"And you're not saving me. You're moving dirt while I direct the system. The system stays mine." He held her look. Something in his expression shifted slightly.
Not offense exactly, but the recognition that she'd needed to say it and that he'd heard it. "All right," he said. She handed him a stake and showed him the grid marks. They worked until mid-afternoon when her water jug ran empty and both their backs were speaking clearly about the morning's labor. Forty-one pots in the ground by the time they stopped, Evie slightly ahead of Silas in her row count which she noticed and did not mention.
He noticed it, too. She knew because he didn't mention it, either. They sat on the fence rail to rest and she drank and he rolled a piece of dry grass between his fingers and looked at the exposed row of clay mouths running into the field. "How'd you find that circular?" he said.
"Sorting files at the freight station." "And you just looked at it and thought three hundred pots?" "Not immediately." She recapped her jug.
"I thought about it for about 3 weeks and ran the calculations six different ways first." He was quiet for a moment. "You've been keeping rainfall records?" "Since I got here."
"Why?" She thought about how to answer that. The honest answer was that she had always kept records of things that might tell her something later because she had grown up in a household where the adults made large decisions on feeling and instinct, and she had watched that approach fail in ways that took years to recover from. The numbers were not a comfort. They were just a way of knowing what was actually happening instead of what you wanted to be happening.
"Same reason you count your cattle every morning instead of every week," she said. "Something changes before you notice it if you stop paying attention." He looked at her sideways. "How do you know I count them every morning?"
"I don't, but you do, don't you?" Another pause. A small one. "Yeah," he said. That was the first real conversation they had.
Not the only one. Over the following days, they developed a working rhythm that was not quite comfortable and not quite tense, but somewhere in the functional space between those things. She marked the holes. He cut the sod and moved the first soil while she tamped and placed. They disagreed twice about spacing once because Silas thought two adjacent holes were too close to a natural rock shelf, and once because Evie wanted to shift a row to accommodate a low depression where rainwater sometimes pooled.
The first time she checked her grid measurements and confirmed she was right about the rock shelf, and they moved the holes four inches. The second time, she checked again and found he was right about the pooling risk. Water sitting at the surface near the buried vessels would eventually cause rot in the wooden stakes she was using as reference markers, which would mess up her measurements for later maintenance. She moved the row without saying anything about it. He noticed.