Then the weather turned. A dry stretch settled in over the county in mid-July, the kind of window every hay farmer waits on all summer—cut and dry and bale it before the next rain comes through and ruins a field’s worth of work. Everybody was running their balers hard, day and night when they could manage it, racing thunderheads that built up most afternoons along the horizon. That was when machines started breaking. Otis Henderson was the first one through Bell’s shop, hay already cut and lying in the field. His knotter assembly stripped out on a baler old enough that the dealership two towns over told him flat out the part was discontinued, and getting one made special would take longer than the hay could wait. Mr. Bell shook his head, out of options himself, and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Malik had bought up a pile of old parts that might be worth checking. Malik pulled his notebook, found the cross-reference, and walked out to the barn. Ten minutes later, he came back with a knotter assembly that matched. He sold it to Otis for $18. It kept a baler running that was helping bring in a hay crop Otis figured was worth close to $4,000 that season, sitting cut in a field with rain building on the horizon. Otis didn’t care that the part had come out of a dealership instead of a dealership box. He cared that his machine was running again before dark.
Word moved fast after that, the way it does during hay season, when every farmer in earshot is watching the same weather. A worn bill hook for the Wallace place, $12, saved them the better part of a day they didn’t have to lose. A broken spring for a Pruitt baler, $6, the kind of part so small a dealership barely stocked it anymore. A stripped twine disk for a rented machine out past the county line, the owner driving 40 minutes just because somebody at the feed store said Malik might have one. By the last week of July, farmers had started calling Bell’s shop before they even loaded up to drive into town, asking whether Malik had a particular part on hand before wasting a trip. Malik took to keeping the cross-reference notebook with him most of the day, answering questions over the phone at the shop counter between sweeping and helping Mr. Bell with regular repair work. Not every part matched. Malik got two orders wrong that summer, sold a bushing that turned out to be the wrong bore size, and drove out himself both times to make it right, refunding the money and helping track down the correct piece through Bell’s own suppliers. One of those mistakes cost him an afternoon he could have spent selling other parts, driving 20 minutes each way to swap out a bushing that hadn’t fit, apologizing the whole time even though the farmer, an older man named Delbert Cross, mostly just laughed it off and said he’d rather deal with a boy who owned up to a mistake than one who didn’t. Farmers remembered that as much as they remembered the parts that worked.