"And compost, as much as we can get. And water, just for the first month. After that, the roots will find their own." "Clara, listen to me." But Clara was already walking toward the barn, her braids bouncing against her shoulders, her sneakers kicking up gray dust with every step.
She was 14 years old. She was 5 ft tall. She had $4.37 left to her name, and she was about to plant a crop that the world had forgotten existed.
The first man to stop by was Gerald Pritchard. He came on a Tuesday morning, riding his ATV across the property line with two of his ranch hands behind him. He was 72 years old with a face like a dried riverbed and hands that had been breaking sod since before Clara was born. He owned the largest spread in the county. He sat on the agricultural board.
He had testified before the state legislature on water rights. He looked at Clara standing in the middle of the dead field with a shovel that was taller than she was. Then he looked at the coffee tin sitting on the fence post. Then he laughed.
It wasn't the loud booming laughter of the auction house. It was worse. It was the quiet, knowing chuckle of a man who had already decided you were going to fail. "Little girl," he said, spitting tobacco juice into the dust, "do you know what that dirt is?" Clara kept digging.
"It's soil," she said. "It's alkali," Pritchard corrected. "It's got a pH lower than a car battery. You could pour a thousand gallons of water on it and it would just run off like it hit concrete. You could plant the finest seed money can buy and it would rot before it broke the surface."
He leaned forward on his ATV handles. "You're digging your own grave out here. Financially, I mean. Though at the rate you're going, the other kind might not be far behind."
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 degrees 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.