"They were."
"And that doesn't bother you?"
Earl considered the question honestly, the way he considered everything. "I've been laughed at before," he said. "Mostly it doesn't stick."
---
Megan was the one who changed the direction of the conversation, and she did it without seeming to try.
She had married into the Whitaker family twelve years earlier, and in that time she had learned two things about her father-in-law. The first was that he did nothing without a reason. The second was that he almost never explained the reason unless someone asked the right question.
"Earl," she said, stepping up beside Ray. "What were you writing down? Danny said you spent the whole morning crouched beside them, writing in your little book."
Earl glanced at her, and something in his face eased.
"Numbers," he said.
"What kind of numbers?"
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out the notebook. It was already soft at the edges, the cover bent from being sat on in the truck. He opened it and handed it to her, and she held it so Ray could see.
Page after page of small, careful handwriting. Rows of letters and digits. Some entries had check marks beside them. Some had question marks. A few had small stars. Lines connected some entries to others, and in the margins were notes in a shorthand that Ray could not decipher: *same pump as 14*, *early rev?*, *trans housing matches 3, 22, 41*.
"These are the identification plates," Megan said slowly. "On every tractor."
"Model number, serial, year. Engine code if I could find it. Hydraulic tag if there was one. Transmission plate on the ones that still had them."
"Why?"
Earl took the notebook back and flipped to a page near the end, where he had drawn a crude chart.
"Because a tractor isn't one thing," he said. "It's a few hundred things bolted together. When people look at a broken tractor, they see a broken tractor. They add up what's wrong and they decide it's worth nothing. But what's wrong with it isn't the whole story. What matters is what's still right. And what it's made of. And where else those same parts went."