At fifty-one, he could hear a loose bearing across a busy yard.
He had left school at sixteen. Everything he knew about machinery, business and people had been learnt by working beside someone who knew more than he did.
The farm now employed seven people. The youngest was seventeen — almost the same age the farmer had been when his own working life began.
On this farm, the website lived as a small brown bird beside the office computer. Nobody found this unusual. Websites took different forms in different businesses; his happened to have feathers.
Whenever the bird produced an enquiry, it left a small dark dropping on the newspaper beneath its perch. Soon afterwards, the telephone would ring or an order would arrive.
In the early years, the bird was lively. The farmer fed it fresh photographs, new services and answers to customers’ questions.
The little pile beneath the perch grew. The farmer disliked cleaning it, but he never complained when the phone rang.
Then the business became busier. More people joined the team, and the farmer spent less time in the office.
The bird could look after itself, he thought. After all, it was a website.
Years passed. Its bowl still contained the same few lines the farmer had written one wet Sunday evening.
Reliable family business. Quality work. Contact us today.
There was also an old photograph of the farmer with his father beside their first tractor. His father had died the following spring.
The farmer had once asked for everything on the website to be updated except that photograph. Somehow, nothing had been updated at all.
Online, the business still had one tractor and two workers.
One of them was no longer alive.
During a quiet October, the farmer began checking the newspaper every morning. Occasionally, there was one small result. Most days, there was nothing.
He made the telephone number larger. He changed a blue button to red. He even moved the newspaper nearer to the perch in case the distance was causing the problem.
The bird pecked the red button once and looked mildly offended.
He added a discount. He stared at the bird. He reminded it that seven people expected to be paid on Friday.
The bird tucked its head beneath one wing.
On Thursday evening, the farmer opened the wage sheet. He knew every name without reading it.
One worker had just bought a house. Another was expecting his first child. The youngest worker’s mother had thanked the farmer for giving her son a chance, which had embarrassed all three of them.
To somebody else, an enquiry might have been a number on a report. To the farmer, it could become three days of work and another Friday when every name on the sheet was paid.
He looked again at the clean newspaper.
Outside, the team were finishing for the day. Someone shouted across the yard, and the others laughed. The youngest worker closed the gate behind them.
The farmer remained at his desk until the last van disappeared.
Only then did he look above the newspaper.
The bird was smaller than he remembered. Its feathers had lost their shine. The water dish was dry, and its beak rested beside words and photographs left there years ago.
Behind it, the old picture of his father glowed on the computer screen. They were both smiling beside a tractor that had not run in nearly a decade.
The farmer smiled too. For a moment, he was sixteen again, and his father was explaining something he had pretended to understand.
The bird tilted its head and looked back at him.
For the first time in months, the farmer forgot to inspect the floor.