Toliffson told people because Toliffson was a talker. And the story that traveled this time was different from the spring story. This story had a number in it. This story said the Bruns kid was selling knives he made himself out of scrap springs and Jarvis Toliffson was using them in his butcher shop and Jarvis said they held an edge better than anything he had bought from a catalog.
This story traveled from Toliffson's place to the locker plant in Duffy to the cafe on Main Street in Lumis and then to the co-op which was the same route the spring story had traveled. But the second story traveled faster and it arrived changed. By the time it reached the co-op, it said the knives were exceptional. Nobody said that about the first story.
Elias was not at the co-op to hear any of this. He was at the forge. Here is what the arithmetic looked like by the end of 1973.
He had forged and finished 19 knives. He had sold 16 of them at prices ranging from $22 to $38 depending on complexity of grind and handle material. Total revenue: $512. Total material cost for the year, including coal, abrasives, handle stock, and a new set of files: $41.60.
He had also spent $11 on a used copy of a bladesmithing manual that had been published in England in 1961 and that he had ordered through the library in Ord, which had taken three months to arrive. Net for the year approximately $459. He was 16 years old and he had made more money from the forge in 7 months than he had made in the previous two summers of fieldwork combined. He showed the figures to Hyram, who read them twice and handed the notebook back.
"Good arithmetic," Hyram said. Then he went back to what he had been doing.
The winter of 1973 into 1974 was when Elias began to understand what he was actually doing. He had been thinking of the knives as a product, which they were. But Hyram said something in December that reoriented him. They were working on a set of farrier's tools, a rasp-and-nippers job for a man two counties over.
And Hyram paused in the middle of drawing out a handle and said without looking up that a knife is just the first thing. Elias asked what he meant. Hyram said, "You learn to move steel. You can move any steel. The knife is how you learn the steel. After that, you can make anything the steel is suited for."
He went back to the rasp. Elias thought about that for a few days and then he understood it and it changed the way he thought about the work. The cracked leaf springs were not raw material for knives. They were a school.
He was paying tuition in coal and time and ruined blanks. And the school was teaching him how high-carbon spring steel behaved under every condition he could put it through. The knives were the homework. The real education was the steel.
He kept that to himself. There was no one in Duffy County in 1974 who would have known what to do with that sentence from a 17-year-old boy.
The spring of 1974 brought a change that Elias had not anticipated. Roland Kesler, the parts manager at Keterman's, heard the knife story from three different directions and came out to the shop on a Saturday in March to see for himself. He was not hostile about it. He was curious in the way that men who work with parts are curious about things that work, which is to say he picked up a finished knife and looked at the grind and flexed the blade slightly and ran his thumb along the flat to feel the geometry.
He asked how long it took to make one. Elias told him. Kesler asked what steel. Elias told him.
Kesler set the knife down and said, "I've got a bin of cracked springs I've been meaning to call the salvage yard about. You want them?" Elias said yes. Kesler said, "I'll call you when the bin's full."
He left without buying a knife, which was fine. The bin, when it was full 3 months later, contained 37 springs of various sizes and vintages, and it cost Elias nothing. That was an early skeptic becoming an ally, though neither of them would have used that language. Kesler's expertise was real, which is why his initial puzzlement had been genuine rather than dismissive.
He knew what cracked springs were worth as scrap. He had not known until the story traveled back to him what they were worth as school.
The summer of 1974 was when Elias began to move beyond knives. He had been studying the farrier's tools that Hyram made and he had started thinking about agricultural tools specifically about the small hand tools that were used in market gardening and that were in 1974 almost entirely imported or made from mild steel that dulled quickly and bent under load. He had seen his mother's hoe, a stamped mild steel thing she had bought at the hardware store, and he had watched her sharpen it twice in a single afternoon. He asked her if he could borrow it for a week.
He took it to the shop and made a pattern from it and then made a new one from spring steel with a thicker eye socket and a thinner blade. He ground the blade to a hollow bevel that would hold an edge through a full morning's work. He brought it back. She used it for a week and then came to the shop and stood in the doorway and said, "What did you do to this hoe?"