The bulletin did not tell her how to save the farm. It told her only that what she proposed was possible in a limited way, and that possible was not the same as certain. There were warnings about rot, prolonged submersion, moving cuttings from one watershed to another, and the difference between wet ground and water so stagnant that roots could not breathe. Clara read every sentence twice. Then she went outside and stood on the porch, watching Miller's Creek spill across the lowest ground, and tried to decide where her grandmother would have placed the first branch.
The drowned field covered much of the property in a flood, but the deepest water lay nearest the bend, where the creek had cut into its own bank for decades. Higher toward the house, the ground rose in slow, almost invisible steps before becoming a small kitchen garden and the pasture where Betsy the mule had once grazed. Clara chose the narrow flood margin rather than the deepest middle of the field. There the water stood ankle to calf deep, depending on the contour, and little mounds of old silt rose just above it. She could not drain the county with two hundred sticks, but she could try to learn whether something would live where everything else had failed.
On planting morning she dressed in an old cotton shirt, her grandfather's work gloves, and the rubber boots Ben had used years earlier. She carried the first bundle down the lane in a feed sack and marked the edge of the intended planting area with a length of string between fence posts. The rows would wander because the ground wandered, but she counted roughly six paces between planting spots to prevent crowding and give her room to walk between them. Whenever the mud became too deep or the water too still, she moved toward slightly higher ground. Every branch went into the earth with a small quiet resistance, as though the field were taking back something that had once belonged there.
At noon, she ate bread and a boiled egg standing beside the fence. Her hands hurt from pushing against the clay, and her boots had rubbed both ankles until they felt raw. The first truck slowed on the county road while she was drinking from a mason jar. Its driver leaned out and asked whether she was staking out a new fishing pond. When she told him she was planting trees, he laughed and drove on slowly enough to make sure his passenger saw the field.
By the next afternoon there was an audience. Three men from the co-op stopped at the fence and watched long enough to decide her labor was entertainment. They did not know that she had nearly turned back at dawn. She had woken to pain in her shoulders and a