"Your mother and I raised you here," he told her once. "My father grew old here. If I leave, it'll be because I choose to, not because a bank tells me to." Margaret had gone quiet on the telephone. She understood that the land meant more than its acreage, even if understanding did not make her less frightened for him.
At the end of the 1970s, Earl still grew corn and soybeans and kept a small cattle herd, but the numbers had stopped offering him much room for mistakes. Seed, feed, repairs, and fuel cost more than they had a few years earlier, while what buyers paid for the crops seemed to shift whenever he tried to plan around it. His mortgage carried a rate that could change, and the bank had made it clear there would be little patience if he missed the required payments. The remaining principal stood at $41,600, a number he could recite without looking at a statement.
Most mornings he rose before five. He checked the cattle, walked the equipment line, ate breakfast at the kitchen table, and wrote down expenses in the same ruled ledger he had used for years. Some entries were hardly worth the pencil lead, a replacement bolt, a gallon of oil, a few dollars for a neighbor's help. He recorded them anyway, because he had learned that money could disappear through small openings long before a person noticed the roof was leaking.
The whiskey barrels came into his life through a conversation at the feed store. Glen Mercer, a neighbor who hauled hay and occasional freight with an old flatbed truck, was complaining about the bank's liquidation of a failed barrel-reconditioning and liquor-distribution operation almost forty miles away. The machinery and useful equipment had attracted buyers, Glen said, but the used barrels filled the yard like a second building. The bank had tried everything short of giving them away.
Earl was buying mineral feed for the cattle when he heard it. "Whiskey barrels?" he asked. Glen nodded and reached for his change.
"Oak ones. Black inside. Most look rough enough to grow mushrooms. Why? Don't tell me you need eleven hundred flowerpots."
Earl asked when the yard would be open. Glen looked at him more carefully. "What for?" Earl lifted the feed sack onto the counter. "I'd like to see the wood."
The next morning Earl drove to the storage site, walked through the rows, and spent nearly an hour examining the barrels without offering a price. Some had loose hoops. A few had cracked heads, and others showed dark stains from standing in wet gravel. But many were sound beneath the grime, and when he tapped the staves with his knuckles they answered with a firm, almost musical note.
He remembered how his father could tell the difference between rotten and weathered boards by lifting an edge with his pocketknife. Earl tried the same test. Beneath the gray surface lay hard white oak, its color deepened by years of heat, char, and contact with spirits. The inside of several barrels held an astonishing amber-black pattern that looked almost painted.