βLOOK AT THAT! THE BOY'S PLANTING GARLIC IN THE MIDDLE OF A DROUGHT! SOMEBODY OUGHT TO TELL HIM HIS GRANDFATHER'S FARM IS ALREADY DEAD!β
Dale Harker's laughter echoed across the dry Kansas countryside.
The fifty-nine-year-old farmer leaned over a weathered wooden fence, pointing toward a thirteen-year-old boy kneeling in the cracked earth. Two men stood beside him, laughing so hard that one had to grab the fence rail for support.
The boy didn't answer.
His name was Noah Bennett, and he was carefully placing pale-white garlic bulbs into six perfectly straight rows beside the remains of his grandfather's vegetable garden. His faded blue-and-gray plaid shirt was dark with sweat, his denim overalls were stained with dirt, and the oversized work gloves on his hands had belonged to a man who would never wear them again.
Beside the fence stood a rusty wheelbarrow, its tire nearly flat.
Beyond the garden, the land stretched toward a weathered gray barn, a broken windmill, and acres of yellow grass that hadn't seen a soaking rain in almost three months.
The drought had destroyed nearly everything.
The creek was dry.
The pond was a shallow depression filled with cracked mud.
And the little vegetable garden that once produced tomatoes, pumpkins, peppers, and beans was now a collection of brittle stems hanging over lifeless soil.
Yet Noah continued planting.
One bulb.
Then another.
Each placed at a measured distance along the narrow furrows his grandfather had marked years earlier.
Dale slapped the fence.
βHey, boy! You planning to feed the whole county with six rows of garlic?β
His companions burst into another round of laughter.
One was Billy Crane, a fifty-seven-year-old farmer with a round face, a gray mustache, and a red plaid shirt stretched across his stomach. The other was Pete Lawson, sixty-one, lean and weathered, with sunken cheeks and a habit of laughing whenever Dale did.
Noah pressed another bulb into the ground.