I looked at the exhaust stack, the radiator area, the service openings, and the ground beneath the tractor. The oil on the dipstick was old and dark, but there was no obvious metal glitter on the blade. The fuel in the visible lines looked stale, and corrosion had found the fittings around the injection system. When I put my hand on the engine casting, it was cold enough to make the skin of my fingers tighten. I tried to imagine that mass of iron warm and vibrating again, but I kept my imagination separate from my list of observations.
An auction employee had a rule against dismantling equipment or trying to crank non-running machinery. He did let me remove a small inspection cover and look at the condition of accessible components without loosening anything critical. I had brought a flashlight, a pencil, and a notebook. I wrote down what I could see, then asked Grandma to photograph a few places where I suspected water had entered. I didn't pretend I could identify the exact damaged cylinders from standing beside it. A seized engine could hide broken connecting rods, damaged bearings, corrosion everywhere, or worse, and none of those possibilities disappeared because I wanted them to.
There was one detail I returned to repeatedly: a weathered service tag wired to the side of the tractor, dated years earlier and partly illegible. Someone had scribbled "stuck after storage" beneath the words "fuel issue." The tag did not prove anything, but it suggested the tractor might have been parked for a relatively ordinary problem and allowed to deteriorate afterward. A machine abandoned because repair wasn't convenient wasn't automatically a machine beyond repair. That difference kept me there for forty-five minutes.
An older man stopped a few feet away and watched me write. He wore a cap advertising a seed company that had changed its logo before I was born. "You look like you're doing homework," he said.
"Sort of," I told him.
"You really thinking of bidding?"
I nodded. He ran his eyes over the tractor and slowly shook his head. "You know what a seized diesel costs to rebuild?"
"More than we have if everything inside is ruined," I said. "That's why I'm trying to find out what might not be ruined."
He looked at me a little longer. Then he asked whose boy I was. When I said Earl Price was my grandfather, the man's face changed. He told me Grandpa had repaired his baler one winter when everybody else wanted to replace half the machine. "Earl wasn't magic," he said. "He just kept looking after the rest of us got tired of looking."
I wrote that in the margin of my notebook after he left. It made me feel proud and sad at the same time. I had been trying to work out whether the John Deere had a chance, but part of me had been waiting for someone to tell me it was all right to try. Hearing Grandpa's name spoken kindly in a muddy equipment yard did more for my courage than all the engine diagrams I'd memorized.