The Three Machinists Who Found Dennis’s Tools

Mill Street

Ernie Stoltz drove past the old co-op feed mill on Mill Street every morning on his way to the cafe. On the Sunday after my sale, a new sign appeared in its dusty window, hand-lettered in blue. Ritter Welding and Repair.

On Tuesday the big overhead door stood open. Ernie, who was supposed to be keeping his head down, turned his Buick around in the lot.

A green lathe sat against the back wall with a blue tarp over half of it. Ernie did not need to lift the tarp. He knew the casting, and he knew the little dent in the pan where he himself had dropped a drill chuck in 1996 and cursed.

“It’s there,” Hub told me on the phone. “All of it. We’ll go at five, when the man is done for the day. Ernie says he’s hardly more than a boy. Be gentle with him, Nancy.”

I was not feeling gentle. I put on my good church coat and rode in the front seat of Hub’s pickup with Ernie and Gus squeezed in back,.

The young man was under a pickup on a creeper when we walked in, and all we could see were his boots. A radio played the Reds game. The bay smelled of hot metal and coffee.

The red box stood near the workbench with its drawers pulled out a little, the way a man leaves them in the middle of a job. He had been using it.

He rolled out wiping his hands on a shop rag. He was about thirty-one, tall, with a short beard and a cap so new its thread was still stiff.

“Help you folks?”

“Son, I’m Hub Lanning. I taught half the machinists in this county. This is Mrs. Nancy Eckert, widow of the man who owned that box.”

I will never forget his face. It was like watching a window shade come down.

“You bought that box and that lathe and that welder on the nineteenth from a man named Lenny Sheets,” Hub said. “Did he tell you where they came from?”

“His uncle’s estate.” Brent Ritter looked at the box and then at me. “He said the family wanted it gone quick. I paid nine thousand two hundred. That’s my savings, and four thousand my wife’s dad lent me.”

“It was not his uncle’s,” I said. “It was my husband’s. Dennis died in July.”

He took off the stiff blue cap and held it in both hands in front of him.

“Mrs. Eckert, I am so sorry. I swear I didn’t know. I thought it was a stroke of luck. I called my wife from Lenny’s parking lot and told her we were going to make it.”

“I know you didn’t know.”

“You do?”

“A man who knew wouldn’t be working in the open with the door wide up.”

He looked at the box. Then he did something that went through me like a cold wire. He walked over and put one finger on the strip of tape across the third drawer, and he read it out loud, slowly.

“Ask Nancy first.” He looked up. “I wondered about that. I laughed at it, honestly. I thought it was some joke about somebody’s wife.”

“It was a joke,” I said. “I’m the wife.”

“Then it’s yours.” He began pulling off his shop apron right there. “I’ll load it on my trailer tonight and bring you all of it. I won’t even charge you for gas.”

“You’ll lose nine thousand dollars,” said Gus.

“Then I’ll lose it. It’s not mine.” He said it so fast that I knew he meant it.

Ernie had not said a word since we walked in. He stood by the back wall near the lathe. He lifted a corner of the blue tarp, and then he put his big spotted hand flat on the machine, the way you would touch a horse that had been missing a week.

“Nancy,” he said, in a voice I had never heard from him. “Come here.”

I went. A piece of brass bar the size of a rolling pin stuck out of the chuck. The top half had been turned down into the slender stem of a candlestick, with a bright bead cut halfway up. Above it the metal was still rough, and the cutting tool sat in its holder, set to make the next pass.

I knew that candlestick. Nobody had to tell me what it was.

“Mrs. Eckert,” Brent Ritter said behind us. “I never touched what’s in the chuck. I figured somebody had started something.”