The committee approved a revised payment schedule late in October, subject to a new appraisal, annual review, and Clara's continuing payments. The loan was not forgiven, and the interest would cost her money for years. She signed knowing that she had accepted a demanding obligation, not won a prize. But the papers gave her a path to keep the property, and this time she understood the path well enough to walk it deliberately.
Outside the bank, Ben waited in his truck. Clara opened the passenger door and climbed in with the documents in her lap. He studied her face without asking for the answer, as though he were afraid to disturb it before she spoke. Clara unfolded the top page and pointed to the payment schedule. Ben read it, exhaled, and set the truck into motion without saying anything for several blocks.
"Well?" she asked finally.
"Well," he said, "we've got work to do."
She laughed, not because the next years would be easy but because he had said we. He drove her home by the long road past the creek, and both of them looked at the willows as they passed. They were beginning to lose their leaves with autumn, no longer the fresh green miracle the newspaper had photographed. Their pale branches stood above a field of brown grass. Clara found that she loved the sight as much as she had loved the summer growth, because she knew that leaflessness no longer meant death.
The first frost came in November and silvered the grass beside Miller's Creek. By then the willow leaves had turned dull gold and begun falling into the water, leaving behind slim flexible branches that looked, from a distance, very much like the dead sticks Clara had planted in April. She walked the rows with a notebook and a piece of red string, marking the strongest trees from which she could safely take a limited number of dormant cuttings. She left the weaker plants untouched. The final tally showed a little more than one hundred fifty established survivors from the original two hundred, enough to make her proud and enough loss to keep her cautious.
When the trees had gone dormant, Clara invited Margaret Ellis and Harold Vance to watch the first careful harvest of propagation wood. They showed her how to select sound branches without stripping a young tree of all its growth, and how to keep the cuttings identified by source and planting site. Clara bundled the wood with new twine, marked the bundles, and placed them in the cool cellar in damp packing material where they could remain dormant until conditions were suitable for planting. She gave the first small bundles to Ada, Joe Kowalski, and the Larsons under an agreement that they would record what happened and call the extension office before planting into unsuitable ground.