And because the hour between 4:00 and 5:00 was the only part of the day that felt like it belonged entirely to her. She pulled water by hand. The well rope was wearing thin at the knot and she had replaced it twice already. She carried the water in two large barrels on the cart to the field where she worked row by row pouring measured amounts into the exposed vessels' mouths. A gallon per vessel in the eastern corn section every 4 days.
Every 3 days for the western squash strip. Every five for the middle beans, which were showing the deepest root development and could draw on reserves the surface couldn't see. The system was working. She did not take comfort from this in the way a person takes comfort from luck. She took note of it as a person takes note of a calculation confirming its own projection.
The corn was at knee height by the second week of June. The beans were climbing. The squash leaves in the western rows had gotten large enough to throw real shade, and the soil directly beneath them was cooler by nearly 20° than the exposed surface 2 ft away. She pressed her palm flat against that shaded soil one morning and held it there, and the cool of it went up through her hand and into her wrist, and she kept her eyes open and did not say a word because there was no one to say it to.
Silas came by on Wednesdays and Saturdays, unless his cattle operation required otherwise, in which case he sent word through whatever contact happened to be heading her direction. He never appeared unannounced without a reason, and he always had a reason, a tool he'd borrowed that needed returning, a question about well maintenance that had nothing to do with the question he actually came to ask. She understood this without finding it complicated. Some people needed a stated reason to be somewhere, and that was not a character flaw. They developed a routine in the morning coffee hour that was not exactly a routine because neither of them named it.
He would arrive. She would make coffee. They would sit at the table or on the porch, depending on the temperature. They would talk about the field and then about other things, and then one of them would say something that was slightly more honest than the conversation up to that point, and the other would respond in kind, and then they would both back off slightly and finish the coffee.
Then he would help with whatever needed doing and leave. It was not a courtship. She was fairly certain they were both aware it was not nothing, either. The arroyo had been completely dry since the 14th of May.