She closed the notebook and pushed it back toward him. "Then I need you to understand why I'm worried." He reached across the table and placed his hand over hers. "I do understand. I don't ask you to pretend it's a sure thing."
By the end of winter the final barrels were in place. With fuel, ropes, tie-downs, the wheel repair, and smaller costs he paid himself, Earl recorded another $310 against the project. Glen's donated truck time and fuel did not appear as cash expenses, but Earl wrote them in a separate column headed HELP I OWE. His total out-of-pocket investment had reached $1,060, and not one customer had paid him a cent.
The result looked terrible from the road. More than a thousand gray barrels stood in uneven rows behind the barn, some on pallets, some under salvaged metal roofing, others protected by heavy tarps Earl had acquired from a farm auction. Passing drivers slowed to stare. One neighbor asked whether Earl had opened a secondhand whiskey business; another wondered if the farm was being used as a dump.
At the diner in town, men who knew Earl by sight began treating the barrels as a standing joke. "How's the whiskey empire coming along?" someone called when he entered for coffee. Earl took a seat and ordered eggs. He had worked long enough to know that a person who explains an unfinished idea to every skeptic can spend all his time talking and none of it learning.
Larkin heard the jokes, too, and repeated them at the bank. He liked pointing out that the institution had received $750 instead of paying the more-than-$5,000 disposal bill. On paper, he calculated, the bank had improved its position by nearly $6,000 compared with hauling everything away. Every time he retold the story, Earl grew a little more foolish and Larkin a little more brilliant.
Earl heard about the laughter and did nothing. The barrels were his, and he was past the age when another man's satisfaction needed an immediate answer. What kept him awake was not humiliation. It was the question of what, precisely, he owned.
On a bitter February evening he selected one barrel that appeared sound enough to take apart. He carried it into the machine shed, set it on blocks, and studied how the iron hoops held the curved staves together. His father had repaired water barrels when Earl was a boy, but the memory of seeing it done was different from having his hands on a heavy, weathered barrel after dark.
He loosened the hoops carefully, marking their positions in pencil before setting them aside. When the staves separated, the smell of oak and old whiskey filled the shed so strongly that he stopped to breathe it in. He laid the pieces across the workbench, black interior faces upward, and inspected the color beneath the char. Some wood showed a rich reddish brown, some a honey-colored streak, and some a dramatic black line that ran beside a ribbon of amber.