fought the fence posts every summer. Callie's great-grandfather Silas had bought the adjoining pieces when land could be acquired through hard bargaining and years of payments instead of the enormous financing arrangements modern farms required. Her father had told her that the property looked small on a county map but had taken three generations of work to make it whole.
When she was little, she had believed farms belonged to families the way their names belonged to them. No one had explained that a deed was less useful when every machine standing on the deeded land carried a note, every note carried a deadline, and every bad season forced the next season to begin with less room for mistakes. Her father had understood those things, though he had never liked talking about them around the kitchen table. By the time Callie inherited the responsibility, the debts were already braided together so tightly that she sometimes felt as though pulling at one would tighten all the others.
Her father died during planting two springs earlier. He had been standing beside the planter on a windy afternoon, arguing with a broken hydraulic fitting as if an argument could make steel behave. Dutch was fifty yards away when he saw him collapse. By the time the ambulance reached the county road, Callie's father was gone, leaving behind half a field planted, two unpaid equipment invoices, and a daughter who still thought she could solve any problem if she worked hard enough.
Her mother, Ruth Voss, managed to remain at Hollow Bend for eight months afterward. She had tried to sit at the kitchen table where her husband's chair remained pushed back, had tried to walk past the mudroom without seeing his boots, and had tried not to cry whenever Eli asked a question that began with the words "When Dad used to." Eventually grief took the shape of a sister's invitation to Ohio and a suitcase packed with clothes Callie could not remember seeing her wear. Ruth called every Sunday and sent money when she had any to send, but she did not come back.
Eli stayed because he was fourteen and because, when their mother asked whether he wanted to move east with her, he had looked at the barn and the cottonwoods and answered that somebody had to help Callie. She had protested that he was a child and did not owe the farm his future. Eli had told her that helping with chores did not mean he intended to give up school. In the end, all three of them had agreed to a temporary arrangement that kept becoming permanent one month at a time.
Dutch Hollis made four people into something that resembled a working farm crew. He was pushing seventy, with bowed legs, strong forearms, and a habit of announcing bad news in the same tone he used to announce supper. He took half the wage he could have earned elsewhere, which bothered Callie more than he knew. Whenever she raised the matter, he told her he had no intention of spending his last good years teaching somebody else where the grease fittings were on a tractor he did not already know.