I. The First Flivver in Town

The machine came into Harlan on a Tuesday in July, 1912, which was a market day, which meant the street was full of people and wagons and horses and carts and produce for sale.

They heard it before they saw it. A great, clattering, asthmatic racket like a threshing machine eating a tin roof. And then it came around the bend by the feed store, trailing a blue-gray cloud and moving at approximately the speed of a trotting dog. The driver sat up very straight, as men do when they are either proud or frightened, and in this case, he appeared to be both.

Herschel Pruett’s team, a matched pair of roans that had hauled freight for seven years without complaint, executed an immediate decision to be somewhere else. They got about halfway there before the traces caught them, and the wagon tipped, and three crates of canning jars became a great tinkling avalanche on the south side of Main Street. Herschel, to his credit, held on. What he said next was less to his credit.

People came out of the hardware store, the dry-goods store, the barber shop. Mrs. Aldean Foot stood in the doorway of her millinery holding a hat she’d been trimming and simply stared. The machine burped and coughed and slowed to a stop in the middle of the street, and the driver, a man named Caswell of the county seat, who had apparently made a wager with someone, climbed down and began talking at the engine with a wrench.

It was Herschel who said it first, loud enough to be heard the length of the block.

“Get a horse!”

That got a laugh. It got a real laugh, the kind that comes out of relief as much as comedy. Somebody repeated it. Then somebody’s boy of about nine repeated it at the top of his lungs, and the laughter went again, and old Walt Demmer slapped his knee on the bench in front of the barber shop. Even Mrs. Foot smiled, though she continued to hold the hat as if she thought it might flee.

Caswell straightened up from the engine, looked at all of them, and said, “Laugh now, gentlemen. I’ll be back in Millerton before your horses need watering.” The machine had knocked a chunk off its own exhaust pipe somewhere on the road from Millerton, and he knew it, and he suspected they knew it too.

He got it started again after twenty minutes. It left in the direction it had come, somewhat faster than it had arrived, the exhaust now producing a sound like a large man rhythmically hitting a washbasin. The horses gratefully watched it go and turned back to their oats.

The canning jars were a total loss. Herschel Pruett submitted a bill to no one in particular and was never reimbursed. He told the story at the feed store for the next three years.

II. The Blacksmith Measures the Future

August Fenner had been shoeing horses and working iron in Harlan for twenty-one years, and he had opinions about machinery the way a surgeon has opinions about knives: precise, unsentimental, and based entirely on what he had seen go wrong.

His first opinion about the automobile was that it was a toy for men with too much money and not enough work, and that opinion held for roughly a year and a half, until a Buick Touring Car broke down on Depot Road and got pushed to his door by a young man who was red-faced from the pushing and red-faced from the asking.

“I don’t know that I can help you,” August said, wiping his hands and looking at the thing the way he looked at anything that was broken and in his yard.

“It’s the lower bracket,” the young man said. “Here. And the steering linkage is pulling left.”

August crouched. He looked at the bracket. He looked at the linkage. He looked at the way the whole front assembly was hung.

“It’s still iron, ain’t it?” he said.

He charged two dollars and fifty cents. The young man, whose name was Porter and whose father owned a lumberyard in the next county, paid it without discussion and drove away.

August stood at the edge of the road for a moment after the car had gone. He was not a man given to long reflection, but he was given to arithmetic, and the arithmetic here was plain enough. Shoeing a horse took him twenty minutes and paid thirty-five cents. The bracket had taken forty minutes and paid two-fifty. And the machine had dozens of brackets. Dozens of linkages, springs, fittings, pins, rods. Things that bent. Things that cracked. Things that worked loose on bad roads.

There were plenty of bad roads.

He went back inside and looked at his shop with slightly different eyes. The forge was the forge. The anvil was the anvil. The vise and the swage block and the pritchel and the hardy were what they had always been. None of that changed. What changed was what you could do with them, and for whom, and at what price.

The problem, he thought, turning the wrench in his hands, was not that the automobile didn’t work. You could see it worked, more or less. The problem was that sooner or later it would work better, and then the roads would be full of the things, and every one of them would be full of iron that bent and cracked and worked loose.

He did not rush to love the machine. He was not built for rushing to love things. But he started paying attention.

III. The Horse Man

Nobody in Harlan fought the automobile harder or with more genuine conviction than Corwin Leake, who ran sixty acres east of town, kept a livery on the side, and had been riding horses since before most of his neighbors were born.

He was not stupid. That’s the thing that wants saying. He was not stupid, and he was not simply old, and his objections were not the objections of a man who feared anything new on principle. His objections had evidence.

The machines scared horses. Fact. He had personally witnessed three runaways, one broken axle on a farm wagon, and a woman thrown from a buggy at the corner of Elm and Second Street, all attributable to the noise and smell of passing motorcars. The machines broke down. Fact. He had seen them pushed, towed, abandoned, and cursed on every road within ten miles of town, and had pulled more than one from the ditch with horses he felt no need to apologize for. They required a fuel you had to purchase from a drum at the hardware store, where before you had required a fuel that any decent field could grow. They threw mud with particular enthusiasm, had no visible manners, and offered their drivers a false confidence that led to all manner of road-hogging and recklessness.