They did not repeat the unpaid planning months, the twelve-to-sixteen-hour harvest days, the specialty market relationships, the unusually valuable varieties, the labor cost, the cold storage, the legal work, or the fact that most five-acre tomato fields could not simply duplicate the result by acquiring rotten tomatoes.
Cole hated the simplified version because it created a new form of the same mistake Arthur had made.
Arthur had looked at the surface and seen garbage.
Now other people looked at the surface and saw a shortcut.
Neither saw the system underneath.
A man from Ohio called in September and asked where he could buy "that cannery sludge" because he had ten acres he wanted to make profitable by next summer.
Cole asked for his soil test.
The man said he did not have one.
Cole asked about drainage.
The man said it was fine.
Cole asked how he knew.
The man became irritated.
"I just want to know how many tons per acre you used."
"There isn't a number I can give you safely without knowing your soil and the material."
"But you did it."
"On this soil, with this batch, under a monitoring plan."
"So you're keeping the secret."
Cole ended the call.
That night he opened Clara's Notebook 31.
Near the back she had written:
People love a recipe because it removes responsibility for observation. Soil punishes recipes applied without context.
Cole copied the sentence onto a card and pinned it above the telephone.
Arthur Vance's season ended badly.
Not ruinously, and not with every field dead as later storytellers preferred. His operation was too diversified for that. But his tomato division posted a substantial loss after disease pressure, rejected contract loads, elevated input prices, and emergency credit expenses combined.
His accountant put the figure a little above three hundred thousand dollars.
For a farm of Arthur's size, it was survivable.
For Arthur's pride, it was harder.
He drove past Cole's refrigerated vans all through August.
He watched chefs in clean jackets walk rows he had called a sewer. He watched college students earning wages packing crooked tomatoes into carefully labeled crates. He watched county commissioners visit for photographs after some of the same people had demanded municipal bulldozers in April.
Arthur despised the hypocrisy more than he despised Cole.
One afternoon he stopped beside Teresa Nolan outside the courthouse.
"Funny how everyone loves the kid now," Arthur said.
Teresa looked at him. "You didn't."
"I was wrong."
"You saying that where he can hear you?"
"Don't push it."
Teresa smiled.
"County wasn't exactly brave either," Arthur said.
"County investigated complaints."
"County trustee wanted to bury the field."