He knew the barrels had value as containers once, but he was not interested in restoring them to hold whiskey. Their usefulness as liquid vessels had ended, at least for the business that had abandoned them. Earl wondered whether the wood itself had acquired something that a newly cut board from the lumberyard did not have. He could not explain it yet, which bothered him enough to return for a second inspection.
Larkin was waiting on that second visit. The manager was a broad, comfortably fed man in his early fifties, with polished shoes and the confidence of someone who had spent years behind a desk where other people came to ask permission. He recognized Earl from the bank's mortgage files and greeted him with a smile that did not reach his eyes. "You haven't come to buy the warehouse, have you, Whitaker?"
"Just the barrels," Earl said. "How many can you account for?" Larkin consulted the list. "One thousand one hundred and forty. Probably fewer if you count the ones that ought to be firewood." Earl walked to the nearest stack, bent, and scraped the oak with his knife.
That was when Larkin began to laugh. Earl could have answered the insult by explaining every possibility running through his mind, but there were too many unanswered questions. He did not yet know how the wood would dry, whether it could be worked into furniture, or whether anyone would want it. There was only one thing he could determine with certainty that day: if he bought the barrels at a low enough price, he could afford to learn.
He brought $750 in cash from savings he had intended to use for a tractor repair. The expense made him uneasy, especially with winter coming, but the figure was a fraction of what a truckload of new hardwood could cost. Earl insisted on a clear bill of sale: the full quantity, the price, the location, transfer of ownership, and his responsibility for hauling. Larkin signed cheerfully, happier to escape the disposal bill than to understand the wording.
"Take every last one," the manager told him. "Just don't come back crying when you realize you paid me to clean up my yard." Earl folded the receipt and slipped it into the inner pocket of his brown coat. "Wouldn't dream of it," he answered.
On the drive home, excitement came in small waves, followed by immediate anxiety. He had bought more than a thousand large wooden objects without knowing how to sell even one. The farm needed fence repairs, the tractor needed attention, and the bank already seemed to know how fragile his finances had become. By the time the pickup turned onto his gravel driveway, Earl had decided that if he was going to make a foolish gamble, he would at least make it a carefully recorded one.
He took out a fresh notebook and wrote the date across the top. Below it he entered the number 1,140, followed by the words PURCHASE COST: $750. Then he wrote TRANSPORTATION, leaving the line blank until he knew how much the next three months would cost him. He placed the notebook beside his father's old carpenter's pencil and went to bed without sleeping much.