"Take it."
"How much?"
"Free."
Clara narrowed her eyes.
"Free usually means you want something."
"I want it gone."
"Anything else?"
Earl smiled.
"I want to see how many of these stupid things you can fit behind your father's shop before he loses his mind."
Clara looked toward the back rows.
"How many other cracked castings?"
Earl stopped smiling.
"Oh, Lord."
Dean started laughing again.
Twenty minutes later, Clara had found three.
The 706 block.
A cracked cylinder head from an old Farmall.
A transmission housing split near a mounting ear.
Earl finally had to use his loader to move the engine block.
The old machine coughed black smoke as he lifted the casting from the snow.
Clara guided him toward her truck.
Dean called out from beside the office.
"Careful, Clara. Put enough dead tractors back there and that Ford might finally surrender."
She ignored him.
Earl lowered the engine block.
Clara wrapped chain around it carefully.
Not because she feared damaging the block.
Because she had learned never to treat test material carelessly.
Garbage taught nothing if you destroyed it before studying why it failed.
She pulled the chain tight.
Earl leaned against the loader.
"You still won't tell me?"
"No."
"What?"
"What I'm doing."
"Because you know it's foolish?"
Clara stopped.
She looked at him.
"No."
"Then why?"
"Because if I explain it now, you'll tell me why it can't work."
Earl grinned.
"Maybe it can't."
"Then I'll find out myself."
She climbed into the truck.
As she drove away, she looked in the mirror.
All three men were laughing.
Clara smiled.
Not because she enjoyed being mocked.
Because Earl had just given her another failure for free.
And failures were expensive when you had to make them yourself.
The Kessler farm sat nine miles outside Eldora.
One hundred sixty-three acres.
Mostly corn and soybeans.
Twenty-six acres of hay.
A few cattle.
Too much debt.
Not enough machinery.
The place had belonged to Clara's grandfather, Walter Kessler, before it belonged to her father.
Walter had been a farmer by necessity and a mechanic by temperament.
He repaired everything.
Sometimes because he could.
Usually because the family could not afford not to.
The old repair shop behind the machine shed had once been Walter's kingdom.
Hand tools lined the wall by size.
Coffee cans held bolts, washers, cotter pins, and objects nobody else could identify.
A lathe sat beneath a canvas cover.
A drill press leaned slightly to the left because the floor beneath it had settled twenty years earlier.
And in the center stood Walter's heavy steel workbench.
After he died, the shop went quiet.
Clara was seventeen then.
Her father, Thomas, continued using it for simple repairs, but nobody treated the place the way Walter had.
Nobody stayed after midnight.
Nobody wrote measurements on chalkboards.
Nobody collected broken parts just to understand them.
Until Clara.
By the winter of 1989, the shop windows glowed almost every night.
Her father noticed.
He did not ask many questions.
Thomas Kessler was fifty-seven, broad through the shoulders, beginning to stoop slightly, and tired in ways that never showed until he thought nobody was looking.
He had survived the agricultural crisis of the early 1980s by selling eighty acres.
That sentence sounded clean.
The reality had not been.
Clara remembered bankers at the kitchen table.
Her mother crying in the bedroom.
Neighbors disappearing from farms that had been in their families for generations.
Auction notices nailed near roads.
Telephone calls nobody wanted to answer.
When land values collapsed and interest rates climbed, the Kesslers nearly went under.
They survived.
But survival had changed Thomas.
He distrusted debt.
He repaired equipment too long.
He postponed purchases until delay itself became expensive.
The tractor represented all those instincts at once.
An old International 806.
Red once.
Now mostly faded.
It had pulled implements across Kessler ground since before Clara was born.
Thomas knew every sound the tractor made.
Every leak.
Every vibration.
Every stubborn habit.
The 806 still worked.