In the spring of 1952, Mercer County lay under a sky that seemed to have forgotten how to clear. Rain traveled over the flat Wabash Valley countryside in slow gray curtains, filling wagon ruts, washing down gravel roads, and pressing against the windows of the Jennings farmhouse at night. The Wabash rose until its banks disappeared into a single muddy color. Its smaller tributaries rose with it, including Miller's Creek, the waterway that made a slow bend around the southern boundary of the Jennings land before continuing toward the larger river.
Most farms in the county had a piece of trouble ground, a low spot or hardpan ridge or stony corner where the land refused to behave as the farmer wished. The Jennings property covered forty acres, including a farmhouse, a narrow orchard, a few workable strips, and a broad floodplain that defeated ordinary field crops. In wet years the lowest field drowned before seed could be planted. In dry years its surface hardened into clay plates that broke apart under the heel of a boot, while the moisture beneath them remained too uneven for ordinary cultivation. The family called it the drowned land, sometimes fondly and sometimes with a bitterness that had outlived the people who first used the name.
Clara had not meant to come back to it. She had spent the previous two years living with her Aunt Ruth in town, finishing school, shelving merchandise at Miller's Five and Dime, and saving small amounts in an envelope marked TEACHERS COLLEGE. She liked books and clean notebooks, chalk dust and the particular bright silence that falls over a classroom when a child understands something for the first time. On Saturday afternoons she helped the county librarian sort damaged books, and the librarian let her borrow more than the posted limit. Clara imagined a life in Indianapolis, where buses arrived on schedules and rain did not decide whether a family would eat well in winter.
Her grandmother Evelyn had never mocked that ambition. When Clara was fifteen and declared that she would rather teach children than milk cows, Evelyn had laughed and said the world needed teachers who knew what hard work looked like. They had sat on the back steps, shelling peas into a yellow bowl while the last light touched the old pear tree. Evelyn's fingers moved quickly despite their swollen joints. She asked Clara what she thought the children ought to learn, and Clara answered reading, arithmetic, and enough history to keep them from repeating every mistake their parents had made.
"And how to look," Evelyn added.
Clara had turned toward her. "Look at what?"
"At anything people have already decided isn't worth noticing. That's where you find some of the best lessons."