Bragg did not think of himself as cruel. Cruelty, in his mind, involved anger or pleasure in another person's suffering, and he felt neither as the trucks crossed the county line. What he felt was the satisfaction of a risk managed and a contractual claim converted into inventory. He told himself that was all the morning meant.
It was not all. His grandfather had once farmed adjoining land beside Silas Voss, and old people in Maro County had talked about a stubborn type of corn that Silas grew when the other fields gave up during dry summers. Bragg had heard those stories as a child, discarded most of them as farm-table exaggerations, then remembered them when his seed-development manager mentioned unusual results in soil and volunteer plant samples taken near Hollow Bend. The old rumors had not been sufficient reason to purchase the farm, but they had made him more interested in keeping the Voss account close than he admitted to Roy or to himself.
When he reached the elevator, Bragg asked his manager to keep the Hollow Bend delivery tickets separate. He offered no explanation. The manager was accustomed to peculiar instructions from a man whose success had taught him that a good instinct could be worth more than a polite explanation, and he placed the tickets in a marked folder without asking why.
Back at Hollow Bend, Callie spent the next two days doing the ugly little tasks that followed a loss. She called the bank, explained what had happened, and asked whether the revised payment schedule could be put in writing before another deadline arrived. She called Halverson Feed Supply and listened while the owner tried to find a way to sound sympathetic without promising credit he could not afford to extend. She asked Dutch what he absolutely needed paid before winter and wrote the amount on the legal pad she had used to celebrate the harvest.
Then she crossed out the harvest estimate. She did it with one line, not a dozen angry marks, because she needed to keep the original number visible. Losing something did not make it less important to record accurately, and somewhere beneath her grief she remained her father's daughter in the matter of keeping books. When she closed the pad, she remembered that Eli had tried to tell her something about the old corn crib.
The old corn crib sat beyond the cattle pasture, past a stretch of fence where three generations of repairs had left more wire than original wood. It had been a handsome structure once, judging by the thickness of the posts that still stood and the careful joinery beneath the sagging roof. By Callie's childhood, it was already too far gone to store grain, and her father had stopped repairing it after a spring storm tore the western wall loose. Now wild grapevine pulled at the beams, goldenrod grew through the floor, and the whole thing looked ready to surrender to the first hard snow.