Ten days earlier, the Brant farm had looked like a farm preparing for an ordinary, difficult spring. The last week of April was approaching, the fields were nearly ready, and the forecast held a narrow promise of dry weather. Four hundred acres of corn ground waited on Tom's decisions. The seed was in its bags, the planter had been checked twice, and every important expense of the season was already written against an operating loan that would have to be repaid after harvest.
The Creek Forty was the field Tom intended to plant first. Its forty acres lay in a long, mostly level parcel beside a small creek, with dark, productive soil that broke into a fine texture when the moisture was right. His grandfather had cleared its last trees with a team of horses, and his father had spent half a lifetime improving its drainage and keeping its fertility in balance. In a good season, the field produced corn so uniform that a person could stand at one end and see the rows disappear into a green wall. In a bad season, it at least offered the family a place to begin again.
Every spring Tom walked that ground before planting, usually at first light. He would kneel at the headland, take a handful of soil, squeeze it, and watch how it broke apart when he opened his fingers. His father, Harold, had taught him to do that long before he was allowed to steer a tractor. "The weather forecast tells you what might happen," Harold used to say. "The ground tells you what has happened already." Tom had repeated those words to younger farmers often enough, although he had begun to forget how much of the lesson involved asking questions rather than making speeches.
This year there was more at stake than usual. Corn prices had not offered much room for optimism, fertilizer had cost more than Tom expected, and the used twenty-four-row planter he bought over winter had required a larger deposit than he liked admitting. The machine would make fieldwork faster if everything held together. It was heavier than his previous planter, particularly when loaded, but that seemed a fair trade for finishing earlier in the narrow spring window. Tom had told Jenny that speed was the one thing they could still purchase with a little financial risk.
Jenny had looked at the numbers and said, "Speed doesn't count for much if we're repairing something instead of planting."
He remembered smiling at her across the kitchen table. "It'll pay for itself."
"That's what you told me about the grain cart."
"And it did, eventually."
She had raised an eyebrow and returned to her spreadsheet, letting him have the small victory. They had been married twenty-four years, long enough to know that a disagreement did not require a winner, and long enough to recognize when a person was using confidence to hold fear at a distance. Jenny had grown up in town but learned the machinery of farm finances so thoroughly that their accountant sometimes called her with questions. Tom knew how to coax another season from a worn bearing or a tired hydraulic pump. Jenny knew how long they could afford to keep coaxing.