Rocks that should have been underwater until the summer heat settled in were sitting dry in the morning light, smooth and obvious like facts that had decided to stop being polite about themselves. She kept the observation to herself. Mostly because she knew the two kinds of neighbors the information would produce. The kind that would tell her one dry spring meant nothing and the kind that would begin catastrophizing in ways that were not useful to anyone. Neither response helped her solve the problem in front of her, which was purely practical.
How do you grow corn in a drought when you have no money to buy water rights and no rights to buy? The circular had given her the beginning of an answer. She'd found it in February sorting through a cabinet of old agricultural bulletins at the freight station for the stationmaster who kept every printed document he'd ever received and had finally been persuaded to let someone organize them. Most of the bulletins were about livestock and soil amendments and matters that had nothing to do with her situation. But one older than the rest, its edges soft from years of handling, described a method of subsurface irrigation using porous earthen vessels, unglazed, buried to the shoulder with only the mouth exposed at ground level.
The clay was fired at a low enough temperature to remain slightly porous, so water placed inside a vessel seeped outward slowly through the walls into the surrounding soil near the root zone without evaporating at the surface. The method was slow. It was also, the bulletin was clear about this, remarkably efficient compared with surface irrigation in dry conditions. Evie read it standing up, then read it again. She asked if she could borrow it.
She took it home and spent the following 3 weeks calculating. Four acres. Standard row spacing for corn intercropped with climbing beans with squash spread between. The estimated seepage rate the circular gave, adjusted downward by 15% because she didn't trust any number from a circular that didn't account for her specific soil depth. The moisture holding capacity of the ground on her claim, which she knew well because she dug test holes after every rain for two seasons, checking how far moisture penetrated and how quickly it vanished again.
The number of vessels required to keep the root zone consistently damp through the months when she couldn't draw from the well daily. She filled six pages of the back of the ledger with grids and crossed out figures. When she finally arrived at a stable answer, she wrote it in larger numerals than everything else on the page. 300. She would need 300 unglazed clay irrigation vessels, each one roughly the size of a large preserving jar, buried with their shoulders below the soil surface and their mouths accessible, covered with flat shale to prevent evaporation from the opening.
Three hundred placed at roughly four-foot intervals across an adjusted grid that weighted the eastern corn rows more heavily where root demand would be highest. Three hundred she didn't have and couldn't make. She had no kiln, no workable clay deposits near her claim, and no time before the planting window to learn a craft that took experienced potters years to master. She needed them already made and she needed them at a price that didn't finish her. The answer to that problem arrived on a Tuesday at the end of March in the form of Rafael Ortega's freight wagon.