He had watched enough farm operations in Duffy County go through cycles of expansion and contraction that he understood the difference between growth that the land and the market supported and growth that the bank supported. He chose the former and ran his place that way.
By 1995, the shop had a second building, a pole structure Elias had put up himself with Ruska and a hired crew in the fall of 1991, 38 feet by 60 feet, housing two additional workstations, a heat treat oven, and a small finishing room where handles were fitted and marked, and the tools were inspected before shipping. The sign over the original shop door still said Bruns Forge in white on dark green. The sign over the new building said the same thing in the same colors because there was no reason to change it.
Saurin Ruska became a partner in 1996. The arrangement was straightforward. Ruska had been running the production floor for 3 years and had developed two tool lines of his own design that were in the catalog under his name alongside Elias's. Elias offered him a share of the business at a price that reflected what the business was worth rather than what it might be worth because Elias did not trade in speculation.
Ruska accepted. They shook hands and then they went back to work which was the only ceremony available in that shop.
Roland Kesler retired from Keterman's Implement in 1994. He was in his late 60s by then and his son had taken over the parts counter. Elias heard about the retirement from someone at the co-op and drove out to Keterman's one afternoon and bought Kesler a cup of coffee at the cafe down the block. They talked for an hour about the implement business and the changes in the county and the price of steel.
At no point did either of them mention the cracked springs or the 1973 transaction. It did not need to be mentioned. Kesler had been sending work to the shop for 20 years. The cracked springs had been the beginning of a business relationship that had been mutually useful for two decades, and that was the whole of the accounting between them.
Kesler's behavior had changed in 1975 and had stayed changed, and that was the apology and the acknowledgement and the reconciliation all in one, delivered without a word about any of it. In 2001, Wendell Joerger, the metalworking instructor from Hastings, who had written to Elias in 1975, retired from teaching after 31 years. He wrote Elias a letter when he retired, a longer letter than the ones they had exchanged in 1975 and 1976. He said that the four pages Elias had mailed him in 1975 had become the foundation of a heat treatment unit that he had taught to more than 400 students over 26 years and that at least a dozen of those students had gone on to work in blacksmithing, bladesmithing or tool making in some professional capacity.
He did not know how many of those 12 had taught the method to others. He said he thought Elias should know that. Elias read the letter twice. He wrote back a short reply, three paragraphs, thanking Joerger for teaching and for writing.
He said the method was Hyram's, not his, and that Hyram had learned it from a man he had apprenticed under in the 1920s, whose name Elias did not know. He said he thought that was worth noting. He mailed the letter and went back to the shop. The cracked spring on the shelf above the coal forge was still there in 2001.
It was dusty. It had not been touched in years, except to move it when the shelf needed cleaning. Ruska's daughter, who was 11 years old that summer and who spent Saturday mornings in the shop the way Elias had spent Saturday mornings in Hyram's shop, asked about it one afternoon. Ruska told her the story, the same story Elias had told him in 1984, which was the same story that had begun in April of 1973 with a 16-year-old boy and 11 cracked springs and no announcement of what he intended to do with them.
The girl listened to the whole story. Then she picked up the spring and looked at the crack and set it back on the shelf. She said, "So it was the worst one." Ruska said, "Yes."
She said, "Why did he keep that one instead of a good one?" Ruska thought about it. He said, "Because the good ones all became something else. This one is what the rest of them started from."
She nodded and went back to what she had been doing, which was watching Ruska fit a handle to a finishing trowel, her eyes on his hands, learning the angle. The spring Elias paid nothing for in April of 1973 is still on that shelf. The forge below it has been rebuilt twice and is on its third firepot, but it runs on the same coal and coke principle that Hyram used because Elias has never found a reason to change what works. The shop has been in continuous operation for more than 50 years.
The tools it makes carry a stamp, a letter B inside a rectangle that appears in the catalogs of three specialty suppliers and in the equipment lists of two university extension programs and in the hands of market gardeners in states that Elias has never visited. The first knife, the one sold to Jarvis Toliffson in the summer of 1973 for $22, was returned to the shop in 2009 by Toliffson's son, who found it in the back of a drawer when he was settling the estate. It was still sharp. Elias put it on the shelf next to the spring.
$16.35 was what it cost to start. That is what the notebook says in the handwriting of a 16-year-old boy who had decided not to announce what he was going to do. The distance between that figure and what the shop became is the whole of the story. And the story is not about the money.
It is about what Hyram said in the shop in December 1973, sitting at a workbench with a broken spring section and a cup of coffee. "The steel remembers every load it ever carried. You have to give it a new memory." Elias spent 50 years proving that this was true, not just of steel.
And the proof is in the tools. And the tools are in the ground right now in somebody's garden doing what they were made to do.