After she hung up, Clara sat in the shed for a while without moving. Then she got up and went back to work.
The following week, Roy Hamlin appeared at the north fence line again, this time in the early afternoon. He was carrying something, a quart-size glass jar sealed with a square of cloth and a rubber band filled with a liquid so dark it was almost opaque. He held it out across the fence without preamble. "My wife Eleanor made this," he said.
"She kept barrels in the shed out back of our place for 40 years. Passed six years ago." He looked at the jar for a moment, not at Clara. "Helene Brauer taught her. The same woman who taught Agnes." Clara took the jar carefully, the way you take something you understand is being trusted to you.
"Agnes never mentioned it to you," she said. "No." Roy's voice carried no particular feeling about this.
"I do not suppose she would have. Eleanor and Agnes were the same kind of women. Did things with their hands and did not talk about it. Figured the work said enough."
Clara unscrewed the cloth and lowered her nose to the opening. The smell was deep and layered, sharp and sweet at the same time. And underneath both of those was something older that she did not yet have the vocabulary to name.
She understood immediately that it was not the same as what she had produced so far. It was what she was trying to get to. She looked up. "40 years and nobody knew."
Roy looked across the Whitfield property toward the shed, toward the visible edge of the great pile that was still working its way down. "The people who do this kind of work," he said, "they do not usually do it for recognition. They do it because the thing itself is worth doing." He turned back toward his truck.
"Keep the jar. It will show you what the direction is." He was halfway across his field before Clara thought to call after him.
She stood at the fence with Eleanor Hamlin's jar in both hands and thought about two women on the same county road learning the same thing from the same teacher, working in separate sheds for 40 years, with neither one of them ever saying a word about it to the other. She brought the jar inside and set it on the workbench. She did not open it again that night. She just let it sit there at the edge of the lamplight while she worked a reference point, a direction, something to aim at.