"Mother would have liked this," he said.
Clara glanced up. "The bridge?"
"You making something useful out of what the flood left standing. That was always her sort of stubbornness."
It was the first time he had referred to Evelyn's habits with something like affection since the funeral. Clara wanted to ask why he had been so angry about the trees, but the question felt too large for the small repair they were sharing. Instead she handed him another board. He took it, set it straight, and stayed until the bridge was finished.
On the last evening of June, Clara stood beside the field while the light drained from the sky. The young willows were no longer invisible from the road, though they had not become anything a timber buyer or grain merchant would recognize as an income. Their leaves moved together when the breeze crossed the creek, making a soft sound distinct from the corn on higher ground. She had eighty-seven dollars left after the month's expenses and payment to the bank. She was tired, still frightened, and no closer to paying off the mortgage outright, but she had not sold the farm. For that summer evening, it was enough to make her sit in the grass and listen to the little trees.
July began with a sky that seemed determined to make up for April. The clouds cleared, the last of the wet wind moved east, and sunlight settled over Mercer County with a hard white intensity that turned the roads to powder. By the middle of the month, the corn on higher ground was beginning to curl at its edges. Farmers who had complained all spring about too much water started speaking about the absence of rain with a caution that made Clara uneasy. Every morning the radio gave another forecast of heat and another explanation for why the storms people had expected had gone somewhere else.
Clara had never followed the weather so closely. As a child, hot days had meant swimming holes, ice cream after church, and the smell of warm tar near the town square. Now she measured the temperature against the soil beneath her feet. Water disappeared from shallow pools, and the clay in the untreated part of the bottom field hardened until her shovel rang against it in places. The creek pulled back within its banks and then lower, leaving pale silt exposed along the bends where it had been brown water only weeks before.
The willows kept growing, though not as evenly as they had in June. Some of the higher cuttings slowed when their shallow roots encountered dry hardpan. A few near the stagnant pocket, already weakened by flooding, lost leaves and died. But many in the moist creek margin put on strong new shoots, and the older root systems began reaching beyond the circles where Clara had first seen them. By the end of July, the tallest trees stood around five feet above the ground, slender and pliant, their silver-green foliage fluttering when the corn beside them scarcely moved.