Mrs. Larkin listened and then handed Clara an additional evening shift stocking shelves. She explained that somebody who would stand in cold water for three days could probably be trusted to put twenty crates of canned peaches in the proper order. Clara accepted without embarrassment.
One afternoon she found a piece of paper tacked to the Jennings fence. It had a drawing of a young woman watering sticks, and underneath someone had printed, FARMER OF THE YEAR. Clara took it down before Ada could see it and carried it to the stove, intending to burn it. Then she held it long enough to see that whoever had drawn it had given the farmer a crooked little crown. She was angry at herself for crying over something so childish, and angrier still that she had to stand in her own kitchen justifying tears to an empty room.
She folded the paper and placed it in her ledger. Years later she would discover it there and realize how much energy people spent trying to make someone feel foolish for working. At the time it was only another small weight on the wrong side of the balance. She scrubbed her face with cold water, tied up her hair, and went outside because the creek was rising again and she needed to check whether the lower row was still standing.
The second flood came in the middle of April. Rain fell all night, heavy enough to turn the gutters into sheets of water and bring branches down from the maple beside the barn. By daylight Miller's Creek had covered most of the lowest field, and only the upper portions of Clara's cuttings showed above the brown surface. The first row lay under a current strong enough to carry a fence board downstream. Clara stood on the higher bank, fighting the impulse to wade out and hold the sticks upright herself.
Ada found her there and ordered her back. "Your grandmother didn't leave you this place so you could drown trying to prove her right," she said. "Those branches can wait. The water doesn't care how anxious you are."
Clara argued, but not for long. She had already felt the ground giving way near the bank and could see a small log being carried past faster than she could walk. Instead of entering the water, she measured its height against a fence post and drew the mark in her notebook. For two days she watched from safe ground as the flooded rows vanished and reappeared. When the water finally fell, twenty-three cuttings were gone, and several others leaned at strange angles.
She was heartbroken by the losses, but the rest stood. She reset what she could without tearing new roots, gathered a few washed branches from the fence line, and marked the missing positions with stones rather than immediately replacing them. She wanted to know whether the survivors differed from the failures. Perhaps the higher rows would live while the lower ones drowned. Perhaps those closer to moving water would survive better than those in stagnant pockets. Even grief, she began to understand, could be a reason to take better notes.