The Machinist Who Hid Behind A Mop

What The Mop Was Hiding

To understand why that sentence landed the way it did, you would need to know what almost nobody at Renke Machine knew about me, which is that I had spent nineteen years earning the exact right to say it.

I grew up two counties over, the son of a man who ran the parts counter at a farm implement dealer for thirty five years and taught me everything he knew about tolerances and torque specs before I ever set foot in a trade school. I went to the community college in Peoria for two years of machining, apprenticed under a toolmaker who was hard on me in the particular way older tradesmen are hard on a young man they have decided is worth the trouble, and by twenty six I had saved enough, and borrowed enough from my own father, to open a small precision shop of my own on a half acre lot outside town.

I built that shop from four machines to eleven over fourteen years. I made custom jigs and prototype tooling for half a dozen manufacturers in the area, including, more than once, small overflow jobs for Renke itself, back before the current young Renke was old enough to run the front office. I was not famous. I was not rich. But I was good, and in a trade like mine, being good and being known to be good in a three county radius is its own kind of wealth. I had six men working for me at my best, a waiting list every spring, and a wife who kept the books better than I ever could have kept them myself.

Barbara got sick the year our daughter Augusta turned six. I am not going to describe the two years that followed in the kind of detail that turns a person’s private suffering into a story other people consume for entertainment. I will only say it was long, it was expensive in every sense the word has, and by the time we buried her, the shop that had taken me fourteen years to build had taken on debt I could not see any honest way to work off while also being the only parent Augusta had left.

I sold the machines to a shop in Bloomington for less than half what they were worth, because a fast sale mattered more to me by then than a fair one. I closed the doors on a Friday in March, alone, and I have never told anyone exactly what that felt like to do, not even the pastor at our church, who tried more than once to get me to talk about it.