"You look happy, Dad."
Earl was quiet for a while.
"I'm useful," he said finally. "That's a different thing. But it's close."
Ray did not say anything to that. He sat beside his father in the dark and listened to the frogs in the ditch along the road, and thought about how close he had come to telling the old man to sell the whole lot for scrap.
It was the next week that Carl Jensen called.
Carl Jensen was not a patient man, and he did not pretend to be.
He farmed eight hundred acres of corn and soybeans in the flat country to the south, and he ran his operation the way a general runs a campaign: on schedule, at full capacity, with no tolerance for delay. He worked his equipment hard because he had to, because the margins in row crops were thin and the planting windows were short, and a tractor that sat idle for a day in May cost him money he would never get back. He was in his late forties, broad-shouldered, red-faced, and loud, and he had a reputation for being fair with people who were fair with him and unforgiving with anyone who was not.
He called in late April. One of his older row-crop tractors, a workhorse he used for tillage and pulling a heavy grain cart at harvest, had a failing hydraulic control assembly. Same design as Walter's. Same discontinued part. He had heard about Earl from a cousin who had heard from Walter.
"I need it in a week," he said on the phone. "Planting starts in ten days. Can you do it?"
Earl looked at the waiting list. He looked at the shelf where four rebuilt hydraulic assemblies sat, each one disassembled, cleaned, inspected, resealed and bench-tested.
"What's the serial number on the tractor?"
There was a pause, and the sound of Carl talking to someone in the background.
"Plate's gone," he said. "Got scraped off years ago, when my brother backed it into a post. It's the same model as Walter's, though. Same family. A couple years older, maybe."
Earl hesitated. Then he made the decision he would think about for a long time afterward.
"Bring me the old valve," he said. "I'll match it to the housing."
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