set it back down.