"We've got a machine that can move dirt and a ditch that needs moving," Warren said. "It doesn't get more straightforward than that."
"It does when somebody's already accusing us of not understanding drainage," Casey replied. "If we move it ourselves, we may give them an excuse to blame us for the next flood."
Abe scratched his chin. "She's right," he admitted reluctantly. "I hate that she's right, but she's right."
Warren knew it too. That did not make standing still any easier. He watched Abe drive away and felt the peculiar humiliation of being a farmer forbidden by caution from fixing a physical problem on his own property.
At the bank, Gerald Voss was preparing a new valuation. Cornerstone had lent to the Puit farm for decades, and the relationship once extended beyond paperwork. Warren remembered a branch manager attending Martha's funeral, another sending a card when the barn roof collapsed, and a time when a loan officer could explain a decision across the kitchen table without treating every question like a potential dispute. Gerald had arrived three years earlier with a more centralized reporting system and an emphasis on reducing exposure to volatile agricultural assets.
There was nothing inherently wrong with a bank reviewing its risks. Warren understood that lenders were not charities and that deposits entrusted to them had to be handled carefully. What angered him was the speed with which the bank treated a new disaster as proof of a problem it had already decided to solve by selling his land. Gerald spoke of the low acreage as if it had been a weak asset for years, but the loan file held field records showing harvests from that same ground in ordinary seasons.
When Warren asked Gerald for a written explanation of the new valuation, he received a document placing particular weight on the loss of the lower crop and the risk of future saturation. The language made sense if somebody ignored the concrete outlet upstream. Warren set that valuation beside Casey's photographs and the drainage plans, then stared at the difference between a fact and a story built selectively from facts. Both documents described the same acreage. Only one tried to explain what had happened to it.
By late June, Casey's records had accumulated into dozens of pages. At fixed locations she measured water depth with a marked staff, always noting whether the reading had been taken after rainfall or during a dry interval. She photographed plant cover from the same angles, recorded bird species cautiously, and checked for small changes in the shape of shallow channels. Odell reviewed her methods and suggested improvements, including written calibration notes, clearer labels, and photographs showing exactly where each measurement had been made.