"Change the method."
She underlined the last three words.
Then she sat on the overturned crate and looked at what she'd written.
8,000 seed pieces remained in the curing area.
The upper two-thirds of the planted section had fared better.
The slight grade had done what she designed it to do on the higher ground, carrying the excess off fast enough that the ridges there had held.
But the lower third was lost, and she'd been the one to put it there.
That was the fact she had to sit with before she could move past it.
She sat with it.
Then she picked up the notebook again and wrote below the first entry.
"8,000 remain.
"That's still 8,000 chances."
Word of the lost planting moved through Harland County the way information moves through a place where people watch each other's fields from the road.
Ren hadn't told anyone.
She hadn't needed to.
The standing water in the lower section of Ridgeback was visible from Route 7 on a clear morning, and three days of rain had made clear mornings a memory.
But the people who'd been watching that field since April didn't need clear mornings.
They knew what a failed section looked like.
Doss Merritt pulled up to the pump at Bleven's gas station the following Friday afternoon while Ren was filling her truck.
He didn't get out.
He rolled his window down and let the engine idle and looked at her across the pump island with the expression of a man delivering a verdict he'd already rendered some time ago.
"Told you that field eats everything you put in it."
His voice had none of the performance quality it had carried on the dock.
This was quieter, almost conversational, which made it worse.
"Just like it ate every dollar your daddy put in it."
Ren kept the nozzle in the tank.
She watched the numbers on the pump face turn.
Doss wasn't finished.
"Earl put real money into that ground. Real seed. Real drainage work. A man who'd been farming this county since before you were born."
A pause that was too measured to be accidental.
"The field didn't care."
The pump clicked off.
Ren replaced the nozzle.
She got in her truck.
She pulled onto Route 7 and drove south toward the farm with both hands on the wheel.
What stayed with her wasn't the part about the money or the part about the failed planting or even the part about Earl's drainage work.
It was the last sentence.
The field didn't care.