"Rafael said two brothers disagreed about water rights, went to a judge, lost time and money, and then one of them went south and the other stayed." She thought about that. Two men who had planned to irrigate together, driven apart by the thing they were trying to conserve. "I'm not going to let that happen here," she said. She wasn't sure she meant just the pots.
Silas was quiet for a moment. "No," he said. "You're not." She reached for the last bucket and found she genuinely couldn't lift it off the ground. She tried twice.
The second time she got it 6 in and her grip failed. She sat back and looked at it. Silas stood up from the fence post and walked over and picked up the bucket. He carried it to the last corner of the reset section and poured it slowly along the base of the perimeter. He did it without a word and without any particular ceremony about it and without once looking at her while he did it because it was just the last bucket and the section needed wetting down and the fact that she couldn't lift it was nothing she did to explain or apologize for.
He set the empty bucket down and picked up his jacket from the fence rail. "I'll come by tomorrow," he said. "Check the eastern edges." "You don't have to."
"I know I don't have to." He looked at her, the same steady look she'd gotten in the freight yard weeks ago, the one she still hadn't entirely worked out. "Go to sleep, Evie." He got his horse from the paddock and rode down the dark lane. She stayed on the ground at the edge of the field for another few minutes after the sound of the horse faded, looking at the reset section, the lantern burning low beside her.
In the following weeks, the damage resolved itself in the way she had hoped. The reset section showed no persistent irregularities. The two cracked vessels were repaired with pine resin and remained functional. The seedlings in the wind-damaged eastern rows that had been pressed flat by debris recovered over several days, though not all of them. She lost perhaps 6% of the eastern corn seedlings, which she had already accounted for in her density calculations.
The corn came up straight and even across the central rows. Beans sent up preliminary leaves, then the true leaves, then began their reach for the stalks. Squash spread low and fast across the western section, putting out enormous flat leaves that covered the soil underneath and reduced the evaporation she'd been worried about. She tested the moisture at eight-inch depth every 3 days, rotating through the rows in order. The readings were consistent in a way she had not been entirely certain they would be.
The soil near the buried vessels stayed noticeably darker and cooler than the surface suggested, the way the circulars had described, the way her calculations had predicted, the way she had bet $46 and weeks of labor on. It was working. She did not allow herself to be surprised by this. It had