That evening she carried Blackwell's mention of Ben's debt to the probate lawyer. Finch helped her obtain the relevant co-op statement and confirmed that Ben had an old, modest account he was paying down through payroll deductions. It did not attach to Evelyn's property. More importantly, the new written offer from Blackwell included a broad right to divert water through a channel on the Jennings land, a provision that went well beyond a straightforward purchase. Clara read the line twice and felt, not triumph, but the steadying power of having asked for the paper.
"He wants control of the bend," she said.
Finch nodded. "It's valuable to him whether the bottom field grows a crop or not."
"He's been calling it worthless for years."
"A person can call something worthless while trying to buy it cheaply. Those two things aren't as contradictory as they sound."
Clara asked the lawyer to decline the offer. She knew this was a real risk and did not pretend otherwise. She was refusing money that could make college possible and choosing instead a future whose first reliable payment had yet to appear. But she understood the terms of the choice now, which was more than she had understood when she planted the first cutting. She could still sell later if the work failed. She would not sell because another person had spent years teaching her to undervalue the thing he wanted.
August came with a heat that made the farmers speak in short sentences. The old men at the feed store began remembering the drought of 1936 with an accuracy sharpened by fear. Ponds shrank, and a few wells that had never failed began yielding less. Cattle gathered under the thinnest patches of shade and moved reluctantly when farmers drove them toward water. Along the county road, corn leaves rolled inward at midday and did not fully unfurl by evening.
Clara's trees suffered, too, though the suffering looked different from the surrounding fields. The uppermost willow row drooped in the hottest afternoons, and several weak plants lost their newest shoots. A few near the shallowest waterline kept growing steadily, benefiting from damp soil that still remained beneath the top crust. Their roots had not reached some mythical underground river that made drought irrelevant. They had been established in the one part of the property where floodplain moisture persisted after the surface water vanished, and they had enough shade and leaf cover to lose that moisture more slowly.
She took a spade out one afternoon expecting to discover that the green appearance was misleading. The surface outside the grove was dry and hard enough to make her work for every inch. Under the largest willows, where leaf litter had gathered against the stems and low grasses had