had once cost farmers several months of income were scattered under tarps with holes in them. Jonah knew the place well enough to identify certain old tractors from the shape of their hoods even when the engines had been removed. What interested him, though, was not the machines that might be restored, but the pieces everybody else had already declared useless.
A broken engine block was more than a dead piece of iron to Jonah. If he knew where it had cracked and how it had been used, he could begin to understand the forces that had pulled it apart, the heat that had changed its shape, and the vibration that had weakened it over thousands of working hours. Every casting brought home a slightly different question, and the questions had become important enough that he was willing to endure all the jokes in Hardin County. The men outside Earl's office could see a boy loading scrap, but they could not see his grandfather's repair shop after dark.
The Kessler farm stood beyond a low rise of frozen fields, with a white farmhouse, two weathered barns, and a narrow creek that ran brown during spring thaw. The family had been farming that ground long before Jonah was born, although each generation seemed to inherit a little more debt along with the land. Dale Kessler, Jonah's father, was a good farmer and a careful man, but good farming and careful decisions did not always guarantee a profit when machinery costs rose and grain prices stayed stubbornly low. The family did not live extravagantly, and by the winter of 1989 there were almost no unnecessary expenses left to remove.
In the kitchen, unpaid invoices occupied a corner of the table where family photographs had once been kept. Dale went through them in the evenings with the deliberate expression of a man studying a weather report he could not change. There were bills for fuel, fertilizer, repairs, and interest, each one small enough to explain individually and large enough to become frightening when added to the others. Jonah did not understand every number, but he understood the way his father's shoulders tightened whenever the discussion turned to spring planting.
The farm's oldest International tractor had done more work than anyone had a right to expect of it. Its red paint had faded toward brown in places, the seat had been repaired with a piece of black vinyl, and the steering