She heard it before she saw it, a heavier-than-normal load, the wheel hubs working against the weight, coming up the valley road at the pace of a man who'd been hauling the same cargo long enough to stop thinking about it. Rafael ran a circuit between border settlements and the northern rail heads, trading in earthenware, preserved goods, and occasionally small livestock. And he stopped in Dry Willow every few months when the route warranted it. Evie had bought glazed cooking jars from him twice. She'd found him honest and unhurried, which were the qualities she valued most in a transaction.
She was at the freight yard that afternoon to collect seed catalogs for the stationmaster when she saw the crates stacked in the sides of Rafael's wagon. Rough unglazed clay, dun-colored, packed in straw. She walked past them, stopped, and walked back. "What are those?" she said. Rafael set down the crate he was unloading and looked at the wagon with the expression of a man who had been asked this question more than once in recent weeks and found it slightly painful to answer.
"Irrigation vessels, made for a farming cooperative up in Mora Valley. The cooperative broke up over a family land dispute before the order was delivered. Three hundred units, paid to the manufacturer but not paid for on delivery. I've been carrying them for 2 months waiting for a buyer who can take the whole lot because I can't move a hundred of them, and I can't store them on the road without risking breakage. I'll have to eat the loss myself."
Evie was already looking at the visible pots through the slats. The shape was right. The clay looked right. She reached through the slats and touched one: rough, unglazed, slightly gritty, porous.
"How much for the lot?" she said. Not an idle question. Rafael took the measure of her the way a man does when a woman asks a freight price without flinching. "$46. That includes the crates and the straw packing." She was quiet for long enough that a different man might have thought she was calculating.
She was, but she had already done the relevant calculation a dozen times that winter. She knew exactly what $46 was. It was 2 months of bookkeeping at the freight station. It was her entire winter reserve built carefully from fall vegetable sales and harness repair work and ledger entries for merchants who didn't have the patience for their own numbers. It was the fund she kept in the back of her seed tin against the possibility of a bad harvest, a broken harness, a sick horse, any of the ordinary disasters that killed homestead claims before the land inspector ever arrived.
She had the kind of mind that didn't flinch from what the numbers said even when what they said was uncomfortable. If she spent the money and the drought didn't come, she'd have pots in the ground, a more efficient watering system than she'd had before, and nothing in reserve for emergencies. Bad. If she spent the money and the drought came, but the system didn't perform, she'd lose both the money and the crop. Worse.