"Twenty minutes minimum if we work without stopping." He looked at the light again. "We start now, we'll be working after dark." "I have two lanterns." He did not ask her what the alternative was because they both understood there wasn't one.
The planting window for the corn was closing and she couldn't wait for optimal conditions. He walked back to his horse and unsaddled it and turned it into her small paddock without being asked. She got the lanterns. They worked through the early dark hour by hour. The temperature dropped once the wind died and the cold settled into the ground, which actually helped because compacted cold soil was easier to judge by feel and sound than warm loose soil.
Evie worked the excavation while Silas mixed the fill. She had piles of prepared compaction soil near the barn, dry and clean and ready to be tamped, and they developed a sequence: excavate, inspect, base layer, tamp vessel in, fill, tamp the shoulders, cover. Twenty minutes each had been her estimate. It took them 18 on average, which was not because they were fast, but because neither of them was wasting any motion. Around the ninth or tenth vessel, she noticed the cloth she'd wrapped around her right palm an hour earlier was showing through at the heel.
She stopped and re-wrapped it. Her hands had been in the soil for hours and the skin had softened past the point where it was protecting itself. Silas saw it. "Stop and let me--" "I'm rewrapping it."
"Let me wrap it." She held up her hand. He wrapped it tighter than she had, double layered at the heel, and tied it with a surgeon's precision she didn't expect. "Where'd you learn to do that?"
"Cattle work. You wrap a lot of wire cuts eventually." She went back to digging. "Is that a metaphor?"
"It's a bandage," he said. They reset all 19 vessels by eleven. She had found two additional compromised holes on the eastern edge and they reset those as well, 21 total. Then they went through the larger problem area a second time, pressing the surface with flat boards to consolidate the fill, making sure the soil resistance was consistent. Evie brought the last lantern to the edge of the reset section and held it low to the ground, moving it across the surface.
The light was good enough to see the even dark soil lying consistent from one end to the other, no gaps, no softness. She set the lantern down and stayed kneeling on the ground and her arms did not want to support her anymore. So, she was aware of being very tired in the specific way you are tired when you have used everything available and there isn't an emergency requiring you to find more. She heard Silas sit down behind her, not close 8 ft away at the edge of the reset section. His back probably against the nearest fence post.
For a while neither of them said anything. "The pots in the Mora Valley order," she said eventually. "The cooperative that never received them. Do you know what happened?"