Silas refused to let Jonah start on anything that belonged to a working farmer. Instead, he made him find abandoned castings that had no more expected service life and could be studied without putting somebody else's livelihood at risk. Jonah rode with Dale whenever a trip took them past a salvage yard, and soon began calling mechanics on his own, asking whether they had broken blocks, cracked heads, or ruined housings they planned to throw away. Most people assumed the boy was collecting scrap for a school project or a strange hobby, and Jonah let them think what they wanted.
By the first week of January, the far wall of Silas's shop held enough broken iron to make the room look like a small graveyard for agricultural machinery. Jonah and Silas had separated the pieces by type, setting thick engine castings to one side and smaller hydraulic housings on shelves near the bench. Some failures were obvious, with cracks wide enough to admit a thin coin; others revealed only faint dark lines that disappeared under dirt and rust. Jonah took particular interest in those nearly invisible fractures because they reminded him that the most important part of a problem was often the part nobody had bothered to notice.
That evening, after bringing home the block Earl had given him, Jonah backed the pickup to the shop and helped Silas unload it using the old overhead hoist. Dale watched from the doorway with his arms folded, his work jacket open despite the cold. He had tolerated the growing collection because the scrap cost almost nothing and the work kept Jonah occupied with something useful, but he had begun to wonder whether the boy was confusing practice with the sort of experience needed to repair an actual engine. "Just remember that school still comes first," he said, and Jonah promised it would.
Dale stayed long enough to look at the newest block, then returned to the house to finish a stack of paperwork. Silas waited until his son's footsteps had faded before turning toward Jonah. "He worries about you," he said. "I know," Jonah answered, reaching for a scraper. Silas added that his son worried about the farm too, and that Jonah should not mistake a worried man's caution for a lack of faith.