He died in March, just before the fields were ready. The funeral drew nearly everyone along the county road. Men who remembered him as a young operator stood beside women he had helped during blizzards and summer floods. They spoke about his steady hands, the way he returned borrowed tools cleaner than he received them, and the old tractor he had driven through three generations of changing farm equipment. Hollis listened from the first pew with her hands clenched around an envelope containing the farm's latest bank statement. After the service, the neighbors filled her kitchen with food and offers to help. Most offers were genuine. None could tell her how to become her father.
She planted in April. The bank approved a temporary modification to one payment, a relief so narrow she barely dared call it relief. The $300,000 S780 was not paid off. Roland had bought it used with a substantial down payment and financed the rest through an agricultural lender, hoping greater harvesting efficiency would keep the farm independent. The bank held a lien. The dealership had a service agreement. The warranty covered specified components under specified conditions. Hollis had spent rainy evenings reading those agreements, learning that the language surrounding a machine could feel far more complicated than the machine itself.
Her neighbors urged her to rent out some of the acreage. A local investor offered to buy a section along the county road. Another suggested she sell the combine and hire custom harvesters. She considered every proposal and rejected none without running the numbers. But grain prices were lower than she had hoped, fuel had cost more than expected, and the cash she might receive from selling equipment would not automatically solve the problem of running the next season. She chose to try one complete crop year before surrendering a farm that Roland had spent forty years keeping alive.
That decision exhausted her. By June, people had stopped referring to her as Roland's daughter and begun calling her the little girl trying to run Eberhart's place. At the farm supply store, men twice her age explained fertilizer to her even while she held a soil-test report they had not read. One offered to show her how to change a hydraulic hose, though he had never seen her replace one. Another said he admired her spirit and then