He clearly had not expected agreement.
She stepped from the platform.
“That’s why we weigh it.”
The county agricultural inspector smiled faintly.
“Exactly.”
The neighboring farmer opened his mouth, but the inspector raised a hand.
“No record gets certified from a monitor.”
The young farmer knew that.
Everyone there knew that.
The harvested grain would go directly into the weigh wagon.
The area had already been surveyed.
Moisture would be tested.
The numbers would be adjusted according to the same rules used for every county yield entry.
Nothing would be given to her because the story was interesting.
Nothing would be taken away because people had doubted her.
The scale would decide.
The neighboring farmer looked toward the trees once more.
His eyes stopped on one particular sapling near the fence.
An American persimmon.
Slight bend in the trunk.
A scar along one side.
Four years earlier, he had kicked the loose earth away from that exact tree while laughing at her.
The young farmer remembered everything.
The spring day.
The laughter.
The notebook landing in mud.
The sentence he had thrown over his shoulder.
“When these things die, don’t ask me to help pull them out.”
She had not asked.
She had simply replanted the soil around the little tree and kept working.
Now the persimmon stood nearly twelve feet tall.
Its leaves moved gently in the October breeze.
The neighboring farmer noticed her looking at it.
Then he looked away.
The extension agent called everyone toward the weigh wagon.
The young farmer followed.
Her father remained beside the fence.
He was sixty-eight now, with a knee that stiffened whenever rain approached and hands twisted enough by arthritis that he rarely drove machinery for more than an hour at a time.
He placed one hand around the weathered fence post.
Then he looked along the tree line.
His daughter had seen him do that often during the last year.
Sometimes she wondered whether he was remembering how empty the fence had once been.
Or how many times he had nearly sold the field.
Four years earlier, none of this had looked inevitable.
Four years earlier, the young farmer returned to the family farm with two suitcases, one pickup full of books and tools, and a plan almost everybody thought was ridiculous.
The farm had been in her family for eighty-three years.
Her grandfather had raised tobacco and cattle there.
Her father shifted into corn and soybeans after the tobacco market changed.