Ray read them twice.
"Dad," he said. "You've made back the thousand dollars about ten times over. In three months."
"Gross," Megan said. "Not net. There's the hauling, and the parts, and the tires. But still."
Earl looked at the screen for a long time. He did not seem as surprised as Ray was. If anything, he looked thoughtful, as if the numbers confirmed something he had known but had not yet said aloud.
"It's not the tractors," he said finally.
"What do you mean?"
"Nobody's paying for a rusty tractor. They're paying because their machine is broken and they can't get it fixed anywhere else. The dealer can't help them. The parts aren't made anymore. The mechanics who knew these machines have retired or died." He tapped the table. "That's the business. Keeping older machines working when the parts and the people who know them are disappearing."
---
By spring the work had outgrown the machine shed.
Earl had Unit One sold to the young couple with the run-down farm, who drove it off the trailer and nearly cried. He had Units Two and Three rebuilt and on the market by April, each assembled from donor machines in the same careful way, each with a cardboard tag listing where every major system had come from. He had rebuilt six more of the discontinued hydraulic control assemblies, and five of them had already sold, to farmers in four different counties who drove hours to pick them up.
He had a waiting list.
That was the word Megan used, anyway, when she started keeping it in a spiral notebook by the kitchen phone. Earl called it "people I need to call back." But it was a waiting list, and it grew longer every week.
The pasture was changing too. The rows of broken tractors were thinning. Some had been rebuilt into working machines. Others had become donors, stripped piece by piece until only the frames remained, and those frames Earl sold to a scrap dealer for more than he had paid per tractor at the auction. In the machine shed, the shelves that had once held a few dozen tagged parts now held hundreds. Earl bought more shelving, then more again. He put up a lean-to on the side of the pole barn for the larger parts, transmissions and axles and engine blocks, sitting on pallets under tarps.
And in the evenings, when the work was done, he sat on the porch again. But it was a different kind of sitting now. He did not look at the pasture like a man waiting for something. He looked at it like a man planning tomorrow.
---
Ray noticed the change, and one night in April, as they sat on the porch together, he finally said it out loud.