Hetty's nephew, pressed gently over another Sunday dinner, gave up more. The private note carried a hard term buried in its language, a clause that Ashford had never read aloud in his oily recitations at the fence.
If the taxes and the arrears were not settled in full by the deadline, the holder of the note might elect to take the land in satisfaction of the debt outright, without public auction, without the property ever being offered to another buyer. No sale to the highest bidder, no chance for Adeline to find a rival purchaser who might pay enough to clear the note and leave her something.
Rufus had written himself the sole door out of her trouble, and the door opened only onto his own barn. The generous offer he kept dangling was not generous at all. It was the only price she would ever be allowed, because when the deadline fell he could simply take the farm, and the offer was merely a way to make her sign it over smiling and save him the paperwork.
Silas took the news badly. He walked the length of the drainage cut he had dug, back and forth in the dusk, his hands opening and closing at his sides. When he finally spoke, his voice shook with a shame that had teeth.
"This is on me. Every foot of it. If I hadn't left that twelve dollars sitting, if I'd been a man about my own debts, he'd never have had the thread to pull. He's been building this for two years while I weighed other men's corn and told myself I'd escaped farming clean."
"I didn't escape anything. I just left my mother and my daughter standing in the trap alone."
He stopped and looked at the willows gone gray-silver now in the failing light. "How long? How long until the deadline?"
Adeline had counted it that afternoon, sitting on the blue porch steps with the bank's letter in her lap. "The taxes and the arrears come due the last day of August. Sixty days from when the letter came, and near 40 of them already gone."
He looked out at her trees, tall and thriving and worth, so far as any man in Calder County could see, precisely nothing that would answer a mortgage. "Two months. We've got two months to turn a woodland into money, and there isn't a soul in this county who'd give us a dollar for the whole of it."
The rain, which had been the enemy all spring, chose that week to become the enemy in reverse. It simply stopped. Low pewter skies that had drowned the bottom through March and April gave way to a hard, cloudless blue that stacked up day on day, and the sun came down on Calder County with a weight that turned the roads to powder and the puddles to cracked plates of dried mud.
At first, the farmers were glad of it. The corn that had stood yellow-footed in the wet all spring greened up and shot skyward, and the co-op talk turned hopeful, and men who had cursed the flood in May blessed the sun in July.
Then July wore on, and the sun did not relent, and the blue did not break, and the gladness curdled by slow degrees into unease. The topsoil crusted. The young corn, which had leapt up on the spring-stored water, began to reach its roots down into ground that had nothing left to give.
The deep green of the blades took on a grayish cast at the edges, a dullness, the first far-off signal of a thing no farmer likes to name.
An old man named Josiah Puit, who was past 70 and had farmed the district since before the war, stopped his wagon at Adeline's fence one blistering afternoon, not to gawk at the willows, but to rest his horse in what little shade her taller trees threw across the road. He sat there fanning himself with his hat and looking at the sky with the flat weariness of a man who has seen too many summers.
"Feels like the dry summer of '64," he said to no one in particular, to the horse, to the air. "Folks don't remember '64. Rain quit in June that year and didn't come back proper until near October. Creeks went to dust. I watched the Blackwater get so low a boy could walk it dry at the ford."
He put his hat back on and gathered the reins. "Corn's looking proud right now. Corn always looks proud right before it doesn't."
He clucked to the horse and rolled on. Adeline stood at the fence and watched him go, then turned to look at her own trees, which did not have the grayish cast, which stood as deep and silver-green in the drought's first weeks as they had in the wet.
She understood why by the middle of July, when she went out with a spade meaning to find dust and found instead, under the canopy of her tallest willows, dark crumbling earth that closed cool and damp around the blade a foot down. The roots she had watched come up as white threads in May had thickened over the summer into a spreading underground net.
That net had gone down after the falling water table and found it, tapping old buried creek channels and the deep, cool wet that the drought had lowered but not emptied. Overhead, the same trees that drank so deep let fall a steady soft rain of small leaves and spent twigs that lay thick on the ground beneath them, a mulch that held the coolness in and the moisture down.
Around the foot of every willow, a circle of stubborn green persisted, clover and violet and grass, while 40 feet away in the open the ground cracked and paled. The field was not merely surviving the drought. It was ignoring it. It had built itself a private weather.
The county noticed that too, and this time no one drove slowly to point and grin. The wagons that passed her fence now carried men with drawn faces who looked at the green line of her trees the way a thirsty man looks at a well he has been told is poisoned, wanting and afraid to want.