"My father tried to beat that creek," he said. "I can still see him out here after the spring flood, pulling the dirt back where he'd put it before. He'd work until his back gave out and then tell us the next ditch would hold."
"Grandmother didn't want another ditch," Clara answered.
"No. She told him that for years."
"Why didn't he listen?"
Ben considered the question. "Because his whole life he'd been told a good farmer controls his land. The more the land resisted, the harder he thought he was supposed to push. I inherited some of that thinking, I expect."
Clara looked at him. "You left instead."
"I did. And leaving wasn't wrong. It kept us fed when crops failed. But I got used to thinking that anybody who stayed was repeating his mistakes. Maybe that wasn't always fair."
The conversation stopped there, not because either had finished saying what mattered but because both understood it would take more than an evening to change how they had seen the land. Ben rose, brushed off his trousers, and helped Clara put the tools away. Before he left, he asked her to bring her notebooks to supper in town on Sunday. She said yes and then stood on the porch watching his taillights disappear with an unfamiliar looseness in her chest.
Sunday dinner was the first meal they had shared without arguing about the bank since the funeral. Ben cooked meatloaf, a dish he made too dry and defended stubbornly as a matter of personal preference. Clara brought vegetables from Evelyn's garden and her notebooks wrapped in a clean dish towel. They spread the pages on the table after supper, and Ben read the columns of rainfall, survival, and growth as carefully as he would have read the freight receipts at the grain elevator.
"You've been doing this every day?" he asked.
"Nearly every day. Some days I was too wet or too tired to write until morning. I put down the date when I remembered."
"Mother had books like these."
"I found them. She was recording the creek before I was born."
Ben closed the notebook and sat back. "When I was younger, I thought she wrote all that because she liked pretending there was a way to outsmart the weather. Now I'm beginning to think she did it because she knew the weather could outsmart us."
Clara smiled. "That's what I think, too."
A week later Tom Blackwell arrived without an appointment. He found her near the upper edge of the field measuring the height of the strongest willow with a piece of string. His pickup stood by the fence with its engine running, and he walked toward her wearing his broad-brimmed hat and an expression that made the greeting sound like a warning before he spoke. The drought had thinned his temper. Clara could see it in the abrupt way he moved and the sharp lines around his mouth.