INVENTORY RECONCILIATION
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Then he went back to work.
Every morning began the same way.
Leonard checked weather.
Soil.
Equipment.
Then the repair status.
The planting window continued shrinking.
Kansas spring did not care about freight systems.
Moisture gradually left the upper soil profile.
Winds strengthened.
Afternoons became warmer.
The secondary equipment continued running, but the farm was falling behind.
Leonard adjusted again.
One field that should have received a more deliberate seedbed preparation pass was shortened.
Another was moved ahead of schedule because moisture conditions favored planting immediately.
A third had to wait.
Leonard hated farming defensively.
Good farming depended on timing work because conditions were right.
Defensive farming meant doing work because something worse might happen tomorrow.
By day twenty-two, Dale no longer gave confident estimates.
“Tracking says it left Georgia four days ago.”
“Where is it now?”
“Intermediate routing.”
“What does that mean?”
“I wish I had a better answer.”
“Do you have a delivery date?”
“No firm date.”
“Can you see the physical scan?”
“Not the final one.”
Leonard wrote everything down.
At night, he stood inside the machinery shed looking at the silent 7R.
There was something particularly frustrating about a quarter-million-dollar-class piece of working equipment rendered useless by a component small enough to carry under one arm.
Frank Bower, Leonard’s father, would have understood.
Frank had farmed through the machinery shortages and financial turbulence of the 1970s.
He never trusted the size of equipment to indicate the strength of the system behind it.
“When you buy iron,” Frank once told his son, “you’re buying three things.”
Leonard had been twenty-three.
“What three?”
“The machine.”
“The man who fixes it.”
“And the shelf behind him.”
Leonard laughed at the time.
Frank did not.
“If the shelf is empty, the first two don’t matter much.”
That sentence returned to Leonard repeatedly during April.
On the twenty-eighth day, the coupling arrived.
Dale called.
“Leonard, it’s here.”
Leonard stood beside the kitchen telephone.
“Physically?”
“In my hand.”
“Good.”
“When can you get me in?”
Silence.
Leonard immediately knew there was another problem.
“Dale.”
“We’re backed up.”
“How far?”
“You’re fourth.”
Leonard stared at the wall.
“My tractor has been waiting twenty-eight days on your part.”
“I know.”
“It was originally on the schedule.”
“I know.”
“So what happened to the slot?”
“When the component didn’t arrive, I had to move other jobs into the bay.”
“Understandable.”
“Now those machines are torn down.”
“When can mine go in?”
“Best estimate, several days.”
Leonard rubbed his forehead.
“Can you send somebody here?”
“Not for that job.”
“I can haul it tonight.”
“That helps.”
“Will it change the order?”
“I can’t bump three customers already promised.”
Leonard said nothing for several seconds.
He knew those farmers.
Not personally, perhaps.
But he knew what they were facing.
Their planting windows mattered too.
Dale was trapped inside his own backlog.
Leonard finally said:
“I’ll bring it.”
The coupling that had traveled from Georgia now sat inside Kingman while Leonard’s tractor waited again.
Another six days passed before the machine was finished.
On day thirty-four, the 7R 330 returned to Bower Farm.
Leonard climbed into the cab.
Turned the key.
The diesel settled into its familiar idle.
Hydraulic pressure held.
He tested the implement.
Normal.
A younger Leonard might have felt relief.
At seventy-two, the emotion was more complicated.
The tractor was repaired.
The season was not.
He opened his notebook.
DAY 34
TRACTOR RETURNED TO FIELD
FINAL PRESSURE CHECK PASSED
TOTAL FORCED DOWNTIME: 34 DAYS