In the early evening light the contrast was almost impossible to look at without feeling something. Riders on the valley road had begun taking the longer route past her property deliberately, which was a thing she'd overheard twice at the mercantile and noted without comment. They came to look at the green because there was so little green anywhere else, because the green meant something that was harder to name than just a good crop in a bad year. That evening, for the first time since April, Evie did not check the field before bed. She left it to the dark and the cool and the 300 vessels working silently below the surface, seeping water into the root zones of the corn, beans, and squash, exactly as she had calculated in February, exactly as the numbers had said they would.
Then she sat down at the table and did the thing she had been too busy to do since April. She looked at the wall and rested for a while. She was still sitting there when the west wind pushed open the kitchen window she'd left unlatched and the air that came through was cool from the desert dark and carried with it very faint, barely a suggestion, the particular smell that dried grass makes when it is hot enough in a long drought to become something more than dead. She noticed it. She closed the window and went to bed, but the smell was already in the room and it did not entirely leave.
The smell did not go away. It was in the air the next morning when she opened the kitchen door, faint and so distant that she could still tell herself it was coming from somewhere far off, some brush fire working its way through dead grass three or four valleys over. She had smelled range fires before. In drought years they were a fact of the territory, the way cold was a fact of January, not welcome but expected. She went to the field and did her morning work.
She noted in her log that the west squash was holding good moisture levels, that the central corn had advanced another inch or so in height overnight, that two of the bean plants in the third eastern row had developed a yellowing at the leaf edges she did not like the look of. She pulled them and checked the roots, which were healthy. The yellowing was environmental heat in a particularly exposed position between two large corn stalks that had grown to shade each other but not the bean between them. She repositioned the shale covers in that cluster to give the bean more shade through the afternoon hours. She was doing this kneeling in the third row, moving a piece of flat stone from one edge to another when she smelled it for the first time.
Not distant, not three valleys over. She stood up. The smoke was coming from the west. Not a column, not yet, just a general thickening of the air along the horizon in the direction of the prevailing wind. A brownish quality to the light that the sky had not had when she came out an hour ago.