"No."
"Neither do I, exactly. But I know it's a lot. I worked on them for thirty years. Small farms, hay operations, cattle outfits, orchards. People who can't afford a new tractor, or don't want one, because the old one does the job and they know how to keep it going. Those people still need parts. And the parts are getting harder to find every year. The manufacturers stopped making some of them a long time ago. The dealers don't stock them. The salvage yards have been picked clean."
He set the cup down on an overturned bucket.
"Every one of these tractors is a box of parts that nobody makes anymore. Some are worth nothing. Some might be worth a lot. Sixty tractors in a few families means I've got sixty chances to find the parts that are getting scarce. Not one chance. Sixty."
Ray stood there with his hands in his pockets.
"That's a big maybe, Dad."
"It is," Earl agreed. "That's why I'm doing the work."
---
Ray drove home that afternoon still unconvinced, but uneasy in a new way. Before, he had been afraid his father was losing his mind. Now he was afraid of something harder to name: that his father might be right, and that Ray had been too quick to decide otherwise.
"He's got a chart," he told Megan that night. "On a piece of plywood. He's sorted all sixty of them into, like, families. Production years, engines, hydraulics. He says they share parts."
Megan looked up from the dishes. "That makes sense."
"Does it?"
"It's inventory," she said. "You do this every day at work. You don't look at a warehouse full of boxes and say it's worthless because some of the boxes are crushed. You find out what's in them."
Ray opened his mouth to say that it was different, and then found that he could not quite explain how.
---
At the white house, long after dark, Earl sat at the kitchen table with three of the old notebooks from the attic open in front of him. The pages were yellowed and soft, filled with handwriting that was younger and steadier than his own was now. Notes from twenty-five years ago. A hydraulic pump that had failed on a farm out past the river. A transmission that had been rebuilt with the wrong bearings. A list, written on a slow afternoon in the shop on the state road, of every serial range he knew of for one particular model family, and which ranges had used which hydraulic valve.
He ran his finger down the list. Then he picked up the new notebook from the auction, flipped to page seven, and compared.