"You've been busy," Ray said.
"Some."
"What is all this?"
Earl pointed his coffee cup at the chart. "These are families."
"Families."
"Look." Earl stepped closer and tapped a column with one thick finger. "When you see sixty tractors, you think sixty different machines. But they aren't. That rental outfit bought used fleets cheap, and they bought them in batches. Batches come from the same places. Same few manufacturers, same production runs, same years. So when you look at the plates, you start to see it." He traced a line. "These eighteen are all one model family. Same frame design, same engine block, same basic hydraulic layout. Production years spread out over about nine years, but the bones are the same. These fourteen here are a related family. Different model number, bigger frame, but they share the same transmission design and about half the same hydraulic components as the first group."
He moved his finger.
"These eleven share an engine with the second group. Different everything else. These seven are the odd ones. Older. Different hydraulics. But six of them share a rear axle assembly with the first eighteen." He tapped the last column. "And these ten here, I'm not sure about yet. Some of them are probably one-offs. Some might belong with the others once I get inside them."
Ray looked at the chart for a long time. He was not a mechanic. He had grown up in his father's shop, but he had never had the patience for it, and he had gone into logistics instead, managing schedules and inventories for a regional distribution center. But he was not stupid, and he could see the shape of what his father was showing him.
"So they're not sixty tractors," he said slowly. "They're like... five or six kinds of tractor."
"Close enough. A handful of mechanical families. And inside those families, a lot of the parts are shared. Engines. Hydraulic pumps. Valve bodies. Transmissions. Axles. Electrical components. Gauges. Wiring. Seats, even." Earl took a sip of coffee. "When a tractor in one family is missing a starter, the starter might be sitting in another tractor in the same family. When one has a seized engine but a good hydraulic system, maybe the one next to it has a good engine and a bad transmission. The rental outfit pulled parts off some machines to keep others going. But they did it in a hurry and they did it without a plan. They didn't take everything. They took what they needed that week. What's left is scattered. But it's still here."
---
Ray walked down the nearest row, looking at the tractors with new eyes. It did not make them look any better. Number Twenty-Three had a radiator that looked like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. Number Twenty-Four was missing its entire seat and operator platform. Number Twenty-Five had what appeared to be a family of mice living in its tool box.
"Okay," he said when he came back. "I get it. You can pull parts off some to fix others. That's what the rental company did, right? And it didn't work out for them."
"They did it backward," Earl said. "They took good parts out of running machines to fix other running machines, and they never put anything back. They were robbing every tractor to keep one working one more week. I'm not trying to keep them all running. I'm trying to find out what's good, put the good together, and know exactly what I've got."
"And what does that get you? Say you get, I don't know, a dozen of these running. Old tractors. Who's going to buy them? People want new equipment."
Earl was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Do you know how many farms in this county are still running machines from these families?"