"I know I can." He didn't. The disagreement over the western boundary happened on a Friday afternoon when the wind had been coming out of the west for 3 days running, hot and dry, and the kind of persistent that meant it wasn't a weather event, but a seasonal condition announcing itself early. Evie's original grid ran the western row at the same spacing as everything else. Silas stood at the fence for a while looking at the direction the loosened topsoil was blowing off the field, and then walked to where she was working.
"The western strip," he said. "What's going to happen to it in July?" "Same thing that happens to everything else. Less water, more heat. That's why the pots are there."
"The wind comes out of the west through the whole summer." "Every ranch from here to the Pecos will tell you the same thing. It strips the moisture off the surface soil faster than you can replace it. The pots are under the surface, and the evaporation off the exposed plant material is going to cost you. Squash out there, bean vines, the corn edges, they'll lose water through their leaves faster than in any other row. If you've got the same density on the western strip as the middle rows, you're not putting moisture where you're losing it most."
She looked at the grid. She looked at the wind moving across the stripped topsoil at the field edge. She ran the relevant numbers in her head not to prove him wrong. She was past that kind of argument with herself, but to check whether the math supported the instinct. It took her longer than she wanted it to.
"I'd have to double the density on the western two rows and use the smaller vessels from the outer placement." "You have enough." "Barely. But you have enough." She looked at the field.
The calculated efficiency of the original grid had a clean logic to it. Every part of the design had a reason and changing one part rippled through the whole system. That was the argument she could make against it. Disrupting a carefully calibrated balance for a reason that wasn't in the original data. The argument she couldn't make against it was that Silas had been watching wind patterns on this range for more than a decade and the circular she'd built the system on had come out of a farming context with different summer wind conditions than high desert New Mexico.
She opened the ledger. She checked the current western placement. She crossed out the original spacing and wrote new numbers. She didn't announce the decision. She picked up the marked stakes for the western boundary and began pulling them, spacing them at new intervals.
Silas stood where he was for a moment. "You don't have to say it," she said without turning around. "I wasn't going to say anything." "Good."
"I was going to help you move the stakes." She handed him the measuring rope. The modified western boundary went in over the next two days. Smaller vessels, more dense, packed in soil she improved with several loads of organic matter from the barn floor to help retain the additional moisture those rows would demand. The work was finicky and slow and by the end of the second day her knees had developed a specific complaint about the kneeling that she was ignoring on principle.