"My well and my labor. Three hundred times across four acres." She poured a measured half gallon from the canteen at her belt into the open vessel mouth, replaced the shale lid, pressed it down, and then looked at the soil around the vessel. "Wait," she said. She stood up.
They waited. At just after 4:00 the following afternoon, she walked Hiram and Tom Hendricks back to the same corn cluster. She pointed at the soil surface. It looked as it always looked, dry, cracked in the heat, the kind of surface that made you think nothing was alive below it.
Then she reached down and pressed three fingers into the earth at a point 6 inches from the vessel shoulder. Her fingers went in easily. The soil at that depth was dark and cool, not wet, not saturated, but unmistakably, measurably moist where the seepage from the clay walls had been traveling outward since the previous afternoon. She withdrew her hand and showed them the soil on her fingers.
"The water comes in through the mouth," she said. "It seeps outward through the walls because the clay is porous but not open. Slowly, continuously, directly into the root zone where the corn can use it without the heat ever touching it." She looked at Hiram.
"That is what I spent $46 and six weeks of my life building. Not a diversion. A burial." Hiram Bell looked at the soil on her fingers for a long time. Something in his face shifted, not collapsed, exactly, but the rigidity of his earlier expression loosened in a way that suggested he had been holding it in place with effort.
He reached out and pressed his own hand into the soil near the exposed root zone and felt what she had felt. He pulled his hand back. "All right," he said quietly. Just those two words. She wiped her hand on her work pants and stood up.
Tom Hendricks cleared his throat. "It's a clever thing, Evie." She nodded. She was watching Hiram, who was still looking at the damp soil, and she was thinking something she hadn't let herself think until this moment, that the demonstration had worked, and that working did not fix what was about to become obvious. The field was green.
The method was proven. And she could not give a single one of them what that demonstration meant in practical terms. There were no pots available, and the planting season was 4 months past. She looked at the four men in her field, at the brown fields visible on all sides beyond her fence line, at the arroyo channel baking dry in the middle distance. She had been right.
She had the only green field in the valley, and she could not put the method to work for them. Not this season. Not in any way that would help them before harvest. Over the following week, more people came. Not accusatory ones.