Then she got to work. The yield took 4 days to fully bring in with help from the families who had been drawing from her well, and the two men Silas contributed from his own operation. She counted everything before distributing anything. This was not mistrust. It was arithmetic.
She needed to know the total before she could divide it in the proportions that made sense. And the proportions needed to make sense because some of these families were going to depend on what they received to get through to spring. The final count was not what it would have been without the fire damage. She had lost roughly eight percent of the outer corn section, which was real, and which she entered in the ledger with the same precision she entered everything. The remaining 92% was a yield that against the backdrop of total crop failure on every surrounding property was almost uncomfortable to look at.
She separated her own winter needs first. She was not selfless about this because selflessness was not the point. The point was sustainability, and she was no use to anyone as a neighbor if she starved herself out of the valley by spring. Winter provisions, seed retention, reserve, she took exactly what the numbers said she needed and no more. What remained went into distribution.
She sent word to 18 households through Silas and through Ruth Bell, who had become, without anyone formally deciding this, the person who knew which family needed what most urgently. Families came over 3 days. No one was turned away. The exchange was in whatever they could offer labor, preserved goods, hides, lumber, the promise of spring work that she recorded in the ledger and intended to collect on only if she needed to. Mostly she collected on it to give people the dignity of not receiving something for nothing, which was a distinction that mattered in a place where pride was one of the few resources that had not been depleted by the drought.
Hiram Bell came on the second day. He came alone without Ruth, which told her the visit was his own initiative and not a coordinated family decision. He stood at the gate for a moment before coming through it, which she observed from the barn door and pretended not to. He walked to her with his hat in his hands, which she noted and did not reference.
"I came for the seed you promised Ruth," he said. "I have it ready." She went to the barn and came back with the wrapped packet of corn and bean seed from the strongest plants in the central section, carefully dried and labeled in her handwriting. She had set aside more for him than the baseline amount, not because she owed him more, but because his was one of the larger properties, and the point was that as much of the valley as possible should be planting this method next spring. He took the packet.