The Parts Man and His Notebooks

“Same as last fall,” I said, and I reached under the counter for the first ledger without thinking about it.

The notebooks need explaining, because the whole story turns on them. They were not the kind you buy at a drugstore.

When Orrin hired me in the spring of 1999, the store ran on microfiche and a phone. The parts books were thick as a family Bible, and half the numbers in them were already wrong.

A part gets superseded. The factory changes the number, then changes it again. A bearing gets dropped from the catalog, but the same bearing is sitting on a shelf at the supply house in Willmar under a plain standard number.

Nobody writes that down for you. You learn it the hard way, on the phone, with a man out in a field and the sun going down.

So I started writing it down. Every time the book was wrong, every time a part from one machine fit another, every time an old-timer told me what his father had done to keep a header running.

I wrote it in big leather-bound ledger books, the old kind the store used for accounts before the computer. Orrin had a shelf of empty ones in the back. When one filled up, I started the next one.

By that September there were seven of them, each one as thick as a family Bible. They lived on the shelf under the counter, between the coffee can of cotter pins and the phone book nobody used anymore.

I had them broken out by farm, more or less. Orville had his own pages in three different ledgers, going back to the combine he bought new from Orrin the year I started.

The computer system came in around 2008. It is a good system. It knows what the factory knows. It does not know that Orville’s rock pile eats a cutter bar every fall, or that his combine has a gearbox bearing they quit making in 2014.

I knew. It was in the first ledger, page forty-one, in my handwriting.

I rang Orville up. He paid in cash, the way he always does, folding the bills out of a leather wallet his wife June gave him for their fortieth anniversary, before she passed.

“You look like somebody ran over your dog,” Orville said.

“Long day,” I said.

He looked at me for a second longer than he needed to. Orville is sixty-one and has buried a wife and a son, and there is not much that gets by him.

“All right,” he said. “You know where I live.”

Patty was at the kitchen table when I came in. She had her reading glasses on and a cup of coffee she had let go cold, and she was going through the mail.

Her heart had been giving her trouble since spring. It started with getting winded carrying laundry up the basement stairs, and then she nearly fainted at the church rummage sale in June.

The doctor in Morris sent her to the heart doctors in Fargo. They found a valve that had gone stiff and narrow, and they said it would have to be replaced. Open heart, because of how the valve sat.

They set the surgery for November nineteenth. The surgeon was a quiet woman about our daughter’s age who drew Patty a picture of her own heart on the paper on the exam table, and Patty trusted her the minute she did it.

I sat down across from my wife and told her what Brady had said. All of it, including the part about my age.