At ten, she argued that Harlan was watering the garden too fast.
He ignored her.
The next morning, runoff had cut a channel through one row.
Della did not say, “I told you so.”
She simply repaired it.
That bothered Harlan more.
Opal understood the habit because she had known another person like Della.
Her late husband, Virgil.
Virgil Pruitt had farmed through dry years when nobody owned sophisticated irrigation equipment.
He watched slopes.
Ditches.
Clouds.
Soil color.
He built catch basins with a shovel.
Set barrels beneath gutters.
Moved water with gravity whenever possible because gasoline cost money even when labor was free.
After Virgil died, Opal kept his agricultural extension pamphlets.
Hundreds of them.
Stapled university bulletins from the 1960s.
Soil surveys.
Irrigation guides.
Livestock publications.
Charts explaining infiltration rates.
Home-built cistern designs.
Articles about contour farming.
Some recommendations were outdated.
Some were still useful.
Della read them all.
The summer she turned eleven happened to be the summer those old pamphlets stopped looking like history.
Calloway County was entering its third consecutive year of below-average rainfall.
The first year had been manageable.
The second had been expensive.
The third was beginning to look dangerous.
By May, the farm pond sat almost two feet below where Harlan wanted it.
Pastures browned earlier.
Creek flow thinned.
Soybeans in the Pruitts’ upper fields emerged, but the stand became increasingly uneven as spring moved toward summer.
The Pruitts farmed about forty acres themselves and leased another twenty nearby.
It was not an enormous operation.
That made every acre matter more.
Harlan grew corn and soybeans most years.
Occasionally tobacco when contracts made sense.
June sold vegetables from an ambitious kitchen garden and kept enough laying hens to provide eggs for family, neighbors, and several customers in town.
Nobody was getting rich.
They were staying.
For families like the Pruitts, staying was often the actual definition of success.
The upper soybean field was six and a half acres of lighter soil on a gentle slope.
In wet years, it performed well.
In dry years, it suffered first.
Harlan’s portable irrigation system could reach it, but poorly.
The farm pond sat lower.
To push water uphill, Harlan used a diesel pump.
Fuel cost money.
Pressure dropped across the longest runs.
Sprinklers nearest the pump delivered adequately.
Those near the high end became weak.
Wind carried water away.
Hot air took more through evaporation.
The system could keep plants alive.
It could not do it cheaply.
One afternoon in May, county extension agent Clifton Barr visited.
Clifton was forty-six.
Slow-speaking.
Broad-shouldered.
A man who wore the same faded extension-service cap year after year.
He walked the upper field beside Harlan.
Della followed ten feet behind them.
Clifton knelt beside a soybean plant.
Dry surface.
He dug three inches.
Slight moisture.
“Roots are chasing it,” he said.
Harlan looked across the field.
“What do you recommend?”
“If you have the water, smaller irrigation sets more often.”
“Fuel.”
“I know.”
“And pressure drops before I reach the west edge.”
“I know.”
Clifton stood.
“You could shorten the runs.”
“Then I spend half the day moving pipe.”
“That’s the trade.”
Della spoke from behind them.
“If pressure drops going uphill, what happens to the water that doesn’t make it?”
Both men turned.
Clifton smiled.
“It doesn’t exactly stop existing.”
“I know.”
“It loses pressure because of elevation and friction.”
“So where does it go?”
“Most still moves through the line. You just don’t have enough pressure at the end to distribute it properly.”
Della nodded.
“What if you don’t need sprinkler pressure?”
Clifton looked at Harlan.
Harlan shrugged.
“This is normal.”
Clifton crouched slightly so he was closer to Della’s height.
“What are you thinking?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing yet.”
“Good.”
That surprised her.