She told him yes. He looked at her for a moment with the careful neutrality of a man making sure he had heard correctly. Then something happened in his face that was not quite a smile but was in the same territory as one, something that had more to do with relief than joy, which she found was the more convincing of the two.
"On what terms?" he said. "The land stays mine. Your ranch stays yours. We live on mine because my field requires daily maintenance and yours doesn't, but the legal boundary doesn't move."
"Agreed." "And I keep the ledger." He looked at her sideways. "Both ledgers?"
"There should only be one ledger." "There are going to be two ledgers." She considered this. "We can discuss the ledger situation."
"Yes," he said. "We can discuss it." And then the thing that had been in the territory of a smile became the actual thing which she had not seen on Silas Ward's face before in its complete form and which she found was worth eight months it had taken to arrive. They repaired the fence together that morning.
Spring came to Dry Willow Valley, the way spring came to the high desert, suddenly without apology, the cold releasing its grip on the ground in the space of two weeks and the planting calculations beginning in every household simultaneously. The arroyo ran thin for ten days in April, fed by snowmelt from a reduced pack, nothing like the ordinary run, and then stopped again. The sky stayed clear, and the wind came from the west, and the farmers of Dry Willow Valley began laying out their fields with a different kind of knowledge than they'd had a year before. The rope measuring lines went out from one property to the next. Children carried shale covers.
Men who had spent the previous April making jokes at a woman's expense measured spacing intervals with careful attention. Women traded seed adapted from the surviving harvest bean varieties, corn that had demonstrated drought resilience, squash selected from the plants that had performed best through the fire and the heat. Evie stood at her fence on an April morning and watched the valley plant itself in a way it had not planted itself before. And she thought about the circular in the cabinet at the freight station, and about $46 in a seed tin, and about a road ditch and a broken wagon wheel and 17 cracked pots, and about a man sitting on a fence rail telling her he still didn't believe it would work, but that he recognized the difference between blind gambling and thinking something through. Some ideas look wrong until they're right.
Some people look difficult until you understand what they're protecting. Some risks look reckless until the drought arrives and you're the only one with water in the ground. She had been told she was foolish. She had been told she was wasting what little she had on something that hadn't been proven. And she had done the arithmetic six different ways and decided that the cost of being wrong was survivable, but the cost of not trying was not.