A bundle of 200 gray sticks lay across a young woman's arms, dry and leafless and no thicker than a broom handle.
Along the split-rail fence, men in faded overalls and dusty caps hooked their boots on the bottom board and laughed as she waded into the flooded field.
She pushed the first dead stick a foot deep into the black mud, and the standing brown water closed around her wrist. Her father turned on his heel and walked to his wagon without a single word.
That evening, a man in spectacles pressed an official notice into her hand, warning that no plant on earth would root in a drowned spring bottom. She kept planting anyway until her cold fingers went white, and the drizzle on her cheeks ran together with something warmer.
Behind her, a black leather ledger waited on the porch steps, filled with 60 years of a dead woman's secrets. On the last day of that same year, every farmer who had laughed would return to this fence, hats in their hands, and beg to know how she had done it.
Everyone laughed the morning Adeline Vaughn walked into the drowned land with 200 dead sticks bundled against her chest and began pushing them one by one into six inches of standing brown water. They gathered along the split-rail fence the way men gather at a hanging, boots hooked on the bottom board, hats pushed back, faces cured to leather by 40 summers of Illinois sun.
They laughed because she was 19 and slight, barely five-foot-two in her grandmother's cut-down boots, with hands that had turned more book pages than furrows. They laughed because the sticks were plainly lifeless, gray and leafless and thin as broom handles, hauled down from an attic where they had lain forgotten in oilcloth.
Two hundred of them. Two hundred dead twigs shoved into the black muck of a field that had never, in living memory, grown anything but frogs and fever. Her own father turned on his heel and walked to his wagon without a word.
The man from the state agricultural society wrote her a formal notice that afternoon, declaring that planting under flood conditions defied every principle known to modern husbandry.
And still she planted until her fingers went white and numb, until the drizzle on her cheeks ran together with something warmer, so that no one watching could have told the rain from the weeping.
Months later, that same fence line would be crowded with the same men, and not one of them would be laughing. They would come with their hats in their hands and their throats gone dry, begging a 19-year-old girl to tell them what she had done.
But to understand how the whole of Calder County came to stand humbled at the edge of a swamp, you have to go back to the cold February morning when the woman who left her those sticks was carried out of the farmhouse for the last time, and the ground was too frozen to bury her. So she waited in the church cellar until the thaw.
Prudence Vaughn had lived 81 years on the flat black land where Cain Creek bent lazily through the bottoms before it emptied into the Blackwater two miles south. She had outlived a husband, a son's leaving, three droughts, and every neighbor who had ever spoken ill of her, and there had been many.
The wives of Calder County called her a witch behind their fans and their pie safes because her garden bloomed when theirs shriveled, because she set her beans by the moon when the almanac swore otherwise, because she talked to her rose canes the way other women talked to their babies.
The men tolerated her for two reasons only. Her blackberry preserves had taken the ribbon at the county fair 11 years running. And her late husband, Elias Vaughn, had come home from the war with a shattered hip and a chest of medals, and a dead war hero's widow was not a woman you crossed in the open. So they let her be strange.
They let her keep her 40 acres of useless bottomland, and they waited quietly for the day she would die and the good riverland would come free. That day arrived on the 14th of February, 1884.
Adeline had not grown up on the farm. Not truly. She had been a dreamy child, forever wandering off with a sketchbook and a stub of pencil while her grandmother tried to teach her the names of the herbs. Prudence would fold the girl's fingers around a seed and say, "The whole future of a life is sleeping in that hard little shell."
Adeline would nod and then draw the shape of the clouds instead. When she was 16, her father had sent her to board with a spinster cousin in Danforth so she might finish her schooling properly. The plan, so far as Adeline had a plan, was to sit the examination for the normal school at Bloomington and become a teacher and never once in her life depend on the mercy of weather.
She had a good hand for figures and a better one for reading aloud, and the children at the district school where she sometimes filled in adored her. She was going to leave Calder County the way a bird leaves a flooded nest, without looking back at the water. Then the telegram came to the dry goods store where she clerked three days a week, and everything she had drawn for herself smudged and ran like pencil in the rain.
The farm came to her because there was no one else. Her father, Silas, had spent 20 years running from the very soil that had broken his father's back, and he wanted nothing to do with the bottomland but to be shed of it. He worked at the grain warehouse by the Danforth depot, weighing other men's harvests, drawing steady wages, keeping his hands clean and his sleeves buttoned.