A neighbor named Lee Gardner had a small tractor and grading blade. Nora hired him for a few days once the goats and hand work had exposed the ground well enough to identify the buried hazards. Lee moved slowly, stopping whenever Nora signaled, and refused to cross any section where she had not probed. They carried fallen limbs out by hand, used gravel on the softest stretches, and widened the turn near the culvert without touching the strongest pecan trunks.
The cost hurt. Tess entered every hour of equipment time and every load of stone into the cash book, her writing smaller toward the bottom of the page. Nora used money she had reserved for winter feed, then negotiated a short extension on a separate equipment payment. She picked up extra shifts at the feed warehouse. For two weeks she came home after dark, washed dust from her face, and fell asleep with the county map still open on the table.
A thunderstorm a few days before the first planned inspection tested their work. Water ran across the lower route and collected at the culvert, carrying leaves and loose soil into the shallow ditch. The road surface held in most places, but one section near the turnout softened enough to take the print of Nora's boot. She stood in the rain studying it and felt the old temptation to call the job done because she had worked too hard to bear another delay.
Tess came down the route beside her. She tested the same ground, watched water rise around her boot, and shook her head. "If that was a loaded truck, we'd have a problem."
"I know."
"We should call Lee again."
"There isn't much left in the account."
"Then we make the fix smaller, not pretend the problem isn't there."
They repaired the drainage at that point before adding the last layer of gravel. Nora spent an entire morning removing leaves from the approach to the old culvert, not because the access agreement required a pristine ditch but because she had learned what happened when a buried problem was ignored until somebody drove over it.
Ben Talley returned near the end of September. Nora met him at the gate with the annotated county plan, the hazard notes, and a pair of muddy boots she had not had time to clean. He drove the finished route slowly in his county vehicle, stopped at the turning area, and walked the final approach to the culvert. Tess watched from several yards away, holding the ledger against her chest as though it were a school assignment awaiting judgment.
Talley inspected the wet section they had repaired. He measured the clear width at two points, looked up at the trimmed overhead branches, then returned to his pickup. Nora waited while he made notes.
"There's maintenance you'll have to keep up," he told her. "You know that. New growth comes back, especially after rain. And the culvert itself has problems you should plan to address, though this agreement was about making the access available."
"But the lane?" Nora asked.
He nodded. "It meets what we required for this transfer. I'll file the inspection. You're clear on the October first access deadline."