farmhouse so quiet she could hear the small clock in the kitchen ticking from the upstairs landing. She had wanted to climb back into bed and leave the sticks soaking until they rotted in the tub. Instead she dressed, took the next bundle, and returned to the mud before she could reconsider.
She planted all two hundred over three hard days. A few were replacements for branches broken by her boots or by the floating debris that came in with the current. She marked each row in a notebook and drew little squares beside the numbers where she could later note survival. From the road, the work looked absurdly slight against forty acres of flooded land. Up close, it was a careful experiment occupying only a small part of the bank and the adjoining flood terrace, made by someone who had never conducted an experiment outside a school classroom.
That evening Ben drove out from town in his old pickup. He parked beside the porch, walked down to the fence, and stared across the water with his good shoes sinking into the soft ground. For a long time he said nothing. Clara stood between the last two rows with the empty feed sack in her hands and waited for him to speak. She could see the muscles working at the sides of his jaw.
"Clara," he said finally. "What have you done?"
"Grandmother left me instructions. These are willow cuttings. The bulletin says they can sometimes root in wet soil."
He looked at the little branches standing in brown water. "Sometimes isn't a farm plan. Your grandmother was a good woman, but she believed things other people knew better than to believe."
"She knew this land better than anyone."
"She knew how to keep it through trouble. That's not the same as knowing how to make a living from it."
Clara felt the answer rise inside her, sharp and defensive, but held it for a moment. The trouble was that Ben had not said anything entirely false. Evelyn had struggled; Arthur had struggled; all the men who had tried to turn the bottomland into respectable farmland had struggled. But the fact of their failure did not prove the field could do nothing else, and Clara wanted her father to understand the distinction as desperately as she wanted him to see the small green tissue she had found under the bark.
"If they rot, they rot," she said. "I spent three days and a little money on twine. The house isn't going to the bank because of these sticks. It's going to the bank because the payments are behind. And I can't change that by sitting inside and waiting."
"Mr. Henderson is coming next Tuesday," Ben answered. "He's going to assess what can be sold. If he sees this mess, he'll think you aren't taking the estate seriously."
"Then he can come and ask me what I'm doing."