He climbed up onto the seat and turned the steering wheel through its full travel, listening for the catches and the clicks. He climbed back down. He got down on his hands and knees in the gravel, and the gravel was hot already even at that hour, and he looked up underneath the front axle with his flashlight. He measured the lateral deflection at the left front wheel hub, 4 1/2 inches.
He measured at the right front hub, 4 1/2 inches, both within 1/16 of an inch. He pulled out the compression gauge from his belt and pulled the spark plugs one by one and rolled the engine through with a hand crank and read the numbers off the dial. 95, 92, 94, and 93 pounds.
Honest compression for a 30-year-old tractor. The top end was sound. He spent 26 minutes on lot 22.
And while he was on his hands and knees in the gravel, a shadow fell across him. He looked up. The man standing over him was about 45, heavy set, wearing a clean flannel shirt and a gold pinky ring. His name, although Wen didn't know it yet, was Drexel Behannon.
Drexel ran a salvage yard in Kearney, two counties west, and he had a reputation among the men who knew him as a buyer who specialized in young farmers, widows, and estate sales. The kind of buyer who worked the seams. He had been watching Wen since the boy stepped out of the pickup. "Son," Drexel said, in a voice that was meant to sound friendly.
"I've been doing this a long time. Let me save you some trouble. That tractor's got a bent axle.
Probably hit a stump 20 years ago. It ain't worth $50 even for parts. You go on over to lot 31. That John Deere over there is more your speed."
Wen stood up. He brushed the gravel off his knees. He looked at Drexel. And even at 15, Wen Holloway had a way of looking at a grown man that did not flinch.
"Thank you, sir," Wen said, polite the way his grandmother had taught him to be polite. "I appreciate the advice." He picked up his steno pad and walked away.
And as he walked, he heard Drexel say in a low voice to the man standing next to him, "That kid don't know what he's doing. Watch this. I'm going to teach him a lesson."
Wen heard it. He didn't turn around, but he heard it. And here's what he understood in the next 10 steps.
If Drexel Behannon was telling him to go look at lot 31, then Drexel Behannon also wanted lot 22. And if Drexel wanted lot 22, then Drexel also knew or suspected what Wen knew. Wen had been worried all morning that he might be alone in his theory. Drexel had just told him, without meaning to, that he was not.
He walked over to the side of the cinder block office and sat down on the open tailgate of his uncle's Chevy. He took the tobacco tin out of his pocket. He counted the money. $380. He thought about what he would have to spend on parts. $14 for the bushings, give or take. $2 to rent his neighbor Hollis Mauck arbor press.
A few dollars for gear oil, gasket material. Call it $25 in total. That left him $355 to bid with.
But he wasn't going to bid $355. He wasn't going to bid anywhere near that. Because if Drexel was going to push him, then bidding too high was exactly the trap.
He thought about his father. He thought about the conversation that was coming when he pulled into the driveway with a Massey-Harris on a borrowed flatbed. He thought about how easy it would be right now, this minute, to put the tobacco tin back in his pocket, climb into the cab of that pickup, and drive home.
No one would know. He could be home before lunch. He could put the money back into the tin and put the tin back on the shelf in his closet. And his life could go back to being the life his father wanted for him.
His hand was on the door handle of the pickup, and then he looked down at his own hand. Two summers of detasseling had put calluses across the meat of his palms. The nails had grease under them, a faint dark line he could never quite scrub out the way his grandmother's nails had always had grease under them. And looking at that hand in the bright August sun, in the gravel lot of an auction yard 18 miles from home, Wen Holloway understood something he hadn't been able to put into words before, his grandmother had not left him a tool chest and a filing cabinet and a folder of service circulars.
She had left him a trust. The trust was that he would do what she had done, that he would keep the work alive, that he would not let men like Calvin Strode and Drexel Behannon and the indifferent dealerships of Hastings have the last word. The two words on the postcard hadn't been instructions.
They had been an inheritance. He let go of the door handle. He put the tobacco tin back in his pocket. He picked up his paddle, and he walked back into the yard.
The auctioneer climbed up onto his wooden platform at the head of the yard at 9:30 sharp. His name was Reggie Voss. He was in his early 50s, lean and quick with a voice that could cut through a hundred yards of tractor noise. He tapped the microphone twice, watched it crackle, and got going.
If you have never heard a livestock or equipment auctioneer work in person, I will tell you that it is a kind of music. It is a chant. Numbers sung out so fast and steady that only the auctioneer and the ringmen and the experienced bidders can read them.
The crowd answers back with paddles and nods and small quiet signals. A touch to the rim of a cap, a shift of weight, an index finger raised an inch above a coffee cup. To the untrained eye, nothing is happening. To the trained eye, a fortune in iron is changing hands.
Lot one was a hayrake. It went for $95. Lot two, a grain drill, brought 520. Lot three, a Farmall H, 380.
Lot four, a disk harrow, 210. The rhythm built up. The morning got hot.
Men raised paddles. Men shook their heads. The gavel came down. The ringmen chalked the price on the side of each lot as it sold.
Wen stood near the back of the crowd. Paddle at his side, steno pad in his back pocket. He didn't bid on lot five or lot nine or lot 14. He didn't even raise his paddle when a clean little John Deere B went through at $220 and a couple of the men around him noticed that and thought it was strange because that B was a steal at $220.
But Wen wasn't there for a John Deere B. Cyrus Penrose watching from the back noticed it, too. The boy had discipline. That surprised him.
At 10:15 in the morning, Reggie Voss looked down at his clipboard, cleared his throat, and called lot 22. The two ringmen pushed the Massey-Harris 44 out into the open by hand in neutral because nobody wanted to start it and drive it. The crooked front end was visible to every eye in the yard. Reggie read the description in a flat, plain voice.
1951 Massey-Harris 44, front end compromised. Sold as is, no warranty. And he started the bidding. "Who'll give me $175? $175.
Who'll start me at 175?" Silence. Not a paddle moved.