Then she picked up her tools and walked back to the barn.
It started raining before she reached the farmyard.
The rain came the way spring rain comes in Harland County when it means business.
Not all at once. Not dramatically.
Just steadily and without any intention of stopping.
It started the evening Ren finished planting.
It was still raining the following morning.
By the second day, the sound of it against the farmhouse roof had become ambient, the kind of sound you stop hearing because it never varies.
That constancy was its own kind of warning.
Ren walked the field on the morning of the third day.
The lower sections of the planted acreage had begun holding water between the ridges within 36 hours of the rain starting.
She'd known this was possible.
Had known it the moment she chose this field.
Had known it every time she'd pushed a shovel into that gray clay and watched the hole she'd made fill slowly with gray water from below.
Knowing hadn't changed what she found.
The standing water had crept into the base of the ridges themselves by the second night, saturating the soil from underneath rather than from above.
It reached the buried seed pieces from below the way floodwater reaches the foundations of a house, quietly, completely, without asking permission.
She dug test holes along the lowest third of the planted section.
She used a narrow trowel to avoid disturbing more than she needed to disturb.
What she found in the first hole confirmed what she'd already worked out on the walk over.
The seed piece that should have been firming toward growth had gone soft at the edges.
The callus she'd spent four days building on each cut surface had held for a day, maybe two, before the sustained moisture overwhelmed it.
The flesh beneath the callus had begun converting back to the gray-brown slime of the compost pile.
She dug seven more holes across the worst section.
Same result in five of them.
In the other two, the seed pieces had gone completely.
Nothing left with any structural integrity.
Just the wet-rot smell in a small cavity in the clay where a potato ought to have been establishing its first root hairs.
She stood up from the last test hole and looked at the lower third of the planting with rain still coming down on her jacket.
3,000 seed pieces gone in one sustained rain event.
Gone because the ridges hadn't been tall enough to keep the water table from climbing into the root zone.
Gone because she'd built eight-inch ridges when this clay, with its particular perched water table, needed something closer to 14.
She knew this now with the clarity that failure provides, which is the sharpest kind of clarity there is and the most expensive.
She walked back to the barn in the rain without hurrying.
There was nothing to hurry for.
Inside, she opened her notebook to a fresh page and wrote without sitting down first.
"3,000 pieces rotted in the first rain. Lower third of the ridge system. Standing water got into the base before the ridge dried.
"This is what happens when you don't give clay enough lift.