Eli was at the stove trying to toast bread without burning it. "What isn't?" he asked.
"Maybe the same thing we found." She laid the letter on the table where he could see it. "Somebody wanted to buy what Silas grew. Apparently he didn't want to sell."
"Did he have a name for it?"
"Not in this letter." Callie studied the signature at the bottom of the offer. The company had disappeared decades earlier, but the address was real and the paper was old enough to have yellowed along the folds. "I think we need somebody who remembers what farming was like before Dad was born."
Dutch suggested Odessa Puit before Callie had finished explaining what she wanted. She was a retired agricultural science teacher in her eighties, lived in a small white house near the county courthouse, and had spent forty years clipping material from newsletters that most people threw away without reading. Dutch claimed that if an old tractor had ever broken down in Maro County, Odessa probably knew who had bought the replacement and what it cost. Callie called her that afternoon.
Odessa listened without interrupting. When Callie mentioned Silas Voss, there was a long pause at the other end of the line and then the sound of a chair moving across a wooden floor. "You'd better come over," the older woman said. "Bring whatever writing you've got. I thought the last of that seed was gone when they tore down the south barn."
Her house smelled of lemon furniture polish, books, and the cinnamon cookies cooling on the kitchen counter. Boxes occupied the spare room from floor to waist height, every one labeled with a year or a local organization. Odessa met them wearing a cardigan with one elbow darned in a different color of yarn, and she studied Callie's face for a long moment before speaking. "You've got your father's eyes," she said. "And the way Silas held his mouth when he was thinking somebody was trying to sell him his own land."
Eli almost laughed. Callie did not. She had come intending to ask technical questions and found herself unexpectedly moved by a stranger who remembered the faces of people she had lost. Odessa led them to the kitchen, poured coffee for Callie and a glass of apple juice for Eli, and waited until the papers were spread on the table.
"Silas wasn't easy," she began. "People remember him as wise because enough time has passed to make stubbornness sound respectable. He argued with extension men, machinery dealers, and sometimes his own family. But the old man could watch a field and tell you what had changed before anybody else knew there was something to notice."