"Evie--" "I know what I'm doing." He was quiet for a moment and she knew he was looking at the numbers again, running them his own way, arriving at the same answer she'd arrived at that she was right. The margin was there. It was not charity but redistribution of a surplus she had calculated and he had helped to protect. He was also, she knew, thinking about something else.
"Ruth Bell's going to cry," he said. "Ruth Bell is not going to cry. Ruth Bell is going to take the seed and say thank you and plant it in the spring." A pause.
"And then she's probably going to cry at home where no one can see." He looked at her and the expression on his face was the one she had started to recognize as the version of him that had nothing to perform, no skepticism, no caution, just Silas Ward seeing something and being willing to let her know he saw it. She looked at the table.
"You knew this was coming," he said. "Since April. This whole thing, the well sharing, the seed reserve, the distribution. You built it into the original plan. Not every detail, but the idea of it."
She thought about how to answer honestly. The honest answer was that she had built it for her own survival first and the community application had clarified itself over the months as the drought got worse and the neighbors got closer and the thing she was building turned out to be more than one woman's solution. But she had also understood, since the first night she'd drawn the grid on ledger paper, that a method that worked once on 4 acres could work on 400 acres if enough people learned it. The knowledge was the thing.
The harvest was proof of the knowledge. "I built it to survive," she said. "The rest of it is what survival turns out to mean when you're living next to other people." He looked at her for a long moment.
"Surviving alone in an empty valley," he said, "isn't much like winning," and she said it with him because she had said it to him before in this room over coffee. Back when the field was just beginning and she had not yet known how true it was going to turn out to be. They held each other's look across the table. Then Evie looked back at the distribution column and added a line. Outside the valley was brown for miles in every direction.
Cattle were gone for most of the surrounding range. Wells were dropping. The arroyo was a flat dry channel baking in the late summer heat and the sky above the Sangre Ridge had not produced significant cloud in 2 months. And in the middle of all of it, one field sat green and full. Corn standing shoulder high, beans thick around their stalks, squash covering the western rows in broad dark leaves.