“What’s that noise?”
“I don’t know. It started after the accident yesterday.”
He stopped.
“What accident?”
There was no hiding it anymore.
I told him everything.
The test run.
The lost traction.
The slide into the ditch.
The damage.
The rushed repairs.
Every detail I’d been hoping to hide.
Grandpa’s face went through several colors.
Red.
White.
Red again.
“You crashed it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You crashed it and didn’t tell me.”
“I was going to tell you. I promised Iris I would.”
“But you didn’t tell me when I first walked in. You let me find out like this.”
He knelt beside the tractor and started examining the undercarriage.
I knelt beside him, watching him trace fuel lines, check mounting points, and feel for anything loose.
His hand stopped on something I couldn’t see.
Stayed there a long moment.
“Goldie, look at this.”
I crawled farther underneath.
He was pointing at a gasket.
Old.
Cracked.
Barely holding together.
“That’s been failing for weeks. Maybe months.”
I stared at it.
“It’s not from your modifications.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because this is original equipment, and it’s rotted through.”
He kept examining.
His movements became more focused.
He found the oil line that had come loose in the crash and traced it back to its connection point.
“This wasn’t loose because of the accident. The mount was already failing. The crash just finished what was already breaking.”
He slid out from beneath the tractor, oil-stained and thoughtful.
“If you hadn’t taken this machine apart, I never would have found these problems.”
He looked toward the John Deere.
“Another two weeks, maybe three, and this engine would have seized completely.”
“During harvest season?”
“During harvest season.”
I stared at him.
“So I saved it accidentally.”
“The exhaust work you did is sloppy. You rushed the welds after the accident, and it shows.”
I lowered my eyes.
“But the core modifications, the carburetor, the intake system, the design work, those are solid.”
I looked up again.