“Why didn't you tell me?”
Clara laughed once.
“You spent three months calling it garbage.”
Silas’s jaw tightened.
Fair.
He dropped the soil.
“My north well is failing.”
Clara’s expression changed.
“How bad?”
“Forty percent less output.”
“When?”
“Started last month.”
“You have another source?”
“South pivot.”
“Can it reach?”
“Not enough.”
Silas looked toward the soil again.
“My cotton won't make August.”
There was no satisfaction in Clara.
None.
A failed neighbor did not improve her farm.
Drought did not respect fences.
Silas took off his hat.
Wiped his forehead.
“What would it cost to do this on three hundred acres?”
Clara almost laughed from disbelief.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“You can't reproduce months of soil changes in two weeks.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
“For next year.”
Clara looked toward him.
Silas’s voice dropped.
“If there is a next year.”
That was when Clara understood.
The man who had called her banker was not standing there as her antagonist anymore.
He was a farmer looking at numbers he could not make work.
She knew that fear.
“Come inside.”
He frowned.
“Why?”
“I’ll show you the records.”
They sat at Clara’s kitchen table.
The same table where she had read her father’s notebook.
Clara opened spreadsheets.
Hauling costs.
Compost.
Fuel.
Seed.
Water.
Labor.
Soil tests.
Yield projections.
Silas stared.
“You tracked all this?”
“Everything.”
“Why?”
“Because if it failed, I wanted to know why.”
“And if it worked?”
“Same.”
He looked toward the notebook.
“Your father's?”
Clara hesitated.
Then handed it over.
Silas opened.
Read.
The 2006 entry appeared.
His own name.
Silas says waste of time.
He stopped.
Clara watched.
Silas read it again.
His face changed.
“I remember this.”
“I assumed.”
“He brought shells from Dawson’s old processor.”
Clara nodded.
Silas stared at the page.
“I told him he was crazy.”
“Yes.”
“We all did.”
“Apparently.”
Silas closed the notebook.
“Did he ever tell you why he stopped?”
“Bank pressure.”
Silas looked down.
“Not just bank.”
Clara went still.
“What?”
He rubbed one thumb against the notebook edge.
“Your father and I were both expanding then.”
“Cotton prices had looked good.”
“Inputs climbing.”
“We borrowed.”
“He was nervous.”
“I told him yields mattered more than soil experiments.”
Clara said nothing.
Silas continued:
“Harold's predecessor wanted conventional projections.”
“I told your dad if he wanted the loan renewed, he needed numbers the bank understood.”
“He listened.”
Clara’s jaw tightened.
“You convinced him.”