I printed the listing and carried it home folded in four. It wasn't just the model that caught my eye. The photograph showed a damaged cover on the vertical exhaust stack, and the right side of the hood had been removed at some point and reattached crookedly. If rainwater had been getting through that stack for years, there was a possible explanation for why an engine had stopped moving. A possible explanation, I reminded myself, was not a diagnosis. Still, it was more than I'd had the day before.
Grandma was peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink when I spread the paper beside her. She looked down at the photograph for a long time before she spoke.
"Noah," she said, "that's a whole lot of rust."
"I know."
"It doesn't run."
"I know that too."
She wiped her hands and turned the page toward the window. "Then tell me why you're looking at it like you just found buried treasure."
I told her about the exhaust, about the engine Grandpa had made me study, and about the difference between a hopeless machine and one that nobody had examined carefully enough. I told her I wanted to go two hours early on Saturday so I could look at it properly. I even showed her a list of repairs I suspected we might need, marked with question marks because I couldn't prove any of them from a photograph.
Grandma listened without interrupting. Then she asked the only question a sensible person would ask: "How would we pay for it, let alone make it run?"
I brought out my tin. We counted the money together on the table, moving the bills into careful stacks. Two hundred sixty-three dollars. She opened the farm account notebook beside it. Four hundred dollars remained in the working account. That was money for feed, propane, and whatever bad surprise November decided to bring us.
I had started to tell her it wasn't enough when she put a finger on the photograph. "If you bid," she said, "you won't do it alone. I'm the adult, and my name goes on the invoice. I also get to decide how much of the farm money we can risk."
We spent almost an hour on that decision. She finally agreed to add up to one hundred eighty-seven dollars from the farm account, bringing our absolute limit to four hundred fifty. It left two hundred thirteen in the account, which frightened her enough that she said the figure aloud three times. We would not spend another penny beyond that limit. We would not borrow at the auction. And if the tractor proved too damaged, I would have to accept that we might have bought an expensive collection of parts.
"Can you live with that?" she asked.
I wanted to say yes immediately. Instead I thought about the way Grandpa would have looked at those question marks beside my parts list. "I can try," I said.