"I'm 20. And I'm here to bid.""Bid with what? Lunch money? Your clerk already made sure.""Those tractors were old before you learned to walk. Five Ford 5000s, five dead engines.""Then show me a record that says the engines are dead.""I don't owe you records. I owe you nothing.""All right. Last lot, $2,000 from the young man. Anybody else?""Sell it. As is, no warranty, no history. Nobody's ever going to open those things up anyway.""Sold.""You just bought five expensive lawn ornaments.""And I guess you won't mind if I find out why they stopped."Victoria Whitmore turned back. "Find out all you want. Just don't show up at my office begging for help when they won't start.""I'm not begging you for anything. I paid for them. They're mine."$2,000 plus fees was nearly half of what Elijah had saved in two years of fixing other people's machines. Now it belonged to five tractors the biggest outfit in Bell Creek called scrap. He didn't argue. He walked to the nearest Ford, fitted a breaker bar onto the crankshaft nut, and leaned into it.The engine turned, stiff through compression, then free. No grinding, no lock. He checked the next one, then the next. All five turned.If these engines weren't dead, what had killed all five tractors? And why was Victoria so eager to dump them?"A funny thing."Elijah looked up from the crankshaft nut. An older black man in a sweat-stained seed cap stood beside the last tractor, studying its rusted exhaust stack like it owed him money."All five quit the same summer.""Quit how?" Elijah asked.The man only nodded once and walked toward a pickup at the edge of the gravel lot, a trailer behind it with a peanut digger strapped down. By the time Elijah set down the breaker bar, the truck was pulling out onto the highway.Elijah folded the bank letter and slid it back inside his denim jacket. An hour earlier at the registration table, the white farmer ahead of him had signed his name and walked off with a bidder card. When Elijah stepped up, the clerk asked for proof of funds and read the letter twice before handing him a number. Nobody said anything about it. Nobody had to.The paperwork ate the rest of the morning: $2,000 for the lot, a $200 buyer's premium, and $450 to a towing outfit that would haul the tractors home in three trips. In the cab of his old pickup, Elijah opened his banking app and watched the balance drop to $2,150. Almost two years of shop work and weekend repairs cut by more than half before lunch once the towing was paid.The last load rolled off the flatbed Monday morning. Marlene Brooks stood in the yard with her co-op badge clipped to her blouse and her car keys in her hand, watching five faded green tractors settle into the grass beside her late husband's shop."Did you buy a tractor?" she said. "Or did you buy a graveyard?"