The note was tied to the largest bundle. On the front Evelyn had written, "Plant these in the mud when the creek rises. Trust the water." On the back came instructions more exact than the sentence sounded: keep the bases damp, soak in rainwater for three days, plant firmly at least twelve inches into soft ground near the flood's edge, leave the upper buds exposed to light, and give them room. Under that, in a narrower hand, was another sentence: "If a cutting is hollow or rotten through, throw it away. Dead-looking is not the same as dead."
Clara sat on the chest for nearly an hour. She turned the note over and over, trying to remember whether her grandmother had ever spoken about these particular branches. Nothing came clearly except an autumn afternoon when Evelyn had returned from the creek carrying an armful of willow and told Clara that one day she would explain why a tree belonged where corn did not. Clara had been sixteen, impatient to finish a school assignment, and had not followed her outside. The memory hurt more sharply now than it had any right to.
Before carrying the bundle downstairs, she inspected the branches as well as she could. A few snapped with a dry crack and revealed empty centers. She put those aside. Beneath the bark of others, when she made a tiny cut with a kitchen knife, she found a pale green line so thin she might have missed it if the window had not caught the light. She had no training in plant propagation and did not mistake that green for proof. But it was enough to keep her from throwing them on the burn pile.
She filled an old galvanized washtub with rainwater collected from the porch barrel. The bundles soaked beneath a board weighted with two clean bricks, and for three days she changed the water whenever it grew cloudy. She wrote the date on the back of Evelyn's note. On the third morning she counted one hundred ninety-three cuttings that still felt flexible and found seven that had softened or split badly enough to discard. To make Evelyn's number, she selected seven sound branches from the willow at the north bend of Miller's Creek, cutting them as evenly as she could.
Before planting, Clara took a handful of them to the county extension office. Harold Vance was not there, but his assistant, a young man named Leon Price, gave her a bulletin on woody plant cuttings and asked where the branches had come from. He told her that willows could sometimes root from dormant wood, though flooded clay presented real hazards and not every cutting would take. He also told her that an afternoon at the library might spare her a month of guessing. Clara thanked him and spent the next evening reading descriptions of buds, bark, cambium, and roots with a dictionary beside her.