"It's a management issue. I fill western first and eastern after. Keeps the whole field balanced." He turned to the next page of the log. He did not comment on the fact that she had kept records on every single day since planting.
She thought about commenting on the fact that he didn't comment, which would have been a strange and revealing thing to say, and so she drank her coffee instead. "Rafael mentioned springs failing up north," he said without looking up from the page. "When did you talk to Rafael?"
"Last week. He came through on the northern freight route. Said a ranch he knows forty miles up the pass has a spring that's been running since their grandfather's time. Running low." She set down her coffee cup.
"That spring," Silas said, "has been reliable through four dry cycles I know of personally." He looked up. "If it's running low in April, the summer pattern this year is worse than anything I've seen here." She had already known this.
The arroyo, the snowpack, the well readings, the wind pattern, the circular report she'd read at the freight station about reduced snowfall in the eastern ranges. She had known it in the way a person knows something they have built their entire spring strategy around, which is to say she had known it as a series of numbers rather than as a feeling. Hearing it from a man who had experienced four dry cycles felt like the numbers acquiring weight.
"Then the timing was right," she said. "Yes," Silas said. "The timing was right." He left an hour later. She stood in the door and watched the horse go down the lane and thought about the spring up north that had never failed in living memory.
She thought about the Arroyo stones she could see from here, how clear they were in the afternoon light. The seeds sprouted on the eighth day. Not all of them, seeds don't cooperate at uniform rates regardless of what any farmer wants, but the first green loops in the eastern corn rows showed on day eight and by day 12 she had visible emergence across most of the field. Bean seedlings began their preliminary reach.
The first squash leaves, soft and slightly crumpled, looking like they weren't quite ready for the world yet, pushed through the soil surface in the western rows. She walked the full field that morning and did not allow herself any particular feeling about it because sprouting was not surviving and surviving was not a harvest. She walked it a second time in the afternoon because the second count confirmed the first one and there was no practical argument against it.
The windstorm arrived three days later. It came out of the southwest, which was not the direction she'd been preparing for and it came in the morning when the air pressure had been doing something uncomfortable for two days that she hadn't been able to interpret.