There is a brass plate on the headstock of the lathe in the woodshop I have taught in since 2014 and it says:

ARTHUR THORNE, 1916–1995. JOINER. HE SET IT AT NINETEEN.

Forty-one children a year use that machine.

Not one of them has ever asked me what the plate means and I have never told anybody, and I am going to go on not telling them, and now I have written it down.

Part Fifty-One: What It Cost

I want to do an accounting, because this entire story is about one and because nobody ever does.

Nineteen years of my grandfather’s lathe, sold for four hundred dollars on a Thursday in November 2006 to pay a heating bill, out of a trust that had eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars in it.