"My father's. Warren Toliver. Six miles northeast." "Warren.
Sure." Roy nodded slowly, the way a man does when he's putting something in a drawer. "What's he need?"
"He doesn't. I want the cracked housing out of your used bin, whatever it weighs in scrap." That's when Dwayne Kessler turned around. Dwayne farmed 800 acres west of town and held court at that counter the way some men hold court at a bar.
"Now, what's a man want with a broke housing?" And Curtis Toliver, who could have lied and who thought about lying, told the truth. "I'm making a pattern off it. I'm going to pour my own." The silence ran about two seconds. Then Dwayne Kessler started laughing, and Roy Hedlund laughed with him.
And it wasn't cruel, exactly. It was worse than cruel. It was the laugh of men hearing something so far outside what they thought was possible that their brains filed it as a joke before it could be filed as a proposal. Dwayne leaned back against that counter with the ease of a man who has never once had to justify an opinion. "Son, I have been farming since before your daddy owned that ground." He let it hang there long enough for everybody to enjoy it.
"You know what you just described to me? A way to lose a hand and burn down a building on the very same afternoon." Curtis stood there and let it go past him. He had, out in the truck, the bore tolerance of that exact housing and the result of every heat he'd run since March, including the three that failed.
He could have opened his mouth and buried both of them. He didn't. He'd been raised by a woman who told him to be twice as careful, and somewhere along the way he'd worked out that a 17-year-old who wins an argument at a parts counter has still lost the afternoon.
So he asked one question. "How much? Scrap price?" Roy looked at the tag, then at the boy, then at the $2.50 already out of his pocket and sitting on the counter, and something in that room shifted about a quarter of an inch, though nobody in it could have told you what.
"Two-fifty." Curtis walked out with the housing under his arm. Dwayne said something behind him that got another laugh, and he heard it through the glass door, and he kept walking. He kept the receipt. $2.50. It is still in a drawer in Eldora.
The fire happened on the 9th of June. He was carrying 40 pounds of molten iron across a dirt floor when his grip shifted, and about a cup of it came over the lip of the ladle and hit the base of the wall. Oak plank that has been drying for 56 years does not smolder. It goes. Curtis had a sand bucket two steps away because he'd put it there in April, and he had the fire out in under a minute. What was left was a black scorch the size of a dinner plate running up one corner post.
He told nobody. For six days he told nobody, and then his 11-year-old brother Bernie, who had the job of watching that sand bucket and who'd been sworn to a silence no 11-year-old has ever kept, mentioned the fire at Sunday dinner in the middle of a sentence about something else. The table went quiet. Warren put down his fork, got up, and walked out to the granary, and Curtis followed him with his heart in his throat.
His father stood in front of that scorched post a long moment without touching it. "Six days." "Yes, sir."
"You gave me your word about this building." "I gave you my word I wouldn't burn it down." Curtis heard how that sounded the second it left his mouth, and he didn't take it back because it was true.
"That bucket's been sitting there since April. I put it there before it happened, not after." That's when Warren turned around and looked at the rest of the room. A steel splash shield bolted to the floor between the furnace and the wall, which had not been there in March. Two sand buckets, not one.
A wet burlap sack on a nail by the door, and a clear path from the furnace to that door with nothing stacked in it. None of it was in the numbers Curtis had shown him in February. All of it was the work of somebody who had spent a lot of nights thinking about this exact thing going wrong.
Warren Toliver did not say he forgave him, and he did not say the boy could keep going. He said, "Next time it happens, I hear about it that night." "Yes, sir." The next morning there was a fire extinguisher standing inside the granary door, new, bought in town. His father never mentioned it that day or any day after.
His mother said one thing about the fire that week, and she said it while she was pinning sheets to a line and not looking at him. "I'm not going to ask you to stop." She got another clothespin out of the bag. "I'm going to ask you not to make me the last one in this house to hear about it." He never gave her cause to ask twice.
Word had started to move by then, the way it moves in a county that size, slowly, finding the low ground, but eventually reaching everywhere. The first man to come asking drove into the yard on a Saturday with a cracked PTO shaft housing in the bed of his truck and $100 he was plainly ready to spend. Curtis looked at it a while. He knew he could pour it. He was almost sure he could pour it well.
"I can't take that one." The neighbor's face did something complicated. "Everybody says you're doing this now." "I am, just not that."
Curtis put his hand flat on the tailgate. "Anything that spins at PTO speed, I don't touch it. That's not my rule, but it's a good one."