He was willing to pay for parts and labor, both he said on a handshake because his family had known the Carvers for generations and a handshake between the Trasks and the Carvers had always been enough. Wyatt shook his hand. The job took 2 weeks. Parts came to $160.
Labor at Wyatt's modest self-rate came to $180. Total $340. It was the same $340 that had been in the coffee tin on the morning of the Seibert auction. Wyatt did not notice the coincidence until later.
Trask picked up the Massey Harris on a Friday afternoon in late January. He admired the work. He shook Wyatt's hand again. He said his check would be in the mail by Monday.
The check did not come Monday. It did not come Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, Wyatt drove out to the Trask place. The house was empty.
The barn was empty. The cattle were gone. A realtor's sign was in the front yard. The neighbor across the section said Trask had sold the farm to a corporate buyer the week before and had moved his family to Arizona on Sunday night.
He said it the way a man says something he has been waiting three days to say. Wyatt drove home. He sat in the shed. He thought about the $340.
He thought about a handshake between the Trasks and the Carvers. He opened his personal notebook. He turned to the page of rules. He added a 10th.
Every job gets a written contract. No exceptions. He did not chase Trask. He did not call a lawyer.
He did not speak his name to Hollis Merritt or Harlan Fykes or his mother. He ate the $340 the way his grandfather had eaten the $80 to the Goodland dealer in 1958. And he went back to work. But the page of rules in his notebook was 10 rules long now.
And he read them every Sunday evening before he went to bed. In March of 1982, Marietta Carver came home from the Oakley Feed and Seed on a Thursday afternoon and sat down at the kitchen table and did not take off her coat. Wyatt came in from the shed 20 minutes later. He looked at her.
He sat down across from her. "Meridian Bank called me today," she said. "Yes, ma'am. "They asked if I knew that someone had made an inquiry about buying our mortgage note.
From a party in Wichita. The kitchen was very quiet. "Did they say who?" said Wyatt. "They said they could not say.
But the officer I spoke to has known us since Silas was alive. And he said off the record, the party was a corporation. He said the name was Corn Belt Equipment Financial Services. Wyatt's hands were flat on the kitchen table.
He did not move them. "Financial Services," Marietta said. "A farm equipment company has financial services. They buy mortgages from farm wives whose sons inconvenience them.
"Yes, ma'am," said Wyatt. Marietta looked at him across the table for a long time. She did not look angry. She looked very still.
"Silas would not sell the chest," she said. "I will not sell the farm. You do what you need to do. She got up.
She took off her coat. She hung it on the hook by the door. She started supper. She did not mention Corn Belt or Meridian Bank or Garrett Voss again that evening.
But Wyatt sat at the kitchen table for another 20 minutes after she left it. He watched the light change across the wood of the table. He thought about a man in comfort boots on a Tuesday in July of 1977 saying, "This is a market. He thought about a pamphlet on Hollis Merritt's table saying, "No more backyard mechanics.
He thought about the two-page document folded in the bottom drawer of his workbench. And he understood with the same clarity he had felt on the empty county road 5 years earlier that Garrett Voss had finally done what Voss had been preparing to do for five years. He had found the pressure point. He had put his hand on it.
He was waiting to see whether Wyatt would move. Wyatt did not yet know what he was going to do. But he knew sitting at that kitchen table in the March light of 1982 that the response was not going to be a phone call to Voss, and it was not going to be a lawyer, and it was not going to be a meeting. The response, when it came, was going to have to come from the binders.
Silas had left him 43 of them. Wyatt had read every one twice. Somewhere in those binders, he understood, was the piece of knowledge that Voss did not have and did not know he did not have and could not buy, no matter how many mortgages he tried to purchase. Wyatt just had to find it.
He stood up from the kitchen table. He walked out to the shed. He turned on the overhead light. He pulled down the first binder on the left-hand end of the shelf, the 1947 Allis-Chalmers volume, and he sat down at the workbench, and he began to read.
The reading took six weeks. Wyatt did it in the evenings after the day's work was done, from 7:00 until 11:00, most nights later on Fridays and Saturdays. He worked through the binders in chronological order, not by manufacturer. He wanted to see how the industry had changed year by year.
