His ranch hands chuckled. Clara didn't look up. "Thank you for your concern, Mr. Pritchard," she said.
Pritchard stared at her. He wasn't used to being dismissed by children. He wasn't used to being dismissed by anyone.
"Do you know what your problem is?" he said, his voice hardening. "You think you're special. You think you're the first person to try to save this place. You think those books you read and those videos you watch on that phone of yours make you smarter than men who have been farming this land since before your mother was born."
Clara stopped digging. She leaned on her shovel. She looked at him with eyes that were far too calm for a 14-year-old.
"I don't think I'm special, Mr. Pritchard," she said. "I think the land is special and I think you forgot how to listen to it."
Pritchard's face went red. He opened his mouth, then he closed it. He revved his ATV, spun it around in a circle that sprayed Clara with dust, and roared back toward his property line. His ranch hands followed, but one of them, a young man named Thomas, no older than 20, looked back over his shoulder. He didn't laugh. He just looked, and then he was gone.
The second wave came from the town. Red Oak Hollow was a small place, 300 people, one diner, one feed store, one church, and a gas station that sold bait and lottery tickets in equal measure. News traveled fast. News about a 14-year-old girl trying to farm Blackwell's Ridge traveled faster.
By Thursday, Clara couldn't walk down Main Street without hearing the whispers. At the feed store, where she went to buy a bag of bone meal, the owner, a woman named Doris who had known Clara since she was in diapers, rang up the purchase with a look of genuine sorrow.
"Honey," Doris said, sliding the bag across the counter, "I can't in good conscience sell you this without telling you that you're wasting your money and your time and your mama's gas money driving you back and forth."
Clara counted out her crumpled bills. "I appreciate your honesty, Mrs. Doris," she said.
"Honesty is all I've got," Doris replied. "That and a store full of things that won't fix dead dirt."
At the diner, where Clara stopped for a glass of water because the heat had reached 98° and her canteen was empty, three farmers sat in the corner booth. They didn't bother to lower their voices.
"Told Pritchard she's planting some kind of heritage grain." "Some old-timey stuff her great-grandma supposedly grew." "Heritage grain on Blackwell's Ridge? Might as well plant dollar bills. At least you could burn those for heat in the winter." "Her mama should have her committed. Letting a child throw away her future on a dirt pile."
Clara drank her water. She didn't look at them. She didn't need to. She had read Esther's journals. She knew what came after the mockery. She knew what came after the doubt. She just had to survive long enough to get there.
The hardest part came from her own family. Uncle Ray arrived on Sunday driving his new truck up the driveway with the air conditioning blasting and the windows rolled up tight. He was her mother's brother, a real estate agent in Tulsa who wore polo shirts and believed that land was only valuable if you could build a subdivision on it.
He took one look at the field Clara had managed to plow, a quarter acre of turned earth that looked impossibly small against the vast gray expanse, and shook his head.
"Clara," he said, "I'm going to talk to you like an adult because apparently that's what you want to be." He crouched down to her level, his knees popping, his smile tight and patient. "This isn't a farm. It's a tax write-off for the county. It's a liability. It's a hole in the ground that money falls into. Your grandfather, God rest his soul, knew that. That's why he never touched it. That's why he farmed the east 40 his whole life and never once looked west at this place."
Clara wiped sweat from her forehead. Her hands were blistered. Her back ached. She had been working since 4:00 in the morning and it was now noon and she had only turned a quarter of the acre she needed.
"Grandpa didn't know about the wheat," she said.
"Wheat?" Ray laughed. "Clara, there is no wheat. There is no magic seed. There is no secret that five generations of farmers missed and a 14-year-old girl somehow found in an attic. This is reality, and in reality, that soil is dead." He stood up and brushed off his khakis. "I've talked to your mother. We're listing the property. You'll get your money back, minus the auction fees. You'll go to high school in the fall like a normal kid. And in 10 years, you'll look back on this summer and laugh at how close you came to ruining your life."