Ren kept her face level.
She placed her order with the woman at the counter, who had the sense to stay focused on the transaction.
While the supplement bags were being pulled, the two men near the fertilizer shelf kept going.
"Miller Creek boys already lost half their spring planting to standing water. Bottomland soaked clean through."
"Prices are going to climb by fall if the yield numbers stay low."
"Not going to be Callaway picking up any slack. Not off that ground."
Doss Merritt came around the end of the center aisle with a bag of cattle mineral under one arm and looked at her with the particular expression of a man who had been enjoying a story and had just received a better development than he was expecting.
"Heard you bought Ray Burton's whole reject pile."
"I did."
"What exactly are you planning to do with 400 sacks of rot, Ren?"
"Plant some. Feed some to the animals. Compost the rest."
Doss looked genuinely entertained by this answer.
Not the exaggerated amusement of a man performing for an audience, but the quieter, more settled satisfaction of someone whose existing view of events had been confirmed by new information.
"You're going to plant it on Ridgeback."
"That's right."
He set his mineral bag on the shelf end and looked at her with his full attention for a moment.
There was something in that look that was almost respectful in its directness, the way a man looks at something he fully expects to fail and wants to see clearly before it does.
"That field beat your daddy for 20 seasons. Beat him with good seed, good weather, good drainage work, and 30 years of experience behind him."
"He knew that ground in his bones."
A beat. The one he'd learned to use.
"You're going to beat it with what Ray Burton couldn't sell."
The counterwoman set Ren's supplement bags down without comment.
Ren said, "We'll see."
She paid. She loaded her truck.
She pulled onto the road with her jaw set in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
It wasn't the line about the reject potatoes that stayed with her on the drive home. She could absorb that.
What she couldn't quite set aside was the other part.
He knew that ground in his bones.
Because it was true in a way the insult wasn't, and it landed in a different place.
Earl had known Ridgeback, had walked it in every season, had pushed a shovel into it hundreds of times, had sat at his own kitchen table with his own journals trying to work out what it needed.
The idea that his daughter was now going at it with garbage from the back of a produce market was not a comfortable thought to carry.
She parked in the drive and sat in the truck for a moment before going inside.
Then she went inside.
She didn't stand in the driveway longer than that.
Doss Merritt's certainty about the outcome was his business.
What happened on Ridgeback Field was hers.
The next two weeks were consumed by turning 286 sacks of sprouted potatoes into planting material, and the work was slower than Ren had anticipated.
Not every sprouted potato was suitable as seed without preparation.