The co-op election was in July, and by June the whole county was talking about it, because Larry had been the board chair for eleven years and this was the first time anybody had run against him. The man who ran against him was named Hollis Vane, who owned a seed dealership in Fairview and who had spent twenty years nursing a grudge against the co-op over a delivery contract. Hollis was not a good man. I'd done work for him and he'd tried to short me on a custom haul and I'd had to threaten him to get paid. But Hollis had one thing going for him, which was that he understood that the co-op's "recommended operator" list was a tool for controlling sixty operators and that taking that tool away from Larry would be the kind of reform that actually changed something.
Carter Boyd came to my sho
