The nail came out of the board sideways. The claw got under the head and I rocked it, and the shank followed the pull instead of the grain, so it left the wood bent a little past its middle. A gray rust in the shank. The point still sharp.
I did not throw it in the coffee can with the others. I do not know why. A new nail costs about nothing. But the box was in the shed and the shed was cold, and this one was already in my hand.
There is a flat rock by the step. It has been the anvil for small things for years. I laid the nail across it and tapped the crown of the bend with the hammer, turning it a quarter each time, the way you true a wheel by feel. The metal gave in small amounts. It wanted to keep the bend. Steel remembers the last thing that happened to it.
I got it mostly straight. Not true. There was still a shadow of the curve near the head, a place where the light broke different along the shank. Sight down it and you could see the lie.
Good enough. It would go into something that did not care — a shim, a brace behind a wall, a job where the head just needs to hold and no one sights down anything.
I set it on the sill, apart from the good box, in a little pile of its own kind. The straightened ones. The rock kept a bright scar where the hammer had missed the nail twice and found stone instead.