In Tribune, the first rumor arrived before the first engine was dismantled. Someone at the feed store claimed Calvin had canceled the order because the cooperative could no longer secure credit. Someone else said he was protecting a friend in the independent repair business. A third person believed he was preparing to retire and wanted to leave the debt for his successor to worry about. None of the stories survived contact with the financial statements, but very few of the people repeating them had requested a copy. Calvin heard them through Frank, Margaret, and occasionally people who seemed delighted to tell him what other people were saying.
One Saturday at the grain elevator, a farmer named Wesley Pritchard told Calvin that the cooperative was turning itself into a museum. Calvin looked at the older man's dust-covered pickup and asked how long he had owned it. "Seventeen years," Wesley answered.
"Runs better than half the new ones." Calvin smiled slightly. "Then you understand the principle," he said, although he knew one reliable pickup was not proof that forty rebuilt farm machines would perform as required. Wesley grumbled, but later that same morning he asked Frank when the cooperative expected to finish the first overhaul.
Calvin kept the roadmap in his desk drawer and the public evidence in a separate file available for inspection. He felt the distinction every day. There were things he believed would happen, things he could already demonstrate, and things he had to wait for the world to reveal. His job was not to collapse those categories into the simplest possible story. His job was to keep forty machines moving through the coming season while the future he had modeled remained only a possibility.
The refurbishment began with a mistake that nearly vindicated everyone who opposed it. Frank Odell's crew opened a tractor transmission expecting to replace worn bearings and discovered damage to a shaft that had not appeared in the outside inspection. The replacement would take longer than the original estimate, and the machine was scheduled to pull a planter in three weeks. Frank called Calvin into the service bay and showed him the damaged metal under a bright inspection lamp. "This is what I was talking about," he said. "The machines are older on the inside than they look from the road."
Calvin examined the shaft, then the work order. He did not offer an excuse or ask Frank to find a cheap shortcut. "How long for the correct part?" he asked. Frank had already called two suppliers and found one that could deliver in nine days, assuming the shipment left on schedule. Calvin instructed him to place the order, move the machine to the back of the work rotation, and assign a substitute tractor to the planter if necessary. It was an expensive answer, but an honest one, and honest answers had been the whole point of refusing a purchase he considered too risky.