That realization was oddly comforting. It meant she was not responsible for guessing the perfect answer the first time. It meant her grandmother's instruction to trust the water had not been an invitation to stop thinking. It had been an invitation to watch how the water moved, where it lingered, and where it made its own passage back toward the creek. Evelyn had given her a beginning rather than a complete solution.
Ada Phelps began visiting the field every Saturday after delivering her eggs. She carried a folding chair and sat in the shade of the old sycamore while Clara measured growth, offering opinions about the weather and occasionally giving the leaves affectionate names. She called the strongest cutting General Pershing and a crooked survivor near the lower end Little Trouble. Clara pretended these names were ridiculous, then caught herself using them when she walked the rows alone. Ada brought two children from church one afternoon and made them promise not to pull the leaves.
The children asked whether the trees would become tall enough to climb. Clara said perhaps, in a few years, if the ground continued to suit them and nobody broke them in the meantime. One of the children wanted to know whether she had invented the trees. She told him no, that willows grew in many places, and that her grandmother had been the person who thought they might belong here. The child nodded as though that was an ordinary and excellent answer. Clara thought how much easier it was to explain a complicated beginning to children than to adults who needed the result to match their previous opinion.
News traveled, but slowly at first. The people who had laughed at dead sticks began saying that the girl had gotten lucky with a kind of tree that could grow in water. Others insisted that a willow was a weed and that weeds grew anywhere, especially where a useful crop could not. One man told the co-op that the trees would attract mosquitoes and ruin the creek, though they had grown naturally along the water for as long as anyone remembered. Clara had stopped defending herself to everyone who asked, partly because she was tired and partly because the only argument she trusted was the changing field itself.
Harold Vance returned in mid-June with soil sample results and a letter from a specialist at the state university. He had shown the photographs to a colleague who worked with streambank stabilization, carefully identifying Clara's project as an informal field test. The specialist said the cuttings appeared to be a local willow type, perhaps with some white willow characteristics, and emphasized that surviving spring flooding did not prove long-term drought tolerance or countywide soil improvement. He recommended that Clara protect the young shoots from livestock and continue comparing planted ground with untreated ground through at least one full growing season.
Clara read the letter twice. "It says I should keep going," she observed.