The morning Ruby Callaway left a full acre of good bottomland soil unturned, and then began setting out cages, nest boxes, and low greenhouse frames along the creek side of the field, the men leaning on the fence along County Road 7 could not believe what they were seeing.
It was mid-March, and the fields all around her family’s modest forty-acre spread in the Hatchie River lowlands of western Tennessee were being worked hard. Every tractor in a five-mile radius was turning earth. The air smelled of diesel and wet clay. Season was short, the window for planting was narrow, and every farmer worth anything knew you didn’t waste an inch of workable ground.
But there was Ruby, twenty years old, five foot four, hair tucked under a faded cap, steering her father’s old John Deere deliberately around a long rectangular stretch of tall, matted grass and sedge that ran along the creek side of the property. She circled it. She left it. Then she unloaded crates from the truck bed as if she had done nothing unusual at all.
Inside the crates were things no one in Hardeman County expected to see treated like farm equipment. There were box turtles collected from the woodlot. There were jars of orb weavers and jumping spiders she had gathered from the shed eaves. There were two nucleus hives of bees. There were nest boxes for wrens, bluebirds, and swallows. She set them along the unplowed strip and under the first of the low greenhouse hoops she had built over the seedling beds.
Three farmers watched from the road.
Dale Huckett, who had worked land in that county for forty years, took off his cap and scratched his head. “What in the world is that girl doing?” he said. His neighbor Tom Pruitt shook his head slowly. Old Burl Simmons, who farmed the land adjacent to the Callaways, just laughed, a short dry sound like a door closing on an empty room.
“Must not know what she’s sitting on,” Burl said. “That’s some of the richest strip she’s got. Her daddy would have had that turned by sunrise. And now she’s turning it into a zoo.”
They watched her park the tractor near the barn, climb down without looking their way, and disappear inside. Not hurried, not defiant, just quiet. Nobody said it out loud, but every one of them thought the same thing. The Callaway farm was already struggling. It had been ever since her father’s health gave out two winters back, and now his only daughter, barely old enough to have a full season under her belt alone, was choosing to leave good ground unplowed and fill it with turtles, spiders, bees, and birds at the start of spring.
What did she know that they didn’t? Or was she simply making a mistake that the rest of the season would prove costly?