The arroyo was exposing more stone every week. The snow on the Sangre Ridge was a thin line that would be gone before June. Evelyn Mercer had already moved on to the next calculation.
The first pot went into the ground on the second Monday of April, before sunrise, when the air still carried the cold that would be gone by 9:00. Evie started at the eastern edge of the field where the grid was densest because that was where she would work the hardest and she wanted the hardest part behind her early.
The technique was simple in theory and brutal in practice. Dig a hole sixteen inches deep and wide enough to drop the vessel in without it touching the walls. Lower it carefully. Pack soil around the outside tamping without cracking the clay. Leave only the narrow mouth exposed at ground level.
Cover the mouth with flat shale so rain and wind couldn't introduce debris that would seal the opening over time. She had practiced the sequence twice in the yard. The practice had taken twelve minutes per vessel. Four acres and three hundred vessels meant something that could not be undone by efficiency alone. It meant weeks.
She dug the first hole by lantern light and set the first pot before the horizon had any color in it. By the time actual daylight arrived, she had completed nine. She stood up and counted the remaining holes she had marked the day before, with lengths of string stretched between stakes in a grid faint enough to be nearly invisible to anyone on the road. She looked at nine pots in the ground and the hundreds still waiting in their crates and she held that number in her chest for exactly as long as it took to pick up the shovel again.
Three days in, Silas appeared at the edge of the field. He didn't announce himself. She heard his horse on the lane and kept digging. He tied the horse to the fence post and walked to the near edge of the grid and stood with his hands in his jacket pockets for a while looking at the pattern of exposed clay mouths.
"You'd go faster with two shovels," he said finally. "Probably." "I have a shovel." She drove the blade into the soil and looked at him over the handle.
"I'm not running a charity for bored ranchers." "I'm not bored." A pause. "I'm also not going to apologize for offering." She thought about it.
Not the help itself; she was not too proud for help. She had gotten over that particular variation of pride in her second winter here when she had needed to ask the stationmaster for 2 weeks of credit on flour. She thought about the geometry of the arrangement. There was a difference between a man helping because he had nothing better to do and a man helping because he had decided the work was worth his time. She wasn't sure yet which one Silas Ward was.
"You set every pot where I tell you," she said. "The spacing is specific. You don't adjust it because something looks more natural." "Understood."