The visitors stayed until afternoon. They ate sandwiches Ada had brought and rested beneath the sycamore while Clara and Margaret Ellis sketched creek banks from the maps farmers carried. Vance wrote down names for a series of winter workshops at the county office. Several women asked whether they could help prepare cuttings and keep records, and Clara said they were welcome. By the time the last wagon departed, the porch was piled with notes and the kitchen table held a list of requests from fourteen properties.
Clara sat down on the steps after everyone left and felt exhaustion move through her like a wave. The county had come begging for her secret, as the men themselves put it, but what they actually wanted was something less mysterious and more demanding. They wanted a way to begin again after a bad season. They wanted to know whether the ground they had struggled with for years might have possibilities they had missed. She could offer them neither a miracle nor certainty. She could offer a method, a beginning, and a willingness to stand beside them while they tried.
Ben arrived near sunset, having heard about the gathering from half the customers at the elevator. He found the porch littered with maps and Clara sitting barefoot beside her boots, too tired to move. He picked up one of the maps, glanced at the lines she had drawn, and looked toward the grove. The last light was caught in the slender leaves, making them shine almost silver against the brown fields beyond.
"You've been busy," he said.
"Everybody came," Clara answered. "Even Leonard Pike. He apologized."
Ben sat beside her. "I heard Vance did, too."
"He did. Said he'd been too certain."
Her father looked out over the field for a long time. Then he said, "I was too certain myself. I thought you were doing this because you couldn't admit Mother was gone. I didn't understand you were trying to learn something she'd spent her life seeing."
Clara felt the old pain rise, familiar and not entirely finished. "I was doing some of it because she was gone," she admitted. "I didn't know how to live in that house without trying to keep part of her in it. But I wouldn't have kept going if there hadn't been something real out there."
"I know that now."
A quiet passed between them. Ben reached down and picked a dried leaf from the step, rolling it between his fingers. "You are like her," he said. The words were the same as those he had spoken in anger at the flooded field six months earlier, but he gave them a different weight. Clara looked at him, and he smiled faintly. "This time I mean it the way I should have before."