"I know you think I'm measuring every mistake," she said. "I'm not. I'm trying to make sure we still have choices when you find the answer."
Tom rubbed his eyes. "It looks like I'm breaking everything I touch."
"That's how it feels," she answered. "We don't know if that's what's happening."
She reached across the table and turned the estimate face down. For a moment neither spoke, and the clock above the refrigerator made a sound Tom had never noticed before. Then Jenny said she would find every invoice and service record, including receipts they had tucked into the glove box or left beside the shop phone. Ray had asked for documents, and at least that was a problem she could solve. Tom nodded and went to help.
They worked late into the evening. The first repair invoice included a description of the fracture and a photograph taken before the tractor was loaded. Gary's tire receipt listed the sidewall tear and bent rim, although the shop had not identified an ordinary puncture. The dealership report was preliminary and cautious, noting shock damage to driveline components without attributing it to a defect in manufacture. Those descriptions looked unrelated until Tom placed them beside each other. Then he began to hear Ray's question again: what had hit the machines?
Ray arrived after supper, bringing a thermos of coffee that smelled strong enough to remove paint. He spread the documents across the workbench beneath the humming fluorescent light. He read the first page, then the second, then all three again. When Tom grew impatient, Ray pointed to a note about fresh metal on the old support.
"The first fracture had years of wear in it," he said, "but something completed it violently. The other machines show different damage, yet each report describes an unexpected impact. That's not proof of one cause. It's a reason to investigate one."
"Could the planter be doing it?" Tom asked. "Maybe something's wrong with the new tool bar."
"Could be. Did it bend?"
"No."
"Did it drag?"
"Not that I saw."
"Then let's not throw the planter out of the list, but let's not make it guilty just because it's new." Ray took a sip of coffee and glanced at the dark window. "Tomorrow morning, we mark every place the machines stopped, and we see what the ground has to say."
The morning was cold enough to leave a thin crust of frost on the fence wires. Ray arrived before sunrise carrying wooden stakes, a long steel probing rod, and a roll of orange flagging tape that he had used for marking buried lines on construction jobs. Tom met him at the shop in rubber boots, carrying a small notebook and a pencil for marking the measurements. He still thought he knew the Creek Forty as thoroughly as a man knew the shape of his own hand. He was about to discover that knowing a surface was not the same thing as understanding what lay beneath it.