The mud took each stick with a soft sucking pull that felt absurdly like appetite, as if the ground were glad. She planted through the morning and into the afternoon, her back a slow-building ache, her fingers cramping around the cold wet wood, until the light began to slide toward the tree line at the field's far edge and the last stick stood among its 199 fellows.
She waded back to the high ground and turned to look at what she had done. From that little distance, her heart failed her because it looked like nothing at all. It looked like the aftermath of a flood, a scatter of debris left standing when the water fell, twigs and wreckage poking up out of the shallows without pattern or purpose.
It looked exactly like the work of a girl who had lost her senses. It looked, she thought, like a mistake so large it could be seen from the road.
Her father saw it from the road that very evening. Silas came out from town after his shift, good shoes sinking in the soft ground at the field's edge, and he stood there a long while in the failing light and said nothing at all, which was worse than shouting. When he finally spoke, his voice had been sanded down to something almost gentle, and the gentleness was the cruelest part.
"What have you done, girl?" It was not a question. He was staring at the water, at the sticks, at the whole impossible ruin of it. "What in God's name have you done to yourself?"
"Grandmother left instructions." She had rehearsed steadiness and was surprised to find she owned it. "She left me the sticks and she left me the note. She said to plant them in the mud when the creek rose. So I did."
"Your grandmother..." He rubbed a hand down his face, and the hand came away no less weary. "Your grandmother was a good woman, Adeline. I'll not hear otherwise.
But she had notions. Old-country notions from her own grandmother. Superstition dressed up as knowing."
"That's dead wood standing in dead water. You put dead wood in a swamp, you don't get a crop. You get rot and a season lost, and a bank that reads it plain as print that the girl holding this land can't be trusted to hold it."
"Then it will rot," she answered, and the words came out level and clear across the darkening water. "And I will have tried, which is more than sitting in that house counting the days until a man in a black coat comes to carry it off piece by piece."
He looked at her for a long moment, and in his eyes she saw something she had never once seen there, worse than anger, worse than shame. She saw grief, not for the farm, for her. He had believed all his life in the warehouse scale and the buttoned cuff and the wages that came whether it rained or not.
Here stood his only child up to her ankles in the very superstition he had crossed a county to escape, wearing the same stubborn tilt of the chin that his mother had worn to her grave. "You're just like her," he said at last, and it was not spoken as a kindness.
Then he climbed to his wagon and drove back toward the lights of Danforth, and he did not come again for three weeks. Adeline stood in the dooryard listening to the wheels fade, and the loneliness that came down on her then was the coldest thing she had felt all that cold spring. Colder than the mud, colder than the water, colder than the empty stall where June the mule had stood.
Word of what she had done ran through Calder County faster than the creek ran to the Blackwater. In a country of flat fields and open doors, a strange thing did not stay secret past the second morning. By week's end, the men at the co-op had their opinions and the women at the Methodist quilting had theirs, and even the children she had once taught their letters carried the talk home from supper tables to the schoolyard.
The Vaughn girl had planted a swamp full of toothpicks. The Vaughn girl had gone the way of the old woman, moon-mad, root-mad. There was a cruelty in it that pretended to be concern, the way a stone pretends to be a gift when it is thrown.
Emmett Whitcomb came on a Tuesday. He drove out in a light buggy behind a bay gelding and stepped down at the fence in a town coat and a bowler, spectacles thick as the bottoms of preserve jars, carrying a leather case and a manner of such settled certainty that he seemed to have brought the whole authority of the state along in the buggy with him.
He was the traveling man for the Illinois State Agricultural Society, sent out from Springfield to advise the farmers of the district in the newest and most scientific methods. He measured every acre he ever met against the bulletins he carried and found most of them wanting.
He introduced himself to Adeline with the brisk courtesy of a man who did not expect to be there long. "Miss Vaughn." He was already looking past her, out at the field, his mouth tightening. "I've had a report from the county that there's been an unusual planting on this property. I'm obliged to inspect it, if you'll permit me."
He did not truly wait for her permission. He waded out into the standing water in a pair of rubber galoshes drawn over his town shoes and stooped over the nearest stick with a small brass magnifying glass held to his eye. He was out there a long while, scraping at the bark with his thumbnail, bending a stick to test its give, holding a cut end up to the weak sun.
When he came back to the high ground, his verdict was already written on his face, and he delivered it the way a doctor delivers news he has grown too practiced to soften. "These are willow cuttings. Salix alba, the white willow, or some old ornamental strain gone half wild. Set that aside."
He wiped his hands on a pocket square that would never come clean. "The wood is desiccated through. I find no cambium activity whatsoever. None. Which is to say there is no living tissue left in these cuttings to strike a root. They are, in the plainest terms, deadwood."
"But even were they sound, Miss Vaughn, even were they green and freshly cut this morning, you have set them in the single worst medium in the county. This is heavy river clay, soured and airless, the water standing on it with no way to drain. Roots want air as much as they want water. Drown a cutting in dead water and you get no root. You get putrefaction."