Then he said quietly, "Your father spent twenty years looking for that."
Eliza froze.
The other farmers turned toward him.
For several seconds, nobody moved.
Then Calvin looked directly at her.
And asked a question that made her stomach tighten.
"Where did you get those fish?"
Eliza frowned.
"From the hatchery."
He shook his head.
"No. Why did you think to put them here?"
She looked toward the ditch.
Then toward the farmhouse visible beyond the cotton.
For a moment, she hesitated.
Finally, she answered.
"Because Dad left me a letter."
Calvin's expression changed.
And for the first time in her life, Eliza saw the older farmer looking genuinely afraid.
Eight months earlier, Eliza Hart had buried her father beneath a white oak tree at the small country cemetery outside Red Clay, Mississippi.
The funeral was held on a cold January morning.
Rain had fallen throughout the night, and the cemetery grass remained wet beneath the shoes of the people who came to pay their respects.
Her father was fifty-nine.
His name was Samuel Hart.
He had spent almost his entire life growing cotton on the same land his grandfather purchased in 1953.
He was a quiet, hardworking man who believed in repairing equipment until it was impossible to repair again.
He kept every receipt.
Never threw away a bolt that might be useful.
And refused to buy a new tractor simply because the old one embarrassed him.
When Eliza was little, she remembered watching him work beneath a red tractor that seemed permanently half-disassembled.
She would sit on an overturned bucket and hand him tools.
Sometimes she asked why he kept trying to repair the machine instead of replacing it.
Samuel always smiled.
"Because broken doesn't mean finished."
She'd heard those words so many times that they became part of her childhood.
Now, standing beside his grave, she wished desperately that the same principle applied to people.
But Samuel was gone.
And everything he'd spent his life protecting had become her responsibility.
The farm consisted of one hundred and twenty-three acres in the low country west of Red Clay.
About ninety acres were suitable for cotton.
The remainder included the farmhouse, barns, equipment sheds, a neglected pecan grove, and strips of land too uneven or wet to plant efficiently.
For decades, it had supported the Hart family.
Not comfortably.
Not extravagantly.
But enough.
Then the water problems began.
The original irrigation system had been installed in the 1950s.
Eliza's grandfather participated in a cooperative effort involving several neighboring farms.
They built a network of shallow distribution ditches and buried pipes intended to carry water from a reliable upland source across the lower cotton fields.
The arrangement required agreements between landowners and careful maintenance.
For years, it worked.
The old photographs showed cotton growing thick and healthy along the southern fields.
Farmworkers standing beside full irrigation channels.
And long rows of green plants stretching toward the wooded hills.