A rumor went through the district that the Vaughn willows carried the blight Whitcomb had warned of in the spring, that stock watered near them would sicken. It was a lie with no root that nonetheless made two neighbors who had meant to help think better of it.
None of it was large enough to fight in a courtroom. All of it together was a man with money and standing making the simple act of getting a crop to market cost more and take longer and lean harder on a girl and her father who had neither money nor time to spare.
"He can't stop us cutting." Silas stood in the dooryard the evening the teamster's refusal came, looking out at the trees that had to become money in 20 days. "So he'll make every foot of the road to Springfield uphill and hope we run out of days before we run out of trees."
"And he might be right. Two of us can't cut and strip 200 trees and haul them 40 miles in three weeks. Not alone."
He turned, and the admission cost him. "We're going to have to ask for help, and I don't know a soul in this county who owes us a kindness after the way most of them laughed."
But the county, it turned out, had been doing its own arithmetic all summer, and the answer it had reached was not the one Rufus was counting on.
The first to come was Josiah Puit, the old man who had rested his horse in her shade and spoken of the dry summer of '64. He came the morning after the teamster quit, driving a wagon of his own with two grown grandsons on the seat beside him.
He climbed down stiff and slow and stood looking at the willows a while before he said his piece. "I've watched every green thing in this county die since June. Everything but these. My corn's gone. My beans are gone. My grandsons are sitting idle because there's nothing left to work."
"Rufus put the word around that a man shouldn't help you, and that's exactly how I knew helping you was the right thing to do. You want these trees cut and hauled, girl, you've got three pairs of hands that aren't doing anything else and a wagon he doesn't own."
He spat in the dust. "I remember your grandmother. She was worth ten of him, and everybody knew it and everybody was too proud to say it while she lived. I'll not make that mistake twice."
They came behind Puit the way water finds a crack, one wagon and then two, men whose own fields had failed and who had time on their hands and a grudge against Rufus they had never before had cause to voice.
Hetty Marsh's nephew came out from the bank on his half-day quietly and would not take pay. Joe Kowalski, who farmed 80 acres south of town and had never once spoken to Adeline in her life, drove up with his eldest boy and a set of stripping knives and said only that he'd heard she was short of hands, then set to work.
By the second week of the cutting, there were a dozen men and more in the drowned land that was no longer drowned, felling the first-year growth, stripping the bark in long clean sheets to dry on racks Silas built along the fence, bundling the osier tight for the wagons.
The willows gave and gave and did not diminish, throwing the promise of next year's growth even as this year's came off them. The field that the whole county had laughed at in April had become, by the middle of August, the only place in Calder County where work was being done and money was being made.
Men who had come out of spite for Rufus stayed for the plain relief of doing something that paid in a season when nothing else did. Adeline stood at the edge of it one evening as the wagons loaded for the first run to Springfield, the low sun turning the stripped bark on the racks to sheets of gold.
The men called to one another across the field in the easy voices of people who had stopped being afraid, and the weight of what her grandmother had held alone came down on her full.
Prudence had done all of this by herself in secret for 20 years, cutting and stripping and hauling a crop she dared not let the county see, holding a siege no one knew was being fought, so that when the day came that her granddaughter needed it, the wall would still be standing.
She had never asked for the dozen wagons. She had never had them. She had held the ground alone until she could hold it no longer and had trusted the holding to a dreamy girl who drew clouds instead of learning the herbs, and the trust had been enough.
Adeline pressed her hand flat against the rough bark of the nearest willow, the first of the 200 she had shoved dead into the mud five months before. She made the tree a promise she did not say aloud, that the ground it stood on would not be lost, that the 20-year siege would not fail in its final week for want of one girl's nerve.
The first wagons rolled for Springfield at dawn, heavy with bundled osier and dried bark, Puit's grandsons and Kowalski's boy driving, going the long way round by roads Rufus's rumors had not reached.
Adeline watched the dust of them out of sight down the section road with the deadline 11 days off and the first real money of her life riding away toward a buyer she had never met. Then she turned back to the field where a dozen men waited to cut the rest, took up her grandmother's stripping knife, and went to work.