He drove out to his father's place the next morning with Megan in the passenger seat and a knot in his stomach that had been there all night.
Earl lived eleven miles outside of town on four acres his own father had bought in the years after the war. The house was a small white farmhouse with a deep porch and a tin roof that rang like a drum when it rained. Behind it stood a pole barn, a machine shed, and a gravel yard wide enough to turn a semi around in. Beyond that was a fenced pasture that had not held livestock since Ray was a teenager. It held tractors now. Or it would, by the end of the week.
The first eight were already there when Ray pulled in. They stood in the pasture in a crooked line, delivered the previous afternoon on a rented flatbed by a hauler Earl had known for thirty years. The hauler had given him a price for the rest, and Earl had accepted it, and Ray did the arithmetic in his head while he climbed out of the car and felt his stomach tighten another notch.
His father was in the pasture with a clipboard, walking slowly along the line of machines. He raised a hand without looking up.
"Morning."
"Dad." Ray came through the gate. Megan followed a few steps behind, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, her eyes moving over the tractors with an expression Ray could not read. "Dad, can we talk about this?"
"We are talking."
"I mean really talk." Ray stopped in front of him. Up close, the tractors looked even worse than they had in the photograph. One had a bird's nest in its air intake. Another had a crack in the transmission housing that Ray could have put his finger into. "Where did the money come from?"
Earl wrote something on the clipboard. "Savings."
"Which savings?"
His father did not answer right away, and that was the answer.
"Dad. That's your retirement money. That's the money you kept back after you closed the shop. That's what's supposed to pay for, I don't know, the roof, your medicine, the next time the truck breaks down. You told me that money wasn't to be touched."
"I didn't touch it. I spent some of it."
"On junk."
Earl looked up then, for the first time. He had his father's eyes, people said, pale gray and steady, set deep in a face weathered by sun and work into something that looked carved rather than grown. They were not angry eyes. Ray almost wished they were. Anger he could argue with.
"It isn't junk," Earl said.
"Gordon Hale says it's junk. Danny says Gordon Hale walked that row and told the auction company to call the scrap yard. He says everyone was laughing at you."