“Good afternoon, Miss Jennings.”
He drove away.
Clara stood alone beside the flooded field.
Two hundred dead-looking sticks behind her.
A dying farmhouse uphill.
A bank note due in less than two months.
Thirty-seven dollars and fourteen cents in her checking account.
And absolutely no idea whether her grandmother had left her a solution or merely one final piece of beautiful nonsense.
Six months later, men who had laughed at that fence would stand in nearly the same place holding notebooks.
Farmers would drive from three counties to look at Clara’s trees.
Harold Vance would publicly admit he had been wrong.
Tom Blackwell would arrive at Clara’s door with his hat in both hands.
The county Soil Conservation District would offer Clara a contract larger than anything her grandmother had ever earned from the farm.
And First Mercantile Bank, which had spent spring preparing to take the Jennings property, would suddenly discover that forty acres everyone considered useless might be the most interesting agricultural ground in the county.
But none of them understood what Clara was doing that March afternoon.
Not even Clara.
To understand it, they would have needed to understand Evelyn Jennings.
And to understand Evelyn, they would have needed to understand the drowned land.
The Jennings farm sat in a low bend of Miller’s Creek several miles north of where the creek eventually fed into the Wabash.
Forty-three acres came with the property.
Three acres held the farmhouse, barn, kitchen garden, chicken yard, smokehouse, and a stand of old black walnut trees.
The remaining forty stretched south toward the creek.
Locals called it the drowned land.
Evelyn hated the name.
“It isn’t drowned.”
She used to say.
“It’s wet.”
“There’s a difference.”
To most farmers in Mercer County, there was not.
Every few years, someone attempted to make productive cropland from that bottom.
Clara’s grandfather, Samuel Jennings, tried corn during the summer of 1928.
The crop reached knee height beautifully.
Then June rain raised Miller’s Creek four feet.
Water stood between the rows for eleven days.
Almost everything rotted.
Samuel tried oats later.
Then pasture.
Then drainage ditches.
Each experiment ended differently but expensively.
After Samuel returned from war and inherited the land from his father, he finally accepted what earlier generations had resisted.
The lowest acres were not ordinary farmland.
He fenced them.
Used parts for seasonal grazing.
Cut hay from the slightly higher ridges when weather permitted.
Mostly, he left them alone.
Samuel died in 1937.
Evelyn remained.
She survived the final years of the Depression alone.
Then wartime shortages.
Then the lean seasons after.
People in town wondered how.
Her garden helped.
So did chickens.
Blackberries.
Eggs.
Her famous pies.
She sold herbs.
Flowers.
Seedlings.
Sometimes baskets.
The baskets puzzled Clara when she was younger.
Evelyn did not weave many herself.
Usually three or four each winter.
But she kept long flexible rods stacked beneath the barn roof.
Some pale.
Some red-brown.
Some almost yellow.
“Willow.”
Evelyn told her.
“Your great-grandmother taught me.”
Clara had been eight and uninterested.
“Can I go read?”
“You always can.”
Evelyn answered.
“You just might regret what you didn’t ask someday.”
At nineteen, standing in an empty house after Evelyn’s funeral, Clara remembered that sentence almost word for word.
Evelyn died in February 1952.
There was no great final speech.
No thunderstorm.
No family gathered dramatically around the bed.
She simply became weaker after Christmas.
A cough became pneumonia.
By February, the doctor told Ben Jennings his mother’s heart was failing.
Clara came home from the county teachers school where she had been taking preparatory courses while staying with her aunt.
She slept beside Evelyn’s room for eleven nights.
Sometimes her grandmother spoke.
Sometimes she slept.
On the final afternoon, Evelyn opened her eyes and found Clara reading near the window.
“Still trying to become a teacher?”
She whispered.
Clara closed the book.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Evelyn breathed carefully.
“Teach people things they can use.”
“I’ll try.”
“You always say try when you’re afraid to promise.”
Clara smiled.