Walter read it and let out a breath that seemed to have been waiting somewhere inside him for years. Ray smiled and reached for Earl's hand. "Well," Walter said, "looks like the old fool with the barrels finally got something done." Earl laughed harder than he expected.
They made coffee and stayed at the table longer than the work schedule required. Earl told them what Larkin had said, and Walter asked whether the manager had apologized for making them haul rotten wood around his yard in the first place. Earl shook his head. "He apologized for thinking I was a fool. He hasn't apologized to you two for inheriting a bad situation yet. You can take that up with him."
Ray held up his cup. "To eleven hundred and forty barrels." Walter corrected him. "To three men who finally learned what to do with them." Earl looked around the kitchen, remembering when he had been the only person sitting there after Ruth died. "To the people who helped," he said.
Margaret arrived that weekend with David and Ben. Earl had not told her what was coming, wanting to put the official receipt in her hands rather than offer another hopeful prediction over the telephone. She stood at the kitchen table reading the payoff statement while her father pretended to be busy with the coffee. Then she crossed the room and hugged him so tightly that his ribs protested.
"You did it, Dad," she said. Earl held her carefully. "We kept it," he answered. Margaret shook her head against his shoulder. "You kept it. You and those people who believed you when everybody else thought you'd lost your mind."
Earl wanted to say that he had not done anything extraordinary. But he remembered the ruined table, the first sale, the years of interest payments, and the sight of two men who had lost their farms finding work in his shed. Pretending the achievement was small would have been another kind of dishonesty. So he simply stood there, holding his daughter, and let himself feel proud.
Ben asked whether they could celebrate. Earl said there was plenty of food in the kitchen and somebody could drive into town for a pie if they liked. Margaret laughed. "We are doing more than buying a pie," she told him. "For once in your life, Dad, we're going to let something good happen without treating it as a reason to get back to work immediately."
They invited Glen Mercer, Leonard Price, Walter, Ray, and several neighbors to a supper at the farmhouse. Nobody arrived wearing expensive clothes, and the table was not large enough for everyone to sit at once. Ben made place cards from pieces of cardboard and insisted that the people who had hauled the first barrels deserved the best chairs. Glen told the story of the broken trailer wheel in the sleet, while Leonard described the first six bundles of whiskey oak he had purchased with no certainty that his customers would like the finished furniture.