And for about 90 seconds, Curtis Toliver thought he had it. Then he broke the mold open and found a crack running clean through the casting like a scar. He tapped it against the bench. It came apart in his hands. In the doorway, his sister Evette wrote in the book she'd started keeping without being asked.
"Heat one. $4.10. Nothing." Heat two went worse. The sand was damp, and when the iron hit it, the moisture flashed to steam and blew the top of the mold apart with a bang they heard in the house.
Nobody was hurt. Curtis stood there with sand in his hair and his heart going like a hammer, swept it up, and said nothing about it at supper. Heat three, the iron froze solid halfway down the channel and left him a metal plug shaped like a mistake.
Three heats, $11 of coke. Nothing on that bench but broken iron and a boy who was starting to understand exactly how much he didn't know. He didn't quit. He did sit down on the dirt floor for a while.
Then he wrote three pages, and almost all of it was questions. The next Saturday he was pushing a broom across Elmer Broughton's shop floor with a piece of that broken clevis in his coat pocket because he'd gotten in the habit of carrying it around and turning it over. It fell out when he hung the coat up.
Elmer picked it up before Curtis could get to it. Then the old man did something strange. He held it close to his face, turned it toward the window, and smelled it. "You poured this cold."
Curtis stopped sweeping. "How could you possibly know that?" Here is what nobody under 40 in Hardin County knew about Elmer Broughton.
Before the machine shop, from 1946 to 1958, he had worked as a molder in a gray iron foundry in Waterloo. Twelve years on a pouring floor. He quit when a doctor looked at his lungs, counted the silica dust in them, and told him he could stop now or find out. So he stopped. He opened a machine shop, and in 28 years, he had never once mentioned the first career to the second. He set the broken piece on the bench, and lowered himself onto a stool, taking his time about it.
"Your books gave you a temperature, I expect." "2,600 degrees." "That's right, and useless." Elmer nodded at the clevis. "Books give you the temperature. They don't give you the hurry."
For a second, he didn't look like an old man on a stool. He looked like somebody standing on a pouring floor in 1952. "Iron's got a temper, son. You pour like you're scared of it, it'll punish you every time.
You had about nine seconds in a mold that size. I'd guess you took 20." Curtis had taken 22. He'd timed it. The old man told him three things that weren't in any book he'd been able to find. How a mold has to breathe, how you build a road for the iron instead of a hole to dump it down, and how the whole business is a foot race against the metal going cold.
Curtis wrote it all down, standing up. Then he asked the question that had been sitting in his chest for 20 minutes. "You've known since March. Why didn't you say anything?" Elmer looked out the window at his scrap pile, which was noticeably smaller than it had been.
"Figured you'd quit by the second week." He turned the broken clevis face down on the bench. "Most do." Heat six, the clevis came out whole. Curtis carried it into the kitchen that night and set it on the table beside his father's plate without a word, because saying anything would have turned it into a speech.
Warren picked it up, turned it over, hefted it, which is what a farmer does with a piece of iron when he wants to know whether it's serious. Then he set it back down next to his plate and ate the entire meal with it sitting there. It wasn't approval, but he didn't move it, either. Heat nine was a belt idler.
Heat 14 was a water pump cover for the old Farmall, a real part on a real machine that ran all summer and never leaked. And that's where he hit the wall no amount of reading was going to get him over. He could melt iron in a grain shed. He couldn't machine it there, and a casting that hasn't been machined is just a rough shape.
The vocational school in Eldora had a lathe. Gil Sorenson taught shop there, and he was the kind of teacher who figures out early which students you make arrangements for. He gave Curtis a key to the side door and a rule. "Lights out by nine. Tell nobody." That lasted until a Tuesday in April when the principal came back for a folder he'd forgotten and found the lights on at 8:15 and a 17-year-old alone at the lathe.
Curtis stood in that hallway 20 minutes while two grown men talked about him behind a door. When Gil Sorenson came out, he didn't look angry, and that was the part that landed. He looked tired, like a man who just spent something he wasn't getting back. "You know what I put on the line in there for you?"
"Yes, sir." "Then don't make me a liar." He handed the key back. By the second week of April, Curtis had a system.
Find a worn-out part somebody threw away, buy it for scrap price, carve a wooden pattern off it. He had four patterns on the shelf. What he needed next was a hydraulic pump housing off a 4240. The only worn one in the county was sitting in the used parts bin at the John Deere dealership in Eldora. He drove in on a Tuesday morning. Three men at the counter, Roy Hedlund behind it, a farmer named Dwayne Kessler leaning on it, and one more whose name doesn't matter except that he was there and he laughed, too.
Roy didn't laugh first. He did something else. And it was the thing Curtis had braced for in the parking lot. "Whose place you run in parts for, son?" Curtis had been asked that in that exact tone by men who meant nothing by it, and by men who meant everything by it. And he'd long ago stopped being able to tell them apart.