"I want to build a foundry." Warren Toliver set down his coffee cup. At the sink, Odessa Toliver didn't turn around, but she stopped moving. And in that kitchen, those two things meant the same thing. "You want to build a what?"
"A furnace. A small one. I can build it out of scrap." Curtis pushed the notebook across the table.
"The parts we buy from that counter for three and four hundred dollars, I can pour those myself for the price of the coke it takes to melt them." His father didn't pick the notebook up. He looked at it where it lay, the way a man looks at a snake that isn't moving yet.
"You're 17." "Yes, sir." "Then let me tell you what I just heard." Warren turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, which was what he did instead of raising his voice. "I heard you want to build a fire in my granary, and I'm the man holding the insurance on it."
Curtis had prepared for that one. He started to answer. His father wasn't finished. "Second thing, you pour one bad part, one, and it lets go on somebody's PTO shaft at 540 RPM." He let that sit.
"You know exactly what happens then. And you're 17." "I'd only be doing our machines." "That's not the whole of it, either." And here Warren Toliver did something his son had almost never seen him do. He looked down at the table before he said the next part, as though it cost something to get out.
"When the Kessler boy wrecks a tractor, folks say the Kessler boy wrecked a tractor. When you burn down a building, that is not a story about a building." The kitchen went quiet. Odessa shut off the water. She still didn't turn around.
Curtis looked at the sheet of paper in front of him, and then he pushed that across, too. Two columns. On the left, every dollar the Tolivers had spent on parts in 1986, copied line by line out of his father's own receipts. On the right, what the iron in those parts was actually worth.
Warren Toliver had spent 30 years living and dying by numbers. He knew the difference between a number that was wishful and a number that was real. He looked at that page a long time. "I need to think about it."
But he didn't close the notebook. Curtis went out to the porch afterward for his coat. His mother was already there, folding a dish towel over the rail.
Odessa worked three shifts a week in the laundry at the county hospital, which meant she had spent 20 years being the only person in a room and knowing precisely what that cost. She didn't tell him she was proud of him. She didn't tell him to drop it, either. "Your father isn't wrong about the talk." She folded the towel again, smaller than it needed to be.
"So, whatever you do out there, you're going to be twice as careful as anybody ever thought to ask you to be. Every single time. Not because it's fair."
"Then why?" "Because it's the only thing I've ever seen work." She handed him the towel to carry inside, which was how she ended a conversation, and he took it. It took his father 11 days. Curtis counted them. He never asked once.
On the 11th day, Warren came out to the machine shed and stood there with his hands in his coat pockets a while before he said anything. "You can use the old granary. Three things." Curtis waited because he'd learned young not to grab at the first sentence.
"One, you don't pour anything that carries a man's weight, and you don't pour anything that spins at PTO speed. Not for us, not for anybody, not for money. I don't care how good you get." "Yes, sir." "Two, you don't light a fire in that building unless there's a grown person in this house. Not one time."
"Yes, sir." "Three, every dime goes in a book, and your sister keeps it because I've watched you count, and I've watched her count." Curtis nodded. His father looked past him at the granary, sitting out at the edge of the yard with its dirt floor and its bad roof and its pigeons.
"That's not a yes. That's a lot of rope." The building was 30 feet by 40. Oak plank walls standing since 1931.
A dirt floor packed hard as concrete. Curtis patched the roof with sheet metal off a collapsed machine shed and evicted the pigeons with hardware cloth and about a week of patience. Then, in the middle of that floor, he built a furnace out of a piece of 12-inch pipe he cut off a dead grain auger, lined with fire clay, welded to a steel base with a blower salvaged from a scrapped grain dryer feeding air into the bottom of it.
Four feet tall. Ugly as sin. A real furnace. On the 29th of March, he lit it.
It failed. He'd started with the simplest thing he could think of, a drawbar clevis, a dumb lump of iron that hooks an implement to a tractor and has almost no critical dimensions on it anywhere. The iron melted. That part worked. It came out of the tap hole in a stream that threw sparks across the dirt floor and lit the inside of that granary orange.