It was during that week that Clara found a photograph in the bottom of Evelyn's seed box. It showed a younger Evelyn beside a line of trees along Miller's Creek, their branches bent toward the water. On the back was a date, 1937, and the sentence: "After flood, bank held where willows stood." A second photograph taken the following year showed a bare patch of ground washed away near the same bend. Clara carried both to the creek and tried to match the old trees to the ones now standing in the shallows.
She found two. One had a hollow trunk and a crooked branch that bent over the water like a fishing pole; the other grew near a stone that Arthur must have used to mark the pasture boundary. The creek had moved in fifteen years, cutting away one side while leaving the other partly intact. The photographs were not proof that a whole farm could be saved by willows. But they were evidence that Evelyn's belief had been tied to something she had actually watched happen.
Clara copied the dates into her notebook and wrote beside them: BANK PROTECTION, NOT MAGIC. Then she climbed the hill to the county library to learn what she could about streambanks. She found thin bulletins on erosion, contour planting, tree shelterbelts, and soil conservation work performed during the previous two decades. Some discussed willow live stakes and woven brush barriers, methods that used cut branches to hold soil along watercourses while they rooted. She sat with the books until the librarian reminded her the building was closing.
The reading left her both encouraged and frightened. Evelyn had not invented an impossible trick. Farmers and engineers had used living branches near waterways for years, but making a hedge survive was one problem and protecting large areas of floodplain was another. Young willows could slow local erosion after they established, and their roots might open compacted ground near the surface. They could not stop the Wabash from overflowing or provide instant moisture to a county in drought. Clara understood the distinction, and part of her was relieved to discover that she did not need the impossible to be true for the work to matter.
By the last week of April, the weather warmed. Clara began waking before dawn to check the rows, feeling with each morning the strange nervousness of someone waiting for a letter that might never arrive. She had marked fourteen branches whose bark still showed a thin green layer when she scratched it carefully with a knife. Others remained brittle and gray. She resisted the urge to pull them up and inspect their roots, remembering that doing so might destroy exactly what she was trying to discover.