Rural Missouri, early summer 1991. A regional equipment distributor two counties over was clearing out an old warehouse, and word of it reached Bell Farm Equipment Repair the way most news did around there—through the parts counter. 1,400 pieces, give or take: knotter gears, bill hooks, twine discs, springs, bushings, sprockets, small brackets, bearings. All of it packed loose in cardboard boxes that had sat on a shelf so long the labels had started to fade. Replacement parts for older square balers, the kind of machine most manufacturers had quietly stopped promoting years before, favoring the newer round balers everybody with money was switching over to. The distributor just wanted the shelf space back.
Malik Carter was 16 that summer, and he’d been sweeping floors and pulling parts at Bell’s shop after school for going on two years by then. Long enough to know his way around a parts book, and long enough to have heard Mr. Bell mutter more than once about how half the county was still running equipment 20 years old because a new baler cost more than some men made in a year. His family had farmed a small piece of ground on the edge of town for two generations, hay and a few head of cattle, and Malik had grown up around machinery that broke down more often than it should have, watching his father and grandfather nurse old equipment through one more season rather than take on debt for something new. He understood, better than most boys his age, exactly what it meant when a farmer said a machine was too old to be worth much. It usually meant the man saying it hadn’t priced a replacement lately.