Chapter 7

Bryson listened to the entire offer without interrupting. Then he told Curtis no.Curtis looked at him for a moment, the way people look when they expect a negotiation and don't get one. He asked if Bryson had thought it through. Bryson said he had. Curtis thanked Louise for the coffee, picked up his hat from the table, and left.Louise didn't say anything until she heard the truck back out of the driveway. Then she looked at her grandson across the table and asked him what he was planning to do with it.He told her the plan was not to fix all 62 acres. Bryson had done enough years of work on functioning farms to understand that trying to rehabilitate everything at once with $2,200 and no crew was not a plan; it was a way to exhaust yourself and run out of money before you'd accomplished anything. Instead, he identified roughly six acres centered on the green strip he'd found along the southern edge of the property. That was his test ground. That was where everything would either prove itself, or it wouldn't.For the crop, he chose sweet potatoes. The decision wasn't sentimental; it was based on what he knew about Georgia's growing season and what he knew about the soil he'd found along that southern stretch. Sweet potatoes could handle heat, they worked well in sandy loam, they didn't require complicated equipment to harvest, and they could be brought to market in the same season he planted them, which meant he didn't have to survive another full year before seeing any return. He'd worked enough harvests to know the regional demand and to have a rough sense of what a decent yield could bring at a local distributor or a farmer's market.The evening before he started planting, he sat with Louise on the porch after dinner. The sun was going down behind the tree line, and the air had cooled enough to be comfortable. Louise had her hands folded in her lap and was looking out at the yard in the particular way she had when she was thinking about something she wasn't ready to say yet.She asked him if he was sure. He told her yes. She looked at him for another moment, the way she'd always looked at him when she was deciding whether she believed him or just wanted to. Then she told him that the land would let him know soon enough whether his reading of it was right. Not unkind, not falsely encouraging—just honest. They sat there until the yard was dark.

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