"What would you have me do?" he asked. She sat opposite him at the kitchen table. "Plan for somebody else to help you. Your work is valuable now. That means you can build it into something that doesn't disappear the minute you get sick."
Earl stared at her for a moment. "I don't have the money for a payroll." Margaret nodded.
"Then don't start with payroll. Start by figuring out what parts only you can do and what parts another honest person could learn. If the answer is that everything depends on you, you're not building a business. You're building a second job you can't retire from."
The observation stung because it was true. Earl had spent years making himself the answer to every problem on the farm. If a tractor failed, he repaired it. If a fence fell, he fixed it. If the books needed balancing, he sat up late until they made sense.
But a thousand barrels demanded a kind of organization different from one man's capacity to keep working. He began writing instructions for the tasks he repeated most often, noting common defects and simple ways of identifying them. The process felt silly at first. Then he realized his father had done the same thing every time he explained a repair instead of merely performing it.
The mortgage remained the shadow under the new income. Larkin's office had begun sending more frequent notices about payment dates and adjustable interest. Earl made every required payment, sometimes only after moving oak revenue into the farm account at the last possible moment. He knew how close the farm had come to missing one after an unusually weak crop sale.
Larkin called him in during the spring of 1984. The manager laid out projections showing what could happen if interest costs rose and farm income stayed low. He suggested that Earl consider selling part of the acreage before the bank had to evaluate the security behind the loan. Earl listened, then asked whether he had missed a payment.
"Not yet," Larkin said. Earl nodded. "Then I'm not selling a field because a projection looks unpleasant." The manager spread his hands.
"I'm trying to help you be realistic." Earl looked at the framed courthouse photograph. "I've been realistic since before you became a banker."
The answer was firmer than Earl intended, and he regretted its edge on the drive home. He did not regret refusing the proposed sale. There were times when the bank's advice was sound, and there were times when advice offered from the security of a desk did not account for what surrendering the family land would actually mean. He was not willing to give away acreage while another source of income was growing.
That season brought a new challenge from a buyer in Pennsylvania. The customer ordered a substantial quantity of oak for a restaurant renovation and wanted it delivered before an opening date. Earl agreed to the schedule, then discovered that several of the selected sets had not conditioned as evenly as the earlier batches. He could either ship wood he distrusted or tell the buyer the delivery would be late.