While they worked, he kept his voice down in the particular way of a man separating himself from what had just happened without quite naming it.
"You sure about this?"
"No."
She didn't stop moving.
"But I'm doing it anyway."
He almost smiled at that. He didn't quite.
Before she pulled up the tailgate, he added something lower, almost under the ambient noise of the dock.
"Every grower on Miller Creek is short this year. Spring's been hard on the bottom ground. Whatever you're working out, county could use it working."
She filed that away. She didn't answer it.
She caught the last of it through her open truck window as she pulled out, one of the dock hands speaking loud enough to carry without appearing to try.
"She's going to need more than one truck when the smell hits."
Ren didn't look back.
By the time she turned onto Route 7, heading south toward the farm, the decision had already moved past the point where doubt was useful.
The useful question now was what to do with 400 sacks of potatoes that everyone in Harland County had already decided were garbage.
Callaway Farm sat two miles south of Route 7, down a gravel lane lined with fence posts that had been standing since before Ren was born.
Cedar posts were going silver with age, wire patched in two or three places with newer gauge that didn't quite match the old.
The farmhouse had been white once. It was still mostly white in the way old paint stays mostly the color it started, even after decades of weather have worked on it.
There was chalky fading at the south corners where the afternoon sun hit hardest through summer. The barn was the deep brick brown of red paint that had gone dark with age and weather and time.
The chicken coop held 40-some birds laying steadily. The hog pen behind the barn had six animals in it.
Not a large operation, just enough to use scraps efficiently.
Three compost bays built from old pallets stood behind the barn in various stages of breakdown, the oldest one already giving off the faint loamy smell of material that was most of the way to becoming something else.
Ridgeback Field lay on the north side of the property, 40 acres of it visible from the farmyard as a broad, slightly lower plane of heavy clay that even in early spring held a visible sheen of standing water in the low spots.
It had a different color from the surrounding ground, grayer, denser, the way clay soil looks when it has no organic matter in it to give it depth.
Ren had grown up looking at that field the way you grow up looking at a piece of furniture that has always been in the house and has never quite worked right. Present, known, accepted as a permanent inconvenience.
Her father, Earl Callaway, had spent most of two decades trying to change what that field was.
He'd tried different rotations. He'd tried cover crops.
He'd run a tile drain line through the worst third of it, hired a contractor to do it right, spent money the farm didn't easily have.
The drain had helped some. Not enough.
The problem with Ridgeback wasn't only drainage. It was what the soil itself was made of.
Ancient lake-bed clay, dense and mineral-rich, ground that had been sitting undisturbed for 10,000 years, hostile to anything that needed to breathe through its roots or push through compacted layers to establish.
In spring, the field held water like a shallow bowl. By July, it baked into something close to fired ceramic, cracked, hard-packed, resistant to a shovel, let alone a root system trying to expand sideways through it.
The county had called it the Brick Field for as long as anyone could remember. The name had no particular cruelty in it when most people said it.
It was just accurate.
Earl had died three winters back. Heart failure in January, found by Ren when she came out for evening chores.
She had run the farm alone since then.
Egg sales, hay, the hogs, a small vegetable stand at the end of the lane, a couple of steady customers in town.
Enough to keep the lights on. Enough to keep the feed bills current most months.
Not enough to fix Ridgeback or hire regular help or do much beyond sustain the operation at the level it had been sustaining itself for years.