By the first week of July 1976, the Harper farm had stopped smelling like summer.
There was no damp earth beneath the soybeans.
No sweet green scent drifting from the lower field after sunset.
No mud stuck beneath boots at the end of irrigation days.
There was only dust.
Dust on the porch.
Dust on the windows.
Dust beneath the kitchen chairs.
Dust collecting in the lines around the Farmer Father’s eyes whenever he came inside after another afternoon staring at plants he could not save.
The drought had begun quietly.
April brought less rain than expected.
May brought almost none.
By June, people in Dry Creek, Kansas, had stopped joking about waiting for the next storm.
The creek that gave the town its name had shrunk until children could cross it without getting their shoes wet.
Pastures browned.
Corn leaves rolled inward.
Wheat came in thin.
The Farmer Father’s soybeans suffered worst of all.
Every morning, he walked the rows before breakfast.
His ten-year-old daughter went with him whenever he allowed it.
The Farm Girl had long brown hair she wore in two braids, knees permanently scratched from climbing fences, and the irritating habit of asking questions adults thought had already been answered.
“Why are these yellow?”
“No water.”
“Why are those less yellow?”
“Lower ground.”
“Why does the lower ground stay wet longer?”
“Clay beneath it.”
“Why?”
Her father stopped.
She looked up.
He sighed.
“I don’t know why there’s clay beneath it.”
The girl nodded.
That answer satisfied her more than adults pretending to know.
The Farmer Father had learned that.
His daughter did not need him to be right.
She needed him to be honest.
That summer, honesty became increasingly unpleasant.
The farm had been in the family for three generations.
One hundred sixty acres.
A modest white farmhouse.
A red barn in need of paint.
A machine shed.
A cattle lot that had stood empty since the Farmer Father sold the last twelve steers in May to make a bank payment.
And sixty-eight acres of soybeans representing nearly everything that remained between the Harper family and disaster.
If the crop survived, perhaps they could make it another year.
If it failed, the bank would not.
The Farmer Father had calculated it so many times that numbers followed him into sleep.
Seed debt.
Diesel.
Property tax.
Repair on the tractor transmission.
Interest.
Feed from the previous winter.
The soybeans had to yield enough.
Not well.
Enough.
But plants did not understand debt.
By mid-July, leaves had begun curling beneath the Kansas sun.
The Farm Girl noticed her father had stopped saying, “When we harvest.”
Now he said, “If we harvest.”
That frightened her more than the dry field.
Her mother tried hiding worry better.
She canned vegetables from the garden before heat finished those too.
She reused flour sacks.
She mended shirts at the kitchen table.
At supper, she sometimes claimed she had eaten while cooking.
The Farm Girl knew that was not always true.
One evening, the girl found her parents speaking quietly after they thought she was asleep.
The windows were open because the house had no air-conditioning.
Their voices carried through the hallway.
“The bank called again.”
Her mother whispered it.
The Farmer Father answered, “I know.”
“They want a meeting.”
“I know.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
Silence.
The Farm Girl sat on the bedroom floor with her back against the wall.
Finally her father said, “That I need rain.”
Her mother gave a small, tired laugh.
“I don’t think they lend that.”
“No.”
Another silence.
Then:
“We could sell the north forty.”
The Farm Girl stopped breathing.
Her father answered immediately.
“No.”
“We may have to.”
“That was Dad’s.”
“So is everything.”
“He cleared that ground himself.”