They stood near the corner of the building with coffee cups, looking at the sacks and then at Ren with the relaxed attention of men who had found a reason to stop moving for a few minutes.
One of them, a heavyset man in a feed cap, looked at the nearest sack and then back at Ren without particular unkindness.
"Those are already trying to leave the bag on their own."
The other one laughed.
"She's not farming. She's doing a burial."
Ren didn't respond. She was watching Ray come back out with a clipboard.
The voice that came from the far end of the dock was different in register from the others. Deeper, more deliberate, the kind of voice that had learned over decades that it didn't need to raise itself to carry.
Doss Merritt had come around to the back to pick up a pallet of fence posts.
He was a broad-shouldered man in his mid-50s with a jaw that looked like it had been set in concrete and a way of standing that took up more space than his actual frame required.
He'd farmed 1,200 acres in Harland County for 30 years, and the county knew it, and he knew the county knew it. That awareness had settled into him over time as a kind of low, permanent confidence that occasionally shaded into something less generous.
He saw the sacks. He saw Ren. He saw Ray Burton with the clipboard.
He put the picture together in about four seconds.
"Four hundred sacks."
Doss walked over without being invited. He stopped near enough to the staged pile to nudge the closest sack with his boot.
The bottom of it gave in a way healthy burlap doesn't give. Soft, wet, the material compromised by what was rotting inside.
"Ray charging you for these, or paying you to haul them?"
A couple of the dock hands appreciated that. Lyall, still in his loader cab, allowed himself a small smile he didn't bother hiding.
Ren looked at Doss directly.
She'd known Doss Merritt most of her life, the way everyone in a county this size knew the men who'd farmed it long enough to believe they'd earned the right to speak first in any room.
She'd watched him and her father circle each other at co-op meetings and Farm Bureau dinners for 20 years. Not enemies exactly, but men who occupied adjacent territory in a way that created a permanent low-grade friction.
Doss met her look without blinking.
"You're planning to plant these. Some of them. On that north field of yours."
He didn't phrase it as a question.
"That's right."
Doss Merritt looked at the sacks for a moment with an expression that was almost philosophical, the look of a man encountering a situation that confirmed something he already believed.
"Ren."
Her name in his mouth landed differently than it did in Ray Burton's. Ray used it to replace a longer sentence. Doss used it to do the talking for him.
"That field took your daddy's best years. Took his best seed. Took money he paid a contractor to run tile drain through it. Took 20 seasons of his patience."
"Earl Callaway knew that ground better than you ever will. It beat him anyway."
He let that sit for exactly the right amount of time.
"You're going to go at it with what the market couldn't move."
The dock was quiet.
Ren understood, in the way she'd learned to understand it over 34 years of living in a place where certain things got said in front of crowds on purpose, that Doss wasn't speaking to her.
He was speaking to Lyall, to the dock hands, to Ray Burton behind her, to the larger audience of Harland County that would hear this version of events before sundown.
She was the subject of the sentence, not the intended recipient.
"We'll see."
She paid Ray for the sacks. She backed her truck to the dock. She started loading.
Ray Burton helped her the way a working man helps when standing idle while someone else loads goes against something fundamental in his makeup.