The tractor had been dead for three days, and Dad talked to it like it was only sleeping.

I found him in the boneyard before the sun cleared the ridge, kneeling in the last of the wet grass with the side panel off the old 8R and his tablet balanced on the tire. The boneyard is what we call the row of machines behind the pack shed: six tractors, two of the little weeding robots, a spray drone with a cracked arm, all of them from companies that don’t exist anymore. When the companies died in the Crash, the machines died with them, or that’s what everybody thought. The software phoned home to servers that got switched off, and one morning a hundred-thousand-dollar tractor decided it was a paperweight. Dad calls them orphans. He says it like the word costs him something.

“Hand me the green cable,” he said, not looking up. “Not the blue one. The blue one lies.”

I gave him the green one. It was maybe half past five and already the air had that dusty, held-breath feel it gets when a day is planning to be cruel. Week five of the drought. The super-year, everyone was calling it: the kind of El Niño summer that dries out the whole middle of the country at once and then, if the old pattern held, tried to drown it on the way out. The grass had gone the color of a paper bag everywhere except the shade line of the pack shed, and the Kickapoo, down past the county road, had pulled so far back into its own bed that you could see the sandbars like ribs.

Here is a thing you should know about me before we go any further: I was born in a place with a tide. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, sixty-seven miles of river south of New Orleans, where the water had a schedule and you lived by it the way other people live by a clock. Then the water stopped keeping the schedule, and then it stopped being water you could live beside at all, and now I live on a hillside in Wisconsin where the river does whatever it wants. The tide doesn’t come here. That’s the first thing you have to unlearn. For two years after we came up I kept waking at four in the morning, certain I could hear it moving up the road. I never could. It’s a quieter water up here. It takes the long way around.

So when I say I found my father kneeling in front of a dead machine in the half-dark, talking to it, you have to understand that this was not a strange sight in our family. We are people who talk to things that are supposed to be past listening. Grandmother talks to the satsuma trees. Mom talks to the co-op’s ledger like it owes her a personal apology. My little brother Theo talks to the chickens, though in his defense the chickens started it.

Dad talks to machines, because before he was a farmer, he built them.

“They locked the firmware,” he said, pulling a little green board out of the guts of the thing and blowing on it like a birthday candle. “Back when they were a company. So you couldn’t fix your own machine; you had to pay them to come fix it. Then they stopped being a company.” He squinted at the board in the gray light. “So now nobody can fix it. Except me. Because I helped write the stupid thing.”

That’s the part people forget about my father, or never knew. Before the Crash he was an engineer: a real one, the kind with a badge and a lab. Agricultural robotics. The vision systems, the way a tractor learns a row of corn and drives itself down a quarter mile without touching a plant it isn’t supposed to. Before that, when he was young, he was going to build things that flew. There’s a photograph in the shop, curling at the corners, of a six-wheeled machine sitting on red rocks under a butterscotch sky, and when I was little I honestly thought it was a relative. In a way I still do. Dad keeps it over the workbench the way other houses keep a saint.

He clipped the green cable to two pins on the board, bridged something with a strip of foil, and woke the tablet with his thumb. A wall of text started scrolling, too fast for me to read.

He read it anyway. That’s the other thing. My father reads machine logs the way Grandmother reads the sky: a long practiced squint, and then a verdict.

“There,” he said softly. “There you are.” He tapped the screen twice. “You’re not dead. You’re just scared. Somebody told you your whole world went away, and you believed them.” He typed a line, then another, hunched over the tablet with his lips moving, and I knew better than to ask, because this was the part where he was lying to the tractor. That’s how he explains it to Theo. The machine wakes up and asks the sky, am I allowed to exist?, and the company’s servers used to answer, and now there’s just silence, and the machine takes silence for no. So Dad built a little box, out of a dead phone and a weatherproof case, that answers instead. It sits on a fence post at the top of the yard and says yes, in the dead company’s own language, to every orphan in the valley, all day long. He calls it the Chaplain.

The 8R thought about it. Machines do think about it; there’s a pause, every time, that has nothing to do with processing speed. Then the starter turned, caught, and the big diesel shook itself down into that idle you feel in your back teeth, and forty thousand pounds of orphaned American iron stood there in the dawn, breathing.

Dad didn’t smile. He put his hand flat on the hood for a second, the way you’d touch a horse.

“Okay,” he said. “Now the hard part.”

The hard part was water, because the hard part is always water. Too much of it or not enough, ours or somebody else’s, coming or going. Slow water, Grandmother calls the whole century, and she doesn’t just mean the sea that took our parish an inch at a time. She means all of it: the way the trouble doesn’t arrive like a wave anymore but like a stain, rising so gradually you could farm right through it and tell yourself each year was just a bad year.

Five weeks without rain is not slow water. Five weeks without rain in the first summer your family has ever had a real crop in the ground is a hole in the bottom of your life.

You have to understand what the crop was. Ninety-one satsuma trees on the south slope, each one a little argument my grandmother has been having with the entire state of Wisconsin for six years. You are not supposed to be able to grow citrus here. You are not supposed to be able to grow citrus a thousand miles north of where citrus grows. But the winters aren’t what they were (the map people redrew the whole country a while back, dragged all the growing-lines north like somebody rearranging furniture) and Grandmother is stubborn in a way the climate has finally gotten stubborn enough to meet. Satsuma on trifoliate root, planted in the warm pocket where the hill folds south, with Dad’s frost fans standing over them like herons. Six years of grafting and losing and grafting again, and this spring, for the first time, all ninety-one trees set fruit and held it.

The first cold-hardy citrus crop on the upper Mississippi. Little green promises, hundreds of them, swelling toward October.

And every one of them was drinking from a drip line, and the drip lines drank from the well and the pond, and the pond was down to its knees.

