Then he looked at Cal. “Where’d you find all this? The G705 information.” “My grandfather has the Minneapolis-Moline technical digest from 1960 through 1969. I’ve been going through them since January.” “Since January?” “Yes, sir.” Sutherland looked at the service records again, then at the tractor, then, slowly, back at Cal. “How old are you?” “Seventeen.”
A man near the back laughed, not mockingly this time, but the way you laugh when something surprises you and the surprise is good. Al Greer had been holding his gavel for the better part of ninety seconds, which was ninety seconds longer than any lot had been paused in his sixteen years of calling sales. “All right, we have new information. Bidding reopens. Do I have six fifty?”
Sutherland raised his paddle. The parts dealer, recalculating everything, raised his. Seven hundred, seven fifty, eight hundred. Sutherland at eight fifty. Parts dealer out. A farmer from near Coldwater who had been silent all morning at nine hundred. Sutherland at nine fifty. The Coldwater farmer shook his head. Sutherland’s ceiling was higher.
Cal had two hundred fifteen dollars in his savings account. He had not placed a single bid. “Nine fifty. Going once, going twice.” The gavel came down. Ray Sutherland bought the G705 for nine hundred fifty dollars, two hundred thirty-five percent above the price it was about to sell for when Cal raised his hand.
Sutherland walked over to where Cal was standing and held out his hand. “That information you had, the records and the technical data, that’s worth more than whatever you would have paid for this machine.” “I couldn’t have outbid you anyway.” “No, but you made me pay more for something I didn’t know was worth more. Most men twice your age don’t do work like that.”
Cal shook his hand. He didn’t say anything. He wrote one final note in his notebook and put it in his jacket pocket. The yard went back to its business, but something had settled differently in the way the men around that tractor looked at the boy in the oversized jacket.
Ray Sutherland called Cal’s father that evening. James Whitmore answered the phone in the kitchen and stood there for several minutes listening, nodding, saying yes and thank you in the way that fathers do when someone is telling them something good about their child. When he hung up, he walked to the barn where Cal was working on the family’s planter.
“Ray Sutherland called.” “I figured he might.” “He wants to know if you’d be interested in previewing equipment for him before sales. He’ll pay you for the work. He says you know things about older equipment he doesn’t have time to research.” Cal set down his wrench. He thought about Harold’s room, the manuals, the service bulletins, the seven interlibrary loan documents about the G705 that had taken three weeks to arrive. He thought about January, eight months ago, when he had started the file. “Tell him yes.” He went back to work on the planter.