“Not for long.”
“You need to rest.”
Evelyn’s eyes were closed. “When the water comes, don’t fight it.”
Clara thought she was confused by fever.
Then Evelyn opened her eyes, and there was nothing confused in them.
“Attic,” she whispered. “Cedar chest.”
Clara leaned closer. “What about it?”
“Trust the water.”
Those were among the last clear words she spoke.
Evelyn died two days later.
The funeral filled the little Baptist church outside town. Women brought casseroles in covered dishes. Men stood near the stove after the service, hats turning slowly in their hands, and spoke about Samuel’s war record and Evelyn’s blackberry pie. Some cried sincerely. Others offered the solemn politeness rural communities reserved for the dead, even when they had spent years calling the dead woman peculiar.
Afterward, life emptied out with shocking speed.
Visitors stopped coming. Dishes disappeared from the kitchen. Ben returned to the grain elevator. Clara stayed in the farmhouse because somebody needed to sort through fifty years of possessions, handle bills, and wait for the attorney to finish the estate papers.
That was when she learned the farm was not free and clear.
Evelyn had kept the mortgage current for years by selling eggs, preserves, blackberry jam, flowers, and occasional produce from her garden. But the winter had been expensive. Roof repairs, doctor bills, taxes, and a missed payment had stacked together. The mortgage itself was not enormous, but enormous was a relative word when Clara possessed forty-one dollars in a savings account, twenty-three dollars in cash, and a part-time job that paid by the hour.
Walter Henderson of First Mercantile Bank came to the farmhouse in early March.
He was a smooth-faced man in his fifties who smelled faintly of shaving soap and cigarette smoke. He sat at Evelyn’s kitchen table, placed his hat beside his ledger book, and explained that the bank was sympathetic but could not operate on sentiment. There were arrears. There were taxes. There were legal deadlines.
“What if I keep making payments?” Clara asked.
“With what income?”
“I work in town.”
“You earn twelve dollars and change most weeks.”
Clara hated that he knew the amount.
Henderson folded his hands. “Your grandmother was resourceful. I’ll give her that. But you are nineteen years old, Miss Jennings. You have no farming income, no husband, no hired help, and no crop. I would be doing you no kindness by pretending this situation is different from what it is.”
“What are you proposing?”
“Sell.”
The word sat between them.
“The house and higher ground have some value. The bottomland less so. There are buyers. Mr. Blackwell has expressed interest before.”
Clara’s shoulders stiffened.
Tom Blackwell owned more acreage than anyone in their section of the county. His farm began two properties east and stretched in wide rectangles of corn, soybeans, and pasture. He had tried for years to buy the Jennings land, mostly because owning it would give him continuous acreage from the county road nearly to Miller’s Creek.
“My grandmother always said no.”
Henderson gave a patient smile. “Your grandmother lived under different circumstances.”
“So do I.”
“Exactly.”
He gave her sixty days.
Clara spent the first two weeks trying everything ordinary.
She asked the dime store for more hours. Mr. Brackett gave her Saturday afternoons. She offered to mend clothes for women at church and earned three dollars. She sold two old lamps and a walnut washstand to an antique dealer from Terre Haute. She gathered the last jars of Evelyn’s blackberry preserves and sold them at the co-op counter until the supply was gone.
The numbers remained cruel.
Even if she ate almost nothing and spent nothing on the house, she would not reach the amount required before the deadline.
That was why she climbed into the attic on March thirty-first with a broom and garbage bags, not because she felt ready to empty Evelyn’s life but because an auction company was coming to inspect the household goods.
Dust floated through the narrow beam from the attic window. The room smelled of cedar, old paper, dried herbs, and summer heat trapped from years past. Boxes filled the corners. Quilts lay folded over trunks. Samuel’s army coat hung from a nail beneath the rafters, wrapped in cloth to keep moths away.
The cedar chest sat exactly where Evelyn had said.
On top of it rested the bundle.
Clara almost threw it away.
The oilcloth was stained. The twine disintegrated beneath her fingers. What lay inside appeared to be nothing more than pruned branches, each around two feet long, gray-brown, hard, leafless, and dry.
Then she saw the note.
She read it once.
Then again.
Then she sat on the cedar chest and read it a third time.
Plant these in the mud when the creek rises. Trust the water.
On the back, the smaller instructions.
Clara ran a finger over the handwriting.
She could see Evelyn writing it. Bent close to the kitchen table, lips moving silently as she formed each line. The thought made Clara’s throat tighten.
She carried the bundle downstairs.
For three days, she soaked the sticks in rainwater inside an old galvanized wash tub. She changed the water every morning because the note did not tell her whether to, and doing something felt safer than doing nothing. The branches darkened as they absorbed moisture. Tiny cracks in the bark softened.
On the third evening, Ben came by.
He found the tub beside the back porch.
“What is that?”
Clara told him.