“Four hours,” Dad said, swinging up into the 8R’s cab to move it off the boneyard row. “Maybe less. It’s going to be ninety-eight by noon and the little trees will start closing up shop. I want the whole east block walked before that. You want to fly the line, or you want to watch me fly it and pretend you’re not learning?”

I flew it. I always fly it now, but he asks the same way every time, and every time he stands behind me with his hands in his pockets like a man at a horse race he has fixed.

The drone is one of ours: co-op built, which means it’s three brands of dead company and one brand of Dad. It went up off the shed roof into the flat pink light and I took it down the first row of the east block at eleven meters, cameras drinking everything: leaf angle, canopy color, the infrared signature of a tree quietly deciding whether to live. Dad called the line behind me the whole way, low and even, like a coach, like a prayer. Down two. Hold. You’re drifting: feel it, don’t fight it. There, row nine, see how she’s silvering? Flag it. That’s the compact’s gauge talking, by the way, telling everybody the aquifer’s fine. Don’t trust it. Trust ours.

The compact. I should explain that too, since you weren’t raised here, whoever you are.

The country I was born in was called the United States of America, and it still exists, sort of, the way a house exists after the family moves out. Nobody bombed it. Nobody marched on anybody, whatever the feeds said that year. What happened, the way Dad tells it, is that it got tired: the Crash in ’29 took the money, the Quiet Year in ’32 took the nerve, and the hot years after took the attention, and one by one the things that used to be true for everyone, everywhere (the weather satellites, the flood maps, the check that came when the river ate your house) stopped being true unless somebody closer to home made them true. So the states pulled the work in close. Where we live, the practical world is run by the Mississippi Watershed Compact, which meters the barge locks and sells flood cover and pushes out a river forecast every morning at six, and by the Lakes bloc north of us, who guard their water like a dragon on a hoard, and by trade agreements between them that Mom says are just treaties wearing a name tag. There’s a toll now on the county bridge that used to be free. There’s a coffee tin on our shelf with three kinds of scrip in it, sorted by rubber band, and half the corn-colored notes in it come from the Greengrass place up the valley, because the co-op's oldest trade line runs to the Ho-Chunk growers there (corn down, citrus starts up) and nobody remembers it starting, because good trades don't have anniversaries. Theo has never once in his life pledged allegiance to anything except the chickens.

Dad carries the old country around inside him like a splinter that went in too deep to dig out. He doesn’t rant about it. It’s worse than that: he’s polite about it, the way you’re polite about someone who died. But stand next to him while the compact’s official gauge says the aquifer is fine and his own sensors (thirty of them, buried all over the valley, wired to a model he trained himself on our own dirt) say it isn’t, and you’ll hear the whole eulogy in four words.

“Ours is better,” he said, when the drone came home and dropped its map onto the tablet. The east block bloomed up in false color, green and yellow and, along the ninth row, a seam of rust red. “Ours is here.” He tapped the red seam. “Everything they built got so big it couldn’t see the ground anymore. We got small. Small can see the ground.”

He said it quiet, almost to himself, and I wrote it down that night, because I’d started doing that by then: writing down the things people say out loud up here, in the notebook Grandmother gave me. I didn’t know yet what the notebook was going to become. That’s a later part of the story.

We walked row nine on foot, the two of us, in the first real heat. Three emitters clogged with mineral scale, one line cut clean (vole, probably) and one tree, the ninth in from the fence, that had no excuse at all except that it was thinking about quitting. Dad knelt at its base for a long minute with his fingers in the dirt.

“Not this year,” he told it. “Ask me again in October.”

Grandmother had biscuits going when we came down, and the kitchen radio was doing the six o’clock river forecast in its flat compact voice (stage at La Crosse four point one and falling, lock delays at eight and nine, burn advisory for the listed counties) while Theo, age ten, ate directly from the jam jar with the focus of a surgeon. Mom had already gone down to the co-op office; market run to the Lakes border on Thursday meant two days of paperwork, because selling cheese and cider across a compact line takes more stamps now than it once took to mail a letter to the moon.

“Well?” Grandmother said, meaning the trees, because with her it is always first the trees.

“Holding,” Dad said. “Row nine’s sulking. We’ll shift the night water to the east block and I’ll tighten the model this afternoon.” He took his coffee and stood at the window the way he does, looking up the valley, and that’s when we all heard it, a sound our valley doesn’t make: a high, thin whine, too smooth to be anybody’s rebuilt drone, too slow to be weather. Dad went still the way the tractor goes still.

It crossed the ridge to the north, small and white and glinting, flying a survey pattern. Straight lines. Patient turns. Mapping. Nothing up here flies straight lines; ours all wander like bees, because ours are all half-homemade. This thing flew like money.

Theo said, “Whose is that?”

“Nobody’s from the valley,” Dad said. He watched it make one more pass, and I watched him, and I saw him do the thing he does with trouble, which is to file it, carefully, in the place where he keeps things he intends to take apart later. Then he turned around and was ordinary again, or something shaped like ordinary. “Finish up, Theo. Del, tonight’s the first potluck: your grandmother’s telling the start-of-season story, and if we’re late she’ll make it longer.”

“I heard that,” said Grandmother, who hears everything.

So that was the morning: a resurrection, a map, a red seam in the east block, a strange machine flying straight lines over land that wasn’t theirs. By October, every piece of it would matter: the tractor, the model, the notebook, even Theo’s chickens, though I still find that part hard to forgive. But standing in the kitchen that morning I only understood the smallest piece of what I’d seen in the boneyard at first light: my father kneeling in front of a dead thing the old world had left behind, telling it, in its own language, that it was still allowed to exist.

“Ours is better,” he’d said. “Ours is here.”

I didn’t know yet that he was talking about more than the tractor.