His father was standing on the back porch with a cup of coffee in his hand. He had been standing there since Wen had started the engine. Wen had not seen him come out. Wen pulled the Massey to a stop in front of the porch and shut it down.
The engine ticked once, twice, three times, and was quiet. Garrett Holloway came down off the porch. He walked once around the tractor, slow. He ran one hand along the hood.
He bent down at the front end, looked underneath, stood back up. He did not speak. He walked over to where his son was sitting on the seat of the Massey.
He set his coffee cup down on the running board. "Wen?" he said. "Yes, sir." "Your grandmother would be proud."
Wen Holloway, 15 years old, sitting on a tractor he had bought with his own money and rebuilt with his own hands, started to cry. Not loud, just quietly. The first time he had cried since the morning of his grandmother's funeral, 18 months before.
His father stood there beside him with one hand on his son's knee and did not say another word. They sat that way for a while, Wen on the seat of the Massey, Garrett standing next to him with one hand on his knee. The engine ticking down slowly in the September warmth.
After a few minutes, Eula Holloway came out onto the back porch. She did not interrupt them. She stood at the rail and watched her husband and her son. She had a dish towel in her hand and she was twisting it without realizing she was twisting it.
After a long moment, Garrett looked up at her. He did not say anything to her either, but something passed between them, the way it passes between two people who have been married for 16 years, and Eula went back into the kitchen and came out a few minutes later with three glasses of cold sweet tea on a tray. She brought them down off the porch.
She handed one to Garrett. She handed one to Wen. She kept one for herself.
She sat down on the running board of the tractor. "Wen?" she said. "Tell me what you're going to do with it." "Sell it, Mama, to somebody who needs a tractor."
"How much do you think you'll get?" "$500. Maybe a little more if I find the right buyer." Eula nodded.
She sipped her tea. She looked over at her husband. "Garrett," she said, "I think the boy ought to put some of that money into a savings account at First Federal."
"I think he ought to put all of it in," Garrett said. "After expenses." "That's right," Eula said, "after expenses."
That was how the rule got made. There was no contract. There was no signed agreement.
But from that afternoon forward, every machine Wen Holloway repaired and resold, every dollar he ever earned in that shop, went first into the account at First Federal of Franklin after expenses and stayed there until he had a use for it that his mother and father agreed was a use worth having. He never broke the rule in 15 years. He didn't have to. By the time he was 23 and ready to hang the sign, the account had grown enough to pay for a new roof on the shop and a second bay's worth of lumber and concrete and a used Lincoln welder out of an estate sale in Hebron, and he still had $2,000 left.
Hollis Mauck came over that evening to bring back the chains he had loaned them for the unloading. He saw the Massey running clean in the yard. He looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then, he turned to Wen, and he said, very quietly, "Your grandmother used to bring me sweet corn in August.
I never could figure out how she knew the exact afternoon to pick it every year. The afternoon she'd walk over with that corn was always the afternoon it was perfect." He nodded toward the Massey. "She knew things, son. She just knew things."
When dusk came, Wen finished his tea and put the Massey back in the shop. He turned out the lights. He closed the door. He walked across the yard to the house where his mother had his supper waiting.
And his father was already sitting at the head of the table with the newspaper folded next to his plate. Wen sat down. Garrett looked at him over the top of the paper. "Tomorrow," Garrett said, "you and I are going to drive over and tell Uncle Roy what you did with his pickup.
You're going to apologize, and you're going to pay him for the gas." "Yes, sir." That was the whole conversation. Wen ate his supper.
In the second week of October, a farmer named Otis Klemp drove up the gravel lane from Orleans, Nebraska. He had heard about the Massey from his cousin, who had heard about it from a neighbor. He paid Wen $525 for the tractor, cash.
Wen counted it out twice on the workbench the way his grandmother had taught him to count cash at a livestock sale. Total cost, $160 at the auction, $13.20 in parts, $2 to Hollis for the press, diesel and oil, $4. $179.20 all in. Sale price, $525. Net profit, $345.80 on one tractor at 15 years old.
The story got around the way stories get around in rural counties, slow and then everywhere at once. It got told over coffee at the co-op in Alma. It got told from the pews of the Methodist Church in Republican City. It got told at the feed store in Franklin and at the diner in Holdrege and across the fence between farms on long August evenings when two men were fixing a post and had time to talk.
"Did you hear about Mabel Holloway's boy? Bought that crooked Massey at Harlan for $160. Had it running in a week. Sold it for five and a quarter."
By Christmas of 1981, men Wen Holloway had never met before were driving up that gravel lane with problems on trailers behind their trucks. Balers that wouldn't tie. Combines with bad clutches. A 1946 Oliver 70 that hadn't run since the Kennedy administration.
They would pull up in the yard and knock on the shop door. And Wen, 15, then 16, then 17, would come out wiping his hands on a rag and they would tell him what was wrong. Most of the time he would nod and say, "Leave it a week."
He always charged fair. He never over promised. And he kept a shop log in the same numbered format his grandmother had used of every machine he ever touched. By the time he graduated from Franklin High School in May of 1984, that log had 11 entries.
In February of 1982, just five months after Wen sold the Massey, a familiar truck pulled into the yard. Drexel Behannon stepped out. He had a 1946 Oliver 70 on a trailer and an engine that wouldn't start. He had taken it to three other mechanics.
None of them could fix it. He walked up to the shop door. Wen, who was 16 now, came out wiping his hands. They looked at each other for a long moment.
Drexel did not apologize. That was not his way. But he did pull a $50 bill out of his shirt pocket and lay it on the fender of his truck.
"That's a deposit," Drexel said. "If you can fix it, I'll pay another $200. Standard rate, no funny business."