“I don’t know if staying here means I can’t.”
“It might not.”
That possibility had never occurred to either of them clearly before.
Ben looked older than forty, but not as defeated as he had beside the drowned field in April.
“I hated farming because I thought farming meant doing what my father did,” he said. “Planting what everybody planted, borrowing every spring, praying every summer, and pretending the bank wasn’t waiting every winter. Maybe I confused the land with the way we used it.”
Clara thought of Evelyn’s sentence.
The land tells you what it can do.
“Grandma didn’t confuse them.”
“No.”
Ben’s eyes moved around the kitchen, across the jars, the notebooks, the old stove.
“Your grandmother confused very little. She just explained it in a way designed to annoy reasonable people.”
Clara smiled.
Before leaving, Ben walked down to the field.
He did not step among the trees at first. He stood at the edge, hands in his pockets, watching leaves move in the evening wind.
The tallest willows reached nearly to Clara’s waist.
Ben touched one.
His fingers closed gently around the stem.
“This came from one of those sticks?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her.
“All right.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m done calling them sticks.”
It was not full belief.
But it was a beginning.
June brought heat.
Not drought yet, but enough warmth to make the county’s late-planted corn leap upward. Farmers relaxed slightly. The fields that had looked like ponds in April became broad squares of green. The co-op laughter shifted into explanations.
Willows were easy to root, people said.
Everybody knew that.
Clara had not done anything remarkable.
The flooded field had probably been ideal for that particular species.
Harold Vance had overreacted in his original warning.
Men who had laughed at Clara now spoke as though her success had been obvious from the beginning.
This bothered her more than mockery.
At least mockery had been honest.
Vance noticed too.
At the co-op one afternoon, a farmer named Earl Dawson told him white willow would grow anywhere if a person shoved it in deep enough.
Vance removed his glasses.
“Mr. Dawson, in April you told me Miss Jennings was attempting to grow broom handles.”
Earl turned red.
“I was joking.”
“So was the willow, apparently.”
Clara heard about that exchange from three different people.
She began to think she might like Harold Vance.
By mid-June, the field no longer looked experimental.
It looked intentional.
Rows of silver-green young trees rose from the dark ground. Clara’s irregular spacing, embarrassing to her at first, turned out to create pockets of light and shade. Grasses appeared beneath them. Clover spread in places where it had never survived summer before.
Birds came.
First red-winged blackbirds.
Then finches.
A pair of killdeer nested along the drier edge.
Insects changed too. Dragonflies appeared in numbers Clara had never seen. Mosquitoes, surprisingly, seemed less dense where standing water had begun draining more quickly.
The bottomland sounded different.
It no longer held the stagnant silence of a place between flood and drought.
Leaves moved.
Birds called.
Insects hummed.