He wanted to see what had been known publicly and what had been quietly retired from the service bulletins over the decades. Silas had kept everything. Superseded bulletins, revised bulletins, original bulletins that the manufacturers had later softened or replaced with gentler language. The full paper trail of what Detroit and Moline and Racine had actually told their dealers over 40 years before the lawyers and the marketing departments had gotten their editing hands on the second printings.
By the middle of April, he had narrowed his focus to Corn Belt's three biggest service revenue streams in western Kansas. Engine rebuilds on mid-60s and early 70s John Deere diesels, hydraulic system overhauls on Case and International combines, transmission rebuilds on Allis-Chalmers wheel tractors. He knew these were their three biggest revenue streams because Hollis Merritt had been quietly asking around for him. Merritt had not told Wyatt why he was asking.
Wyatt had not told Merritt why he wanted to know. They understood each other without putting words to it. On a Thursday evening in the last week of April, Wyatt found what he had been looking for. It was in the John Deere binder.
A service bulletin dated June of 1971. The bulletin was titled in the dry official language of John Deere technical communications, cylinder head gasket torque sequence, 4020 and 4320 diesel engines, revised procedure. It was four pages long. It described in precise detail a failure mode that had appeared in the 4020 and 4320 diesels through the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The failure presented as a cracked block. The symptoms looked exactly like catastrophic engine failure. Coolant in the oil. Loss of compression.
A block that appeared to a dealer service technician looking at it in a service bay to be beyond repair and ready for replacement. It was not beyond repair. The root cause, the bulletin explained, was a head gasket torque sequence error that had been introduced in the 1967 service manual and not corrected until this 1971 bulletin. The correct procedure applied to an engine that had been damaged by the incorrect procedure restored full function in approximately 90% of cases.
Parts cost approximately $40. Labor approximately 6 hours. Wyatt read the bulletin three times. Then he pulled down the John Deere binder from 1972 and 1973 and 1974 and 1975.
In the 1973 binder, he found a second bulletin. The 1971 bulletin had been superseded. The new bulletin from March of 1973 described the same symptoms, but recommended a different remedy. Block replacement.
Approximate parts cost $2,400. Approximate labor, 40 hours. The 1971 bulletin had been withdrawn. Wyatt sat very still at the workbench.
He understood what he was looking at. He understood it the way a man understands a thing when 20 years of reading have prepared him to understand it in one moment. John Deere had discovered between 1971 and 1973 that correcting the torque procedure in the field was cheaper for farmers and less profitable for dealers. The superseded bulletin had been replaced with a recommendation that produced $2,400 of dealer revenue per repair instead of $40.
And somewhere in Colby, Kansas, in the summer of 1982, Corn Belt Equipment Corporation was quoting cracked-block repairs on 4020 and 4320 diesels at $2,400 each. Wyatt copied the 1971 bulletin. He copied the 1973 bulletin that had replaced it. He put the copies in a manila envelope.
He put the envelope in the top drawer of the workbench. He turned off the light. He told no one. Not yet.
The Adelia Strickland job came to him three weeks later. Hank Strickland had farmed 920 acres northeast of Levant for 41 years. He had died in April of 1982 of a heart attack in his own equipment yard at 63 years old, two days after he had started prepping his combine for the coming harvest. Adelia, his wife, was 58 years old.
She had been married to Hank for 39 years. She had three grown children, two in Kansas City, and one in Denver. She had a Case 1370 combine that Hank had bought new in 1976 and had maintained himself ever since. The combine had stopped working on a Tuesday morning in the third week of May.
Wheat harvest was 8 days away. Adelia had called Corn Belt in Colby because it was the closest service center. A Corn Belt technician had come out on Wednesday. He had spent 3 hours with the combine and had written her a quote. $2,800 to replace the engine.
5 days assuming parts availability. She had not signed the quote. She had, on the recommendation of her neighbor Orel Tipton, the same Orel Tipton who had watched Wyatt at the Seibert preview in 1977, called Wyatt Carver. Wyatt arrived at the Strickland place at 7:00 in the morning on a Thursday.
He met Adelia on the porch of the farmhouse. She was a small, steady woman in a faded blue work dress. She shook his hand the way farm wives shake hands. Firm, brief, already turning toward what needed doing next.