We arranged them in the shade of the porch, setting the sturdiest ones aside for the most exposed points on the upper slope, and the smaller ones for the gaps between rocks on the lower section. I got out my notebook and went over the plan I had drawn in the weeks before. The hillside divided into three horizontal sections according to rock density with spacing between plants adjusted to each section. Wider spacing on the upper section where the rock was densest and the soil thinnest. Closer spacing on the lower section where the soil had a little more depth.
The first day I went up alone to mark the holes with wooden stakes along all three sections I drove around 400 stakes with a hand mallet into rocky ground under the 10:00 a.m. sun. It was 94°F on the bottomland, but on the hillside, with the limestone reflecting heat from below, it felt closer to 100°F. The second day I started planting. Every hole required finding the exact gap between rocks where the soil had enough depth, which meant some holes came on the first try, and others had to be moved two or three times before finding the right spot. Tennessee Mountain Cayenne needed a minimum of 16 inches of root depth on the upper section of the hillside.
Getting those 16 inches could take 10 minutes of work with the dibble bar. 340 holes, four days under the August sun with the ridge wind blowing your hat off and the limestone throwing the heat back up at you from below. I came into the kitchen on the fourth day with blisters under my gloves and my knees scraped from kneeling between rocks to check the depth of every hole. My mother set a bowl of pinto bean soup and a glass of sweet tea on the table without saying anything. That was everything I needed.
The third day, Harold Briggs came out. He arrived in his extension service truck at 9:30 in the morning with his clipboard under his arm, accompanied by a young technician I didn't recognize. They got out on the gravel road, walked to the foot of the hillside, and watched me plant for a while. Harold said, in the voice of someone trying to stay professional and unable to keep the skepticism from showing, "Ruth Ellen, the limestone substrate in the upper section has less than 10 inches of usable soil at most points. The root system of cayenne pepper under those conditions is going to be restricted, and the plant is going to have chronic moisture stress through the dry months."
"The late frost in April at that elevation with that exposure is a risk the assessment documents with historical data from the county weather station. If you get a hard frost in April of the first year, you lose the entire investment in one weather event that was already on record before you planted. If you want to test the hillside with cayenne, I'd recommend doing it at a small scale. Twenty or 30 plants on the lower section where the soil has more depth, not 340 plants across the whole surface. That limits your exposure."
I kept planting. The young technician crouched beside one of the holes I had finished and studied it with interest. Harold continued, "If you want me to, I can get you a contact at the extension office for the low-income farm assistance program. They have soil amendment grants for marginal land that might help you reduce the risk on the bottomland if this doesn't work out." I kept planting.
Harold and the technician got back in the truck. Before he pulled out, Harold rolled down the window and said, "Ruth Ellen, the assessment isn't a personal opinion. It's a technical evaluation with field data. I didn't write it to cause you trouble. I wrote it because the data said what it said."
I kept planting. My cousin Paty, who was hauling water in a bucket from the cistern at the foot of the hill, asked me after the truck had gone down the road, "What did the county man say?" I told her we needed to keep the transplants well watered for the first two months while the roots establish. She kept hauling water.
There were four people in Cookeville and the surrounding area who followed the cayenne situation with their minds already made up before I had finished planting the first section. The first was Orville Pucket, the largest landowner in Putnam County and the man with the most years working the Middle Tennessee hill country, 73 years old in 1979, who had grown cayenne, corn, and tobacco in the county since before Harold Briggs was born, and who believed with the conviction of someone who has survived 50 years of farming that the land tells you what it can give, and that listening is wiser than arguing with a university bulletin. Orville came to the foot of the hillside on the third day of planting in his old pickup truck. He got out, looked at the fresh transplants between the rocks, and said to his son-in-law, Jean, who had come with him, "Look at that. Ruth Ellen Caldwell is planting cayenne in the rock pile. Old Walter Sims tried that same thing on the ridge across the hollow back in '58 and lost everything in a frost on Good Friday."
Jean, who grew hay and cattle on the adjoining county line, nodded with the authority of a man who has heard enough stories of other people's failures to consider himself an expert.
The second was Bobby Ray Tatum, 42 years old, with a flat bottom cayenne operation on the creek bottom fields of the neighboring co-op farm, who knew more about cayenne than anyone in the county at the working level, and who had concluded after 18 years in that crop, that cayenne on a rocky hillside was an idea that sounded interesting in theory, and failed in practice for the same reasons the assessment described, frost, thin soil, and poor moisture retention in the dry stretch. Bobby Ray was not a mean man. He told Ruth Ellen straight to her face on the gravel road one Saturday in August, "Ruthie, I think the world of you, and that's why I'm saying this plainly: that hillside is going to eat your investment."
The third was Harold Briggs himself, who, although he was not a neighbor, came out to county farms often enough that his skepticism was part of the landscape of the project from the beginning. The fourth was her cousin Dale Caldwell, her father's brother's boy, who was 28 years old and had tried to start a greenhouse tomato operation on the family place two years before with an FSA loan and had lost everything in a whitefly infestation in the first season, and who had since that time the conviction of a man who has lost his own money that agricultural projects that step outside the proven always end badly without exception.
All four kept coming with the regularity of people who are expecting to see something fail and don't want to miss it. Orville and Jean came together most mornings and set up at the bottom of the hill to observe from below. Orville would say, "The cayenne on the upper section is not going to hold through the first dry spell. Limestone doesn't hold moisture the way deep soil does." Jean would say, "And if the drought doesn't get it, the April frost will."
Bobby Ray Tatum came out by himself from time to time and looked at the hillside with the practical eye of someone who knows the crop from the inside and is looking for the specific point where it's going to break down. Harold Briggs came on his regular county rounds and always stopped at the Caldwell place, even when it wasn't part of his official schedule. He made notes on his clipboard, said nothing. Ruth Ellen also made notes. Same point, same technician, no comment. It was data worth keeping.
What none of the four expected was what happened at the first late frost the following April, after Ruth Ellen had planted the last cayenne. The frost came on the night of April 9th, 1980 with a temperature of 28° Fahrenheit recorded at the county weather station in Cookeville. Exactly the kind of weather event the assessment had cited as the primary risk of the hillside on the creek bottom fields of the co-op farm where Bobby Ray Tatum had his cayenne operation. The frost burned the tender new growth that had pushed out with the warm spell of the past two weeks and set the season back 3 weeks. Bobby Ray lost 25% of his projected yield that year from the delay caused by the frost.