At fifteen, Clara had dismissed this as one of the old woman's sayings, useful mostly for keeping a conversation going while the peas were being shelled. She was not unusual in that. Evelyn had a saying for almost everything, and some of them contradicted other sayings she had offered only the week before. She predicted frost by watching the birds and argued about planting dates with men who owned barometers and listened faithfully to the farm reports. But when her roses bloomed through dry weather and her beans survived a wet spring, people stopped laughing long enough to ask what she had done.
Evelyn was not a witch, though some women in the church had called her that when they believed the kitchen door was shut. She had been a farm wife, then a widow, and during both parts of her life she had taken notes on everything that grew or failed. An old wall calendar in the pantry held thirty years of rainfall marks, made with pencil lines so faded Clara sometimes needed to tilt the paper into the sun to see them. Seed tins carried dates, locations, and little remarks: good by the stone wall, drowned in east bed, survived the dry August. To Evelyn, a garden was not a mystery requiring special powers. It was a place where ignorance could be reduced, one season at a time, if a person was willing to admit what she did not know.
Her husband had been a veteran of the First World War, a quiet man named Arthur Jennings whose uniform photograph stood on the mantel between a pressed fern and a chipped blue vase. Arthur had worked the land, hated its floods, and spent much of his life trying to make it yield corn like the properties on higher ground. He built a shallow ditch with his own hands one summer, and the next spring the creek returned the ditch to him full of silt. He tried a pump that failed after two seasons, then a narrow levee that sent the water into the kitchen garden instead. By the time Clara was old enough to remember him well, he had stopped promising that the next year would be different.
Yet Arthur had never sold. When neighbors asked why, he said the place had been his mother's before it was his and that a man sometimes kept a thing because of who had given it to him. He died while Clara was still a child. Years later, his widow remained in the sagging house, tending the orchard, taking in mending, selling flowers and preserves, and somehow sending another payment to First Mercantile Bank whenever the bank's patience grew thin. Clara had assumed there must be more money than anyone talked about. She learned otherwise in February.