"Not exactly. You could rent a spreader from the dealership, but you'd pay for the whole day whether it took you three hours or nine. Most of us couldn't afford that when we started. We owned these together, paid a share, and paid toward upkeep every time we used them. Walter handled the keys because somebody had to."
Rachel looked toward the open doors. Beyond them, her empty loading dock stood in the midday sunlight, newly swept and ready for the customers she hoped would come. She could imagine farmers pulling in to return an implement, unhooking it in the yard, and going to the counter to leave the key. She could imagine Walter taking the key without a word because everyone already knew the arrangement.
"How many farmers?" she asked.
"Depends on the year; more than twenty when I was young, though not all on every machine. You bought into the ones you used. If you quit farming, somebody could buy your share, or the group could pay you out when there was money." Earl lifted a corner of the grain cleaner's tarp. "These days we're down to six or seven who still need anything, maybe fewer depending on whether Hank's still pretending he's going to plant another forty acres."
"Walter never said anything about a cooperative."
"We never called it that. Around here it was just the pool."
Earl moved a loose board aside with his boot and uncovered a wooden wheel chock. He picked it up and placed it beneath the spreader's tire automatically, the way a farmer straightens a fence wire while talking. "When my father came home after the war, he had eighty acres, two children, and a tractor that wouldn't start when it rained. He couldn't buy a grain auger on his own. Neither could the Kellers or the Martins. So they bought one together."
The first machine had been a used auger shared between four farms. The agreement was spoken over a kitchen table, with the cost divided according to acreage and the names written on a flour sack until Walter's father put the arrangement into a ledger. It worked well enough that another group bought a post driver, and then a few years later somebody suggested that Walter's store might be the easiest place to keep the equipment schedule. Farmers passed through there for seed, salt blocks, fertilizer, or a sack of bolts anyway.
"Walter gave it a pegboard because he was tired of people calling his house after supper," Earl said. "His wife gave it the rule about sunset. The morning somebody needed a machine, she wanted the key where she could find it."
Rachel imagined a woman standing behind the counter long before she herself had come into the world, writing names on a chalkboard and refusing to be talked into making exceptions because a farmer claimed his work was more urgent. It was not an especially romantic picture. It was a useful one, and Rachel liked that better.
"How did people use it when the store was closed?" she asked.
"Walter kept the back shed unlocked on Saturdays for a while, and I helped collect keys when somebody called. We put a lockbox under the porch roof so things could come home even if nobody was around. It got untidy. A few machines stayed out too long, and nobody wanted to be the one calling Hank and telling him he was late. But the habit stuck."