“The anaerobic stress alone should have—”
He stopped.
He examined another.
Then another.
Henderson watched Clara instead of the trees.
Blackwell’s laughter disappeared completely.
Finally Vance stood.
His face was pale.
“They’re alive.”
No one answered.
He removed his glasses, wiped them on his handkerchief, and put them back on as if clearer lenses might restore the world to the rules he understood.
“They’re actually alive.”
Blackwell kicked at the mud.
“Willow grows like weeds. Doesn’t mean anything.”
Vance turned toward him.
“Six weeks under standing water from cuttings this desiccated means something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Those four words sounded almost painful coming from Harold Vance.
Clara looked at Henderson.
He was folding the purchase offer.
“We can revisit the bank matter next month.”
“My deadline is still the same?”
“For now.”
“Why?”
Henderson glanced toward the first green bud.
“Because circumstances may be changing.”
Blackwell’s eyes narrowed.
“A few buds don’t pay a mortgage.”
Clara met his stare.
“Neither does your opinion.”
For the first time, Tom Blackwell had no quick answer.
The three men left together.
Vance looked back twice before reaching the fence.
Henderson did not.
Blackwell kicked mud from his boots against the bottom rail with angry, violent movements.
Clara stayed in the field.
When they were gone, she knelt beside the first rooted cutting.
She pressed her fingers into the wet earth around it.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
She did not know whether she was speaking to the tree, the field, or Evelyn.
Then she began to cry.
Not because anything had been saved.
Nothing had.
The bank debt still existed. The roof still leaked. The cuttings could still fail. One good week could be followed by rot, flood, disease, heat, insects, or some agricultural disaster Harold Vance had not yet thought to warn her about.
But the impossible had moved one inch toward possible.
For that day, one inch was enough.
The following morning, Clara went back with a spoon from the kitchen drawer and a length of string.
She had no proper soil auger, no measuring rod, and no instruments beyond Evelyn’s rain gauge and an old carpenter’s rule, but she had questions now. Questions felt different from hope. Hope asked the future to be kind. Questions gave her something to do while she waited to see whether it would be.
She marked every cutting that showed visible root growth with a small strip of cotton tied loosely near the top. She marked every cutting showing buds with blue thread from Evelyn’s sewing basket. By noon she had sixty-eight rooted plants, nineteen visibly swelling buds, and four with actual green breaking through.
The next day, the numbers changed.
Seventy-six roots.
Thirty-one buds.
Nine green shoots.
On the third day, Clara stopped counting individual roots because the mud around several cuttings had become threaded with them.
She opened a new page in her notebook and wrote: May 8. Growth not even. Strongest on east rows nearest old willow stand and where flood stayed longest.
That puzzled her.
Harold Vance had insisted prolonged saturation should be worst for them. Yet the cuttings in the wettest section appeared to be strongest.