"One part of it died," Raymond said. "The rest is still waiting."
He explained that the job was not to mourn the broken piece. The job was to figure out how much the surviving pieces were still worth.
Cedric started coming back on Saturday afternoons. Raymond did not run a class and did not give lectures. He simply worked while Cedric watched, and when Cedric asked questions, Raymond answered them without condescension.
Over those months, Cedric learned how to read voltage output, how to clean a carburetor without damaging the needle valve, how to test a stator with nothing but a multimeter, and how to be patient. More than any specific skill, Raymond gave him a way of seeing.
"Before you decide something is finished," Raymond told him, "count the steps it would take to make it run again. If the number is manageable and the remaining parts are sound, you don't have a dead machine. You have an incomplete repair."
The distinction sounded small. It changed everything about how Cedric moved through a salvage yard.
On the drive home from those Saturday sessions, Cedric sometimes wondered whether he was actually building toward something or whether he had simply found the most interesting way to avoid figuring out his life. He did not have an answer. He kept going back.
By September of 1978, Cedric had been studying under Raymond for several months. One Tuesday morning, Howard needed to make a run to South Ridge Farm Salvage to check on a parts pickup, and Cedric rode along.
The salvage yard sat at the edge of the county, a wide gravel lot where equipment from failed farms was sorted and priced before being sold off or crushed. Most of what lay in the back rows was genuinely finished. Frames were warped beyond alignment. Blocks were cracked through. Wiring had corroded to powder.
But near the far fence, four generators had been grouped together and tagged for scrap weight. They had been sitting outside for years. One was missing its fuel tank. One had a seized engine. One had a failed voltage regulator. The fourth was missing its wheel assembly entirely.
The yard owner had already made up his mind about them.
Cedric walked the row slowly and said nothing for a while. He crouched beside the one with the seized engine and looked at the frame, the head, and the places where components connected. He was running a count in his head, not of what was wrong, but of what was still intact.
The rotor on the third unit looked undamaged. The carburetor on the second might be recoverable. There was copper wire. There were fasteners. There were capacitors that had not been exposed directly to the weather.
Cedric stood up and asked the yard owner what he wanted for all four.
That was when Blaine Garrison walked over.
Blaine ran Garrison Engine and Tractor, the largest repair shop in that part of the county, and he had been working with machinery his whole adult life. He was there with two of his mechanics, picking through parts bins. When he heard Cedric's question, he turned toward the four generators, then toward Cedric, and something about the combination struck him as funny.
He said he could save the boy time and money by selling him a shovel to bury them with.
One of the mechanics laughed. The other said that if Cedric wanted to make a living with machines, he first had to learn which ones were not worth touching.
Cedric did not answer either of them.
He counted out $31.60 and handed it to the yard owner.
Howard helped load the generators onto the truck bed without saying much. When they were finished and Cedric climbed into the passenger seat, Blaine stopped beside the driver's window.