Ray Whitaker found out about the tractors the way he found out about most of his father's decisions: after it was too late to argue.
He was standing in the kitchen of his own house that evening, forty-four years old, still in his work clothes from a Saturday shift at the distribution center, when his phone buzzed with a message from a man he had gone to high school with. It was a photograph. The photograph showed Ray's father standing at the back of an auction yard in front of a long row of rusted machines, holding a bidder card. Underneath it, the man had written: *Is your dad okay?*
Ray stared at the picture for a long moment. Then he called his father.
Earl answered on the sixth ring, which was standard. Earl Whitaker regarded the telephone the way some people regard a barking dog: a thing to be dealt with when it could no longer be ignored.
"Dad. What did you do?"
"Bought some tractors."
"Some tractors. Dad, Danny Pruitt just sent me a picture. There's a whole row of them behind you. How many is some?"
A pause. "Sixty."
Ray sat down at the kitchen table. Across the room, his wife Megan looked up from the laptop where she had been doing the household budget and raised her eyebrows.
"Sixty," Ray repeated. "Sixty tractors."
"That's right."
"How much?"
"A thousand dollars."
Ray let out a breath. For one second he thought it might be all right. A thousand dollars was not nothing, but it was not a disaster either. Then his mind caught up.
"Wait. A thousand dollars for sixty tractors? What's wrong with them?"
"Pretty much everything," Earl said. And Ray could have sworn, though he would never prove it, that his father sounded pleased.
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