"He's seventy years old," he said. "He doesn't need a project. He needs to rest."
"Maybe he's rested enough," Megan said.
"You heard Gordon Hale. Everybody at that auction thought he'd lost his mind."
"Everybody at that auction looked at the tractors for about thirty seconds," Megan said. "Your father looked at them for three hours. I'm not saying he's right. I'm saying I'd want to know what he saw before I decided he was wrong."
Ray did not answer. He drove the rest of the way in silence, thinking about the notebook, about the lines connecting one entry to another, about the small stars in the margins.
He did not sleep well that night either.
Earl Whitaker took apart his first engine when he was nine years old.
It belonged to a push mower his father had dragged home from the dump, a rusted, smoke-belching thing with a cracked deck and a pull cord that had snapped off inside the housing. His father set it on the workbench in the barn, handed Earl a coffee can full of mismatched wrenches, and said, "Find out why it quit." Then he went back to the house for supper and left the boy alone with it.
Earl did not come in for supper. He did not come in until nearly ten o'clock, when his mother came out with a flashlight and found him sitting on an overturned bucket with the engine in pieces on the bench in front of him, every bolt, washer, spring and screw laid out in neat rows on a sheet of newspaper in the exact order he had removed them.
"Well?" his father said when he came out behind her.
"The spark plug's fouled," Earl said. "And the carburetor's gummed up. And the pull cord broke because the spring in the recoil is rusted. But the piston's fine. And the crank's fine. And the valves are fine. It's not broken. It's just dirty and old."
His father picked up the spark plug, turned it in the flashlight beam, and looked at his son for a long moment.
"Most people would've thrown it out," he said.
"Most people didn't take it apart," Earl said.
His father laughed, the only time Earl could remember him laughing at something Earl said, and the next weekend the mower ran.
---
He thought about that night more often than he would have admitted, in the weeks after the auction. Not because it was a fond memory, though it was. Because it was the first time he had understood the thing that would shape the rest of his life: that the difference between broken and useless was almost always a matter of looking.