By early July, the well on the Hendricks property half a mile north was showing serious reduction. Tom Hendricks had mentioned it at the mercantile with the careful neutrality of a man who didn't want to alarm anyone, which alarmed everyone. The Bell property's shallow well, which had always been marginal, dropped so fast that Hiram had been hauling water from the settlement's community cistern for 2 weeks. The cistern itself was at roughly half capacity, which represented a finite runway at current consumption. People were watching the sky and driving their cattle out.
By the third week of July, there were fewer cattle in Dry Willow Valley than in any year anyone could specifically remember. And Evie's field was green. Not performing well green, not holding on green, vigorously, undeniably, almost offensively green corn standing past shoulder height with good color in the leaves, bean vines so thick around their stalks she had to manage them back, squash spread wide and low across the western rows like a living carpet. The visible difference between her 4 acres and the fields on either side of it was not subtle. It was the kind of difference that made people slow their horses on the road.
She noticed when they began stopping. First, it was one or two pausing at the fence line to look at the field with the expression people get when they're looking at a thing that contradicts what they understood about the world. She acknowledged them when she saw them and continued working. By the last week of July, the stopping had become a regular event, five or six riders a day, sometimes a wagon, always the same pattern of wordless staring followed by a slow departure. She did not feel vindicated.
She had been too busy for vindication. What she felt, honestly, was uneasy. A green field in a dead valley was not just a success, it was a target. Silas said it to her before she said it to him. It was a Wednesday morning, and they were both watching a group of four men at the fence line who had been there long enough to constitute a meeting.
"They're going to come talk to you soon," he said. "I know." "Some of it will be genuine questions." "I know that, too."
"And some of it," he said, not looking at her but at the men at the fence, "will not be." She nodded once and went back to the row she was working. The conversation she'd been anticipating arrived on a Thursday afternoon when she was at the far corner end of the field checking the deep moisture on the western squash strip. She heard the gate and turned and found Hiram Bell walking toward her with three other men behind him, Tom Hendricks, a man named Asa Pruitt, who ran goats near the valley's eastern edge, and a younger man she didn't immediately recognize, who turned out to be Pruitt's oldest son. Hiram stopped at the edge of the planted section.
He wore the particular expression he'd had since they both understood he'd been wrong about the pots: the look of a man who had been wrong loudly and now had to manage that fact in public. "Evie," he said. "Hiram." She kept her place at the far end, made him close the remaining distance if he wanted the conversation. It was her field, and she was not going to walk toward him to have an accusation directed at her.