“You are increasingly difficult to conduct business with.”
“My grandmother said the same about your father.”
That made him laugh.
Clara signed the restructuring agreement.
When Henderson left, she remained at the table.
The mortgage was not gone.
The taxes were not gone.
The house still needed repairs.
She still worked at the dime store.
But the sixty-day cliff had become a road.
A hard road, but a road.
She put both hands flat on the table and cried quietly for five minutes.
Then she washed her face and returned to the field.
The first farmers began arriving regularly after that.
Not crowds yet.
Individuals.
Men came early so fewer neighbors would see them asking advice from Clara Jennings.
Women came in afternoon groups under the respectable excuse of visiting the farmhouse.
Young sons came on behalf of fathers who were too proud to appear themselves.
Clara noticed all of it and said nothing.
She created a system.
Nobody received cuttings until they could describe the planting site.
Was it a creek bank?
A drainage ditch?
Flooded bottomland?
A dry upland field?
If it was dry upland, Clara told them willow might not be the answer.
This disappointed people expecting a universal miracle.
“There isn’t one plant for every bad field,” she said repeatedly. “That’s how we got into trouble in the first place.”
Vance supported her.
They began making simple site notes.
Low bank with seasonal flooding: longer cuttings, planted deeper.
Dry ditch with seasonal water: soak first, plant near lowest moisture line.
Severely eroded slope: willow alone might not solve it; grasses and contour work needed too.
Clara refused to sell false certainty.
The irony was enormous.
In April, people mocked her for trusting something they considered irrational.
By September, those same people wanted her to guarantee results she knew were not guaranteed at all.
She would not do it.
Mrs. Phelps’s cuttings produced the first visible success outside Clara’s property.
A light rain fell one evening after weeks of drought.
Not enough to restore streams.
Enough to dampen soil.
Ten days later, twenty-three of Mrs. Phelps’s fifty cuttings showed swelling buds.
By early October, green appeared along a creek bank that had been brown since July.
Mercer County saw.
The Henderson brothers reported similar results in the lowest section of their drainage channel.
Joe Kowalski’s twenty cuttings were slower, but thirteen began rooting before frost.
The stories multiplied.
So did the requests.
Clara’s grove became a source, but she protected it carefully.
She calculated how many branches each young tree could lose without weakening. Vance advised conservative pruning. They cut from vigorous new growth rather than main stems.
Clara refused payment at first.
That became impossible.
People insisted.
Some brought cash.
Others brought food, fence posts, roof shingles, tools, seed for the kitchen garden, labor, or materials.