"We're not out of the woods," she said. "But if the weather holds and the buyers keep their word, we can pay the summer taxes without leasing away the lower field."
I studied the figures. They were smaller than the triumphant sums I'd imagined at the auction. The numbers did not say we were suddenly rich or that every year ahead would be easy. They said we had a path through the next season. I hadn't known how good such a modest-looking answer could feel.
Then James arrived one afternoon with an envelope and a different sort of proposal. The statewide youth agricultural education exhibition was accepting mechanical restoration projects. He thought our work, especially the safety documentation and financial accounting, could compete in the junior division. He offered to sponsor the entry through the county program, with Grandma's permission.
I told him I wasn't sure we belonged there. I'd heard about some of those competitions from other kids, and I imagined shiny equipment restored by families who owned professional workshops. Our 4020 still had uneven paint, and my notebook contained a page where I'd written the same wrong part number twice before correcting it. James said the judges weren't supposed to be impressed by polished paint alone. They wanted to know what the entrant had learned, how the work had been verified, and whether the project made practical sense.
"What if they ask something I can't answer?" I said.
"Then you answer honestly that you don't know," he replied. "It worked pretty well for you at the auction."
Grandma laughed. I wanted to argue, but there wasn't much to argue with. She signed the permission form on the kitchen table where we had first counted our money, and James told us the event would be held before the main summer harvest. We would have a few weeks to prepare our presentation. The tractor itself would remain on the farm because transporting it for display was unnecessary; photographs, measurements, supporting reports, and the project journal would tell the story.
That night I dug through the pile of photographs on the computer and found the one Grandma had taken on auction morning. In it the 4020 looked almost prehistoric, its rusted hood tilted beneath a leaking roof, one wheel settled into a patch of dirt. I opened a recent picture beside it, showing the tractor crossing the upper field under Mr. Atwood's careful hand. Between the photographs lay months of work that couldn't be seen simply by comparing the images.
I decided the competition presentation would begin with the three columns from my first notebook page. Confirmed. Possible. Unknown. Not because I wanted to show how clever I'd been, but because that was where the restoration had really started. We had almost nothing we could trust on the day we bought the tractor except the condition we could see, the money we had counted, and the willingness of a few people to help us look more closely.