"Twenty-six tractors in those two families," he said. "Twenty-three still have the assembly. Some of them won't be any good. Some will need rebuilding. But even if half are usable..." He let the sentence hang.
"Then you've got a dozen of a part nobody makes," Megan finished.
"Nobody makes them," Earl said. "But plenty of people still need them."
---
He did not have to wait long to find out how many.
It began with Walter Briggs.
Walter farmed three hundred acres of hay and cattle about fifteen miles east, on ground his grandfather had cleared. He was sixty-three, lean and sunburned, with a slow way of talking that made people underestimate him exactly once. Earl had worked on his equipment for nearly twenty years when the shop on the state road was open, and they had the kind of friendship that men of their generation have, which consisted mainly of nodding at each other at the feed store and saying "Walter" and "Earl" and occasionally, at the end of a long conversation about the weather, something true.
Walter came up the driveway on a cold morning in January, towing his utility tractor on a flatbed behind his truck. It was an eighteen-year-old machine, and he had kept it in better shape than most men keep their cars. But the hydraulics had failed in the fall, in the middle of moving round bales, and the loader arms had dropped to the ground and would not rise again.
"Took it to Hale," Walter said, standing beside the trailer with his hands in his coat pockets. "They had it two weeks. Told me the control valve's gone. Told me they can't get a new one. Told me they could retrofit a different system, but it'd run me close to what the tractor's worth." He spat into the gravel. "Gordon himself told me it wasn't worth fixing. Said I ought to trade it in on a new one. Offered me a price for it that I'd be embarrassed to repeat."
Earl walked around the trailer slowly, looking.
"Heard you bought that rental fleet," Walter said.
"I did."
"Heard you got one running."
"I did."
Walter waited. Earl did not volunteer anything, because he did not yet know if he could help, and he did not believe in promising things before he knew.
"Well," Walter said at last. "Can you do anything?"