She answered his questions directly and without additional narrative. When they reached the field, he stopped. He had the same expression every person had when they came to the edge of her field and actually saw it up close. Not awe, just the recalibration a person makes when reality is different from what they expected.
"You're carrying full corn to this height in this drought," he said. "Yes." "From the well? Surface irrigation?"
"Subsurface. I'll show you." She walked him to the nearest row and showed him the same thing she'd shown Hiram Bell, the clay mouth, the shale lid, the vessel in the ground, the moisture seeping outward. He took notes. He pressed his hand into the root zone soil the way everyone did when she showed them and felt the same dark cool that never failed to make the point more clearly than anything she could say.
He asked her how many vessels were in the ground. "300," she said. He looked at the field for a long time. "You did this by hand," he said.
"With help. The burial and the maintenance are my own system. I had a neighbor assist with some of the physical installation." Calhoun wrote things in the ledger. He walked the perimeter of the field and wrote more things.
He looked at the arroyo bed from the far fence line and came back and looked at the field one more time. "Miss Mercer," he said, "your improvements are in good standing. I'll note the field as fully productive." He closed the ledger.
"I don't think I've seen a field in better shape in the county this season." She thanked him. She did not say anything else. When he rode out, she went back to the row she'd been working when he arrived, knelt down, and pressed her fingers into the earth beside a corn cluster that was so healthy it had outgrown its stake. The soil was cool and dark seven inches down.
Every vessel in the row was holding water. The root zone across the entire eastern section was doing exactly what she had calculated it would do in April when this had all been numbers on ledger paper and a theory in an old agricultural circular. She stayed kneeling there for a moment. The field held still around her, the corn just slightly taller than her head. From this angle, the bean vines thick against the stalks, the far western squash spreading wide in the afternoon heat.
It was not beautiful in the way that word usually got used. It was better than beautiful. It was correct. She got up and went back to work.
That evening Silas came with the week's water delivery and found her at the table doing the distribution calculations for the harvest. How much she'd need herself, how much for seed, how much was available for neighbors, in what proportions. He read the numbers upside down from the other side of the table while she worked.
"You're going to short yourself," he said. "No, I'm not. The neighbor column is larger than the Mercer column. The Mercer column is what I need to survive winter. The neighbor column is the rest. The rest goes out."