"Eleven dollars and 40 cents. The iron was free." His father didn't answer right away. He looked at the tractor, then past it at the granary where the light was still burning and the coke smoke was drifting out across the yard toward the house. "Dealer wanted 390."
"Yes, sir." Then Warren Toliver reached over and put his hand on his son's shoulder, which was not a thing he did often and not a thing he did lightly. "You were right." Quiet and direct, which was how that man said everything. It was enough.
They planted on schedule. In the second week of June, Warren Toliver drove to Iowa Falls and sat across a desk from a loan officer who ran his eyes down a column of figures and renewed the note for another year. It took 11 minutes. Nobody in that room mentioned a grain shed. Nobody in that room knew that the reason the crop went in on time was a 17-year-old, a length of pipe, and $11.40.
By the end of that season, three neighbors had brought broken castings to the granary and left with new ones. By the spring of 1988, there were nine. By that fall, there were 16 and a waiting list written in chalk on the wall. Curtis never charged more than 30% of the dealer price, and the reason wasn't generosity. Price it near the dealer and he was just a slower dealer with no warranty. Price it near nothing, and every farmer in the county would assume it was worth what he charged.
Thirty percent was the number where a man saved real money and still believed he'd bought something. Evette had taken over the books completely, and she'd started a second column of her own without being asked. What it would have cost at the counter against what it cost here. At the end of 1988, she added that column up and set the total in front of her father at the kitchen table.
$14,700. $14,700 that stayed in Hardin County instead of leaving it. Warren Toliver read that number. Then he sat down. And that October, the mail brought an envelope from the insurance company that carried the farm.
Two days later, a man from the county fire marshal's office called the house and asked some very specific questions about a structure on the property. And inside four minutes, it was clear that somebody had made a report. And that whoever came out to look at that granary had seen exactly one thing. A black scorch mark the size of a dinner plate on a corner post. Evette read the letter twice at the kitchen table. Then she asked the question that turned out to be the right one.
Which was not, "Are we in trouble?" but, "What would make this stop being a problem?" Curtis took $60 out of the coffee can, drove to Eldora, and spent 20 minutes with an attorney. He came home with one sentence written on the back of an envelope.
"You cannot stop a man from suing you. You can make sure the paperwork ruins his day when he tries." As it happened, he'd been building that paperwork for a year without knowing what it was for. Every heat since the previous summer, he'd cut a test bar off the runner and mailed it to a metallurgical lab in Cedar Rapids. First because he wanted to know if he was any good, then because he'd started wanting it in writing.
Four dollars a sample. He had a binder of results two inches thick. The kid they laughed at had more documentation on a pump housing than the dealership did. Roy Hedlund called the house that November.
He didn't apologize. Roy Hedlund was not a man who dealt in apologies. He was a man who dealt in inventory.
And what he had was a pallet of returned cores in the back of the shop. Factory parts too damaged to rebuild, worth a few dollars each in credit, scheduled to ship back to the manufacturer. Forty-three of them. Forty-three different components.
Every one carrying factory dimensions that a young man with a wooden pattern and a set of calipers could copy exactly. He offered them for nothing and wrote them off as scrap. And both men understood this was a transaction and not a favor. Which is precisely why it worked.
He said one other thing at the end of that call, in the flat voice of a man reporting the weather. His grandfather had been a blacksmith, made parts for a while, until the factories got big enough that it stopped making sense. Then a pause, and then he wasn't sure it ever had stopped making sense. He thought people just stopped paying attention. He hung up before Curtis could answer.
Dwayne Kessler took two more years. He came in the fall of 1990. Thursday afternoon, alone, no phone call ahead. By then, Curtis had graduated, filed a business name, and moved the whole operation into a rented implement shop on the south edge of Eldora with a concrete floor and three-phase power.
Dwayne stood in that doorway with a cracked transmission housing off an Allis-Chalmers 7080 under his arm. A big casting, a complicated one. The kind that would have run him better than $500 at a counter.
Curtis looked up from the furnace and waited. He'd waited three and a half years for this, and he wasn't going to hurry it. "I need a casting poured." "I remember what you told me I'd lose." Dwayne Kessler looked down at the housing in his own hands, the way a big man does when there is nowhere else in the room to look.
"I was wrong about you." Four words, no decoration on them. Curtis took the housing out of his hands, set it on the bench, and started running a tape over it.
"Come back Thursday." It cost Dwayne Kessler $62. The dealer price was $540. He became a regular customer, and he never held court about the Toliver kid at that parts counter again, which mattered less than what he did instead, because Dwayne Kessler talked to everybody. And when a farmer asked him about the foundry on the south edge of town, he said, "Go see him." With nothing attached to it.