Tom looked at the tractor with something close to resentment. "What about the rental?"
"Call the dealership. Let them recover it without driving it out. And stay off that strip with anything heavy until we know whether the soil is sound." Ray's voice remained low, but he was no longer making a suggestion.
He had worked beside Harold Brant for years and had earned the right to tell Tom when pride was getting in the way of judgment. Tom knew that tone. He had heard his father use it around loose chains, worn tires, and grain bins in severe weather.
The dealership's recovery crew arrived that afternoon with equipment suited to getting the tractor onto a trailer from firm ground. Colin followed in a pickup and spoke carefully while they documented the damage. He could not promise a replacement rental until the first machine had been assessed, and he could not promise the repair would be covered. "It's nothing personal, Tom," he said, standing in the sun beside the trailer. "We have to protect the equipment and our own insurance position."
"I understand," Tom replied, because he did understand. That was the worst of it. No one was cheating him or behaving irrationally. The company had a valuable machine damaged on his land, and its manager was doing the job he was paid to do. The facts were reasonable even as they put Tom in an unreasonable position.
When the trailer pulled out, its tires left a long, shallow pattern across the grassy field entrance. Tom watched until the truck disappeared onto the county road. Then he returned to the house and stood outside the kitchen window for a few moments, unable to make himself go inside. He could see Jenny at the table with papers spread around the laptop. She was using a pencil to mark expenses, a habit she had kept even after moving most of the accounts to a computer, because paper made her feel she could still change the numbers.
He opened the door, and she looked up. "How bad?"
"I don't know yet."
"That wasn't the question."
Tom sat across from her. He explained the rental manager's concerns, the possible repair bill, and Ray's insistence that nothing else should cross the pale strip. Jenny listened without interrupting, occasionally writing a figure in the margin of her notebook. She had already calculated the likely minimum loss from the first two failures. When she added the possible deductible for the rental, the total passed nineteen thousand dollars, and she turned the page so he could see it.
"That's before the replacement work," she said. "Before any new seed, before a possible late-planting loss, before whatever the dealership decides. We need to tell the bank something by Friday, and I can't send them a page of question marks."
Tom looked at the number. He had once spent less than that to buy his first tractor. Now it could disappear in ten days without gaining the farm a single acre of planted ground. He felt an impulse to stand up, drive to the Creek Forty, and force some machine to cross it just to prove that he still could. The impulse shamed him as soon as he recognized it. Jenny saw the struggle in his face and slid the calculator out of the way.