Adeline did not know the chemistry either. She knew only that her field was learning to breathe exactly as the old woman had promised it would, and that no bulletin from Springfield had ever contained the fact.
Word came up the section road again, but the tone of it had shifted, and she felt the shift before she understood it. The wagons that had once slowed at her fence so their drivers could point and grin now slowed so their drivers could stare.
Hetty Marsh brought her quilting circle out on a Sunday afternoon, six women in their good bonnets who stood at the fence with their fans going and their curiosity plain on their faces, watching the girl move among a line of green where they had all sworn nothing but frogs would ever live. One of them, a broad woman named Cora Ellery, who had called Prudence a witch to her face at more than one church supper, asked in a voice pitched to carry whether it was true the girl talked to the trees.
Hetty answered before Adeline could. "A body might do worse than talk to something that listens." That shut Cora Ellery's mouth for the afternoon.
Adeline let the success go to her head. She would come to see that later and blame no one but herself. The saplings along the field's low edge, nearest where Cain Creek curled in and the water moved even in dry weather, were the tallest and the strongest.
It seemed to her a simple thing that more water meant more willow. So she took fresh green whips from her strongest trees and carried 60 of them to the deepest, stillest part of the bottom, a low blind pocket at the field's inner corner where the flood always stood longest and drained last, a black glassy pool that never moved at all.
She set them there a foot deep in the dead water, 60 green cuttings from her own thriving stock, and went back to the house well pleased with herself, certain she had doubled her fortune in an afternoon. For 10 days she let herself believe it.
Then a three-day rain came down out of a low sky. When it cleared, she went to the inner corner to see her 60 and found them gone soft. The bark had darkened past the green stage into something wet and black, and when she closed her hand on the nearest one, it gave like a rotted rope, sloughing under her fingers.
The inner wood had gone to gray slime that smelled of the grave. Every one of the 60 had done it. Every single one.
She stood over the dead pool with the ruin coming apart in her hand and felt the bottom drop out of her, the way it had dropped the morning she thought the whole field had failed, only worse now, because this time she had no one to blame but her own certainty. Whitcomb had been right after all, not about the field, but about the water. Dead water drowned a cutting. She had proven it herself on her own trees, out of her own pride.
She went up to the house and opened her grandmother's book and read the note on the back of the original paper again. The note she had memorized in the attic and then, in her hurry, half forgotten. "Set them a foot deep in standing water."
Standing water. She had read it as still water, dead water, the deeper the better. But three pages into the ledger, in a passage she had passed over as poetry, Prudence had written what she meant.
"The willow wants wet feet and moving water. Set it where the creek breathes in and out at the living edge. Never in the dead pools where the flood forgets to leave. In the dead pools even a willow will drown."
The original planting had lived because Adeline, knowing nothing, had walked the whole open field and set the sticks where the flood sheeted across and drained toward the creek, in the moving skin of the water, exactly right by pure blind luck. The 60 had died because she had thought she knew better and set them in the one dead corner of the field where nothing that breathed could live.
The failure sat on her worse than any of Whitcomb's warnings because it was true and because she had earned it. She went out that evening and stood over the black pool with its 60 rotted whips, and something in her cracked that had held all through the mockery and loneliness and her father's turned back.
She had let herself believe she was chosen. She had let herself believe the field had spared her because she was special. When the plain truth was that a stubborn tree had done what a stubborn tree does, and she had happened to stand in the right place holding the bundle.
The whole county thought her mad, and she had begun, in her pride, to think herself blessed. Both were wrong, and the wrongness of it opened under her like the dead pool itself.
She did not sleep. Somewhere past midnight she came down the stairs in her nightdress with a lamp in one hand, took the axe from beside the woodbox, and walked out into the dark field. The moon was down.
The saplings stood in ranks. She could barely see them, silver ghosts of themselves, and she went to the nearest one at the field's high edge, set the lamp in the mud, and took the axe in both hands. She meant to cut the whole grove to the ground and burn it and be done.
She meant to stop being the mad Vaughn girl the county laughed at, to sell the ruined ground to Thackery, take the train to Bloomington, and become someone who had never stood weeping in a swamp. She raised the axe. The lamplight ran gold along the edge of it.
Her father's voice came out of the dark behind her, low and careful, the way a man speaks to a spooked animal. She turned with the axe still lifted and found Silas standing at the edge of the lamplight in his shirtsleeves, his good coat gone, his face older by years than it had been three weeks before at the fence.
She had not heard the wagon. She would learn later that he had walked the last half mile up the section road in the dark, unable to sleep himself, drawn back to the farm by something he could not have named, and had come up the lane to see his daughter standing over her own trees with an axe raised to the sky.