Bring a couple of carrots. Let her people see for themselves. Word traveled in the horse community. It was better to travel with it than behind it.
Mari drove up the next morning with two of the Holdridge carrots in a paper sack on the seat beside her. She had pulled them the previous Saturday and rinsed the dirt off in the shop sink. They were both crooked. One was forked.
Both were sound. Francis met her at the barn office. She had asked two women from boarding operations in Onalaska and West Salem to join them. Both had been caught in the phone tree of nervousness Merl Blackwood had set up. Mari shook their hands.
She set the carrots on Francis's desk. She took a paring knife from her coat pocket and sliced the forked one lengthwise. The flesh inside was uniform orange dense. No woody core, no dark ring at the pith.
She cut a piece off and put it in her mouth and chewed it. She cut a second piece and offered it to the woman from Onalaska who took it and chewed it and looked at Francis and shrugged in a way that meant the carrot tasted like a carrot. Mari did not make a speech. "The soil out there is Fayette silt loam," Mari said.
I checked the county survey at the extension office. It drains fine. There is no pathogen concern. The carrots are irregular because the soil is stony in that back six.
That is a shape problem for a peeling line. It is not a health problem for a horse. If you want a veterinary reference, I will get you one. If you want a bag to try, I will bring you a bag next week at no cost.
If your horses do not eat them or if you see any issue at all, I will take the bag back and refund your delivery fee, which I have not yet collected. The woman from West Salem asked what Mari's price was. Mari told her. The woman did the arithmetic in her head and looked at Francis with an expression that meant she had already decided.
The woman from Onalaska asked whether the delivery schedule was going to be reliable. Mari said the delivery schedule was going to be as reliable as her truck, which was as reliable as anything else on her farm, which was to say that it was going to be there when she said it would be there. Francis stood up from her desk. She said the 200-bag order she had placed the week before was standing.
She said she would take another 50 on top of it as soon as Mari could bag them. Mari drove home that afternoon with the paper sack empty on the seat and the arithmetic doing quiet patient work in her chest. Not triumph, not vindication, something older than either. The plain ordinary sensation of a plan holding together at the point of first pressure.
She pulled the Holdridge carrots the first weekend in November, working the back six over three long days with a borrowed two row digger behind the F-100. The ground was soft from a heavy October rain. The carrots lifted cleanly. She ran them through the rebuilt washer in the shop in evening shifts 2 hours after supper.
Each night, the wood stove ticking and the crank turning under her hand, the clean carrots dropping into 50 lb. Burlap bags at 60 cents a piece from the feed store stacked three deep on pallets along the north wall. The root cellar under the farmhouse held 400 bags. Raymond had poured the walls and floor in 1946 with a ventilation shaft that kept the temperature between 34 and 40 degrees through the coldest Vernon County winters without any mechanical assistance.
Mari filled the cellar in the second week of November. She rented cold storage at the Viroqua grain elevator for the remainder at $40 for the season. Total cost of the operation, entered in the ledger in the small precise hand that had begun to look more and more like Raymond's: $60 for the lot, $11 for brush stock, $4 for welding rod, $2 for hardware, $108 for bagging, $40 for cold storage, and $22 for fuel across seven trips to La Crosse and back. $247.
She delivered the first 200 bags to Cedar Bluff on the 11th of November in the borrowed flatbed. Francis wrote her a check for $300. She delivered the additional 50 on the 18th. She delivered 50 more to the Onalaska operation on the 22nd and another 75 to West Salem on the 25th.
By the 1st of December, she had sold nearly half of the 40 tons and had covered every dollar of her cost with the first four checks. The Sunday after the West Salem delivery, she stopped for gas at the Sinclair station outside Viroqua on the way home. She was standing at the pump with the nozzle in the F-100's filler when a Buick Electra pulled in behind her at the second pump. Merl Blackwood got out of the driver's side.
He walked around the front of his car and passed the pump island and stopped at a distance from her that was calculated not to feel like an approach. He asked how she was doing. She said she was doing fine. He said he had heard she was moving product.
She said she was moving product. He said he had heard she was going to have inventory left over come January. She said she probably would. He said if she found herself in a bind for a buyer, the cannery had a livestock feed contract with a rendering operation up near Eau Claire.
He could put her in touch. It would not be top dollar, but it would be a check. Mari clicked the nozzle off. She hung it back on the pump.
She screwed the cap on her filler. She looked at Merl for a moment. The wind coming off the ridge had turned cold enough now that her breath was visible when she spoke. "I appreciate the offer, Mr. Blackwood. I will let you know."
She got in the truck. She drove home. The green notebook came out of her coat before she took the coat off.
She wrote three lines. Merl Blackwood Sinclair station offered livestock feed buyer at reduced price. Wants inventory off the market before January. Below that, in slightly larger letters than she usually used, she wrote a single sentence.
"A man makes three moves in two months. He is not warning you. He is watching the clock." She closed the notebook. She hung her coat on the peg by the back door.
She lit the wood stove in the kitchen and set water on for coffee. Outside, past the shop in the machine shed, in the empty back pasture where Biscuit's granddaughter grazed in a coat of early winter fuzz, the sun was going down over the ridge in the specific slow way it went down in Vernon County in early December. Half of the 40 tons was already gone. The remainder was in storage cold and dry and paid for.