The man argued about a minute, then stopped arguing and got cold about it, and then he drove out of the yard. That was the first money anybody ever offered Curtis Toliver, and he watched $100 of it leave in a pickup truck. Evette put it in the book anyway, in the margin, with a dash where the number should have been. Now, go back to the 21st of April, seven weeks before the fire, in the only stretch of the year that decides anything.
Warren Toliver's 4240 threw its hydraulic pump housing in the field. Cracked clean through at 4:00 in the afternoon, in the middle of groundwork, which is the worst place on the whole calendar to lose hydraulics on a row-crop tractor. Warren came in and called the dealership at 10:04. They didn't have one.
They could order one. Four to seven business days. In late April in Iowa, four to seven business days is not a parts delay, it's a planting delay. And a planting delay is measured in bushels, and bushels were exactly what the man at the bank in Iowa Falls was going to be looking at in June.
Warren hung up the phone and stood in his kitchen with his hands still on it. Then he walked out to the granary.
Curtis already had the pattern on the bench. He'd carved it three weeks earlier off a worn housing he'd bought from a neighbor for $1.50 on the chance this exact thing would happen, which was not something he'd said out loud to anybody in that house. "How long?"
"Four hours. Charge to pour to fit." He was already reaching for the coke bucket. "If nothing goes wrong." His father looked at the furnace a long moment.
"Something always goes wrong." "Yes, sir. Four hours anyway." Warren stood there another second or two.
"Then do it." He charged the furnace at 5:00 with coke and broken engine block out of Elmer Broughton's scrap pile. Evette took the doorway with the cost book and a stopwatch because she'd decided this was a data point. Bernie got the sand buckets and a very serious expression.
Their mother was in the house, which mattered because that was rule number two, and nobody was breaking rule number two tonight. Curtis packed two molds. That wasn't the plan he'd have made in March. In March, he'd have packed one and believed in it.
Two meant twice the sand, twice the work, and a real chance of wasting half a heat. And he packed two anyway because three failures in one week had taught him something no book had thought to mention. The iron does not care how badly you need it to work.
By quarter past 6:00, the furnace was running hard, and the color coming off the tap hole was that particular orange-white that isn't quite yellow and isn't quite white. He tapped it. The iron came out in a stream that threw sparks across the floor and lit that granary like a second sunset, and Evette hit the stopwatch, and Curtis poured the first mold in one continuous motion. Fast, faster than felt safe, the way a dying man had told him to. Then the second. Forty minutes to cool.
Then he cracked the first mold open with a hammer and a held breath. There was a gas hole in the flange, small, about the size of a pea, sitting exactly where the mounting bolt had to clamp down, which is to say the one place on that entire part where it could not possibly be. Evette stopped writing. Curtis looked at it for maybe four seconds. Then he set it aside, picked the hammer back up, and went to the second mold.
Behind him, without a word, his father took off his coat, hung it on a nail, and picked up a shovel to start clearing sand. That was the moment. Not the tractor, not later, that. The second casting came out clean. At twenty to nine, Curtis Toliver was standing at a lathe in a dark high school with the side door unlocked behind him, and Gil Sorenson was sitting in the office with his feet on the desk reading, asking absolutely nothing.
He fitted the housing at a quarter to ten with his father holding the flashlight. Bolt pattern lined up. Bore was in tolerance. Everything seated the way it was supposed to seat.
Warren started the tractor and brought the hydraulics up to pressure, and a thin line of oil came out from under the flange and ran down the side of the casting. Nobody said anything. Evette didn't write. Bernie didn't breathe.
Curtis stood in the beam of that flashlight and watched his own part leak in front of his father, and it went on for about 90 seconds. And those 90 seconds are the reason people in that county still tell this story. Then he crouched down and put his thumb on the joint. It wasn't the casting.
He knew that because he'd bored it himself two hours earlier and measured it twice. It was the mating face, rough off the mold, and he hadn't dressed it flat. So the gasket had rolled when he torqued it down.
"Shut it off. Give me 20 minutes." It took 22. He pulled it, scraped the face flat with a file and a straightedge, cut a new gasket out of sheet stock in the machine shed, and put the whole thing back together while his father held the light and said nothing at all. Warren brought the pressure up a second time. It held.
No leak, no noise, nothing to suggest the piece of iron doing that job had been a cracked engine block 11 hours earlier. Warren Toliver stood there with the flashlight hanging at his side and the engine running and the hydraulics cycling up and down. "What did it cost?"