The sight was shocking.
Where water usually ran knee-deep in spring, only a narrow ribbon remained beneath exposed roots. The bank had cracked. Grass above it was brown.
Clara showed Mrs. Phelps how to angle some cuttings along the bank and plant others upright in lower damp pockets.
They soaked bundles overnight in a stock tank first because the ground was dry.
“Will they live?” Mrs. Phelps asked.
Clara looked at the cuttings.
“I don’t know.”
Mrs. Phelps smiled.
“That’s the most trustworthy answer anybody has given me all year.”
Two days later, the Henderson brothers came.
Not Walter the banker.
His cousins, Earl and Raymond, who farmed sixty acres west of town.
Then came the Larsons.
Then Joe Kowalski from south of the county road.
Each arrived with some version of the same expression: embarrassment mixed with need.
Joe had been one of the men laughing at the fence in April.
He stood on Clara’s porch twisting his hat between broad hands.
“I owe you an apology.”
“Yes.”
The direct answer startled him.
He cleared his throat.
“I thought you were foolish.”
“You said I was.”
“I know.”
“You said my grandmother left me firewood.”
Joe’s ears reddened.
“I know.”
“You asked whether I planned to grow chairs.”
He looked miserable.
Clara let the silence sit for three seconds longer.
Then she said, “How many cuttings do you need?”
Joe looked up.
“Maybe twenty?”
“What for?”
“Creek bank. Lost ten feet in the spring flood. Now it’s dry and cracking.”
Clara nodded.
“Come tomorrow. I’ll have them ready.”
He placed his hat back on his head.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me until they live.”
Word spread faster than before.
The same social machinery that had carried ridicule now carried need.
By mid-September, Clara kept a list on the kitchen wall.
Phelps, fifty.
Henderson brothers, thirty.
Larson, forty.
Kowalski, twenty.
Miller school ditch, twenty-five.
Pastor Hale, ten for church creek bank.
Others followed.
Clara did not have enough new growth to supply everyone immediately without damaging her grove.
For the first time, people had to wait for her.
The irony was not lost on anyone.
Tom Blackwell did not come.
Not yet.
But his farm was failing visibly from the county road.
The high fields had browned first. Then lower corn curled. Trucks moved cattle from one pasture to another in search of feed.