The tape on bottle B said HOLD-BY 12/4 in her own grease pencil, and on the fourth of December at seven-thirty in the morning Janelle Woith was at Dale's bench without Dale, because the water from Gary's tile had been on ice for two weeks and today it either got run or got poured down the sink.
She ran alkalinity the way he'd shown her in August. Titrant in the burette. The meter clicking down a tenth at a time. The stir bar ticking against the glass. 4.1 milliequivalents. A normal number for that tile in a wet week. She wrote it on the sheet.
The work order had a box at the bottom nobody checked on routine bottles.
ICP CATIONS, ADD-ON, $11.00
She checked it. The planner wanted to know who was paying.
SE-0611 FORWARD SUSPENDED. LAB COST: [GENERAL FUND] [DEFER]
GENERAL FUND. PENDING KUHL. The line went grey, like the six hours from the twentieth were grey, like everything she'd done on Lot 41 T since the panel suspended the forward was grey. Grey meant nobody had said no yet.
Dale came in at nine with his coat zipped to the chin. He saw her at his bench and the order on the clipboard and didn't say anything about either. He ran the ICP before lunch.
Potassium, 6.4 milligrams per liter.
He pulled up last November's SE-0611 on the archive screen. 1.7. March, 1.9. August, 2.2.
"That's the ash," she said.
"That's something soluble with potassium in it that went through Gary's cracks the first wet week after it got spread." He tapped the screen with a pen cap. "Clay holds potash. Most of it's still up top, in the first two inches. What you're seeing is the bit that went down a root channel and out the tile. It's a smear. It's not a tonnage."
"But it's on his field."
"It's on his field."
The planner had told her on the second of December that it could not map the ash to any field, because the load tickets out of yard pile 41 T said AG LIME BLEND and didn't say blend of what. So the deduction had gone on all fourteen fields, five and a half percent each, even as a tax. The load tickets were blended. The tile water wasn't.
She wrote it on card four in pencil.
6. SE-0611 BOTTLE B ON HOLD-BY. K 6.4 (WAS 1.7-2.2). TILE KNOWS WHERE THE ASH WENT. DALE: SMEAR, NOT TONNAGE.
Friday she was at the yard desk at ten to seven, before the phones, with fourteen field numbers on a sticky note.
The archive had November bottle B on thirteen of them. Wendell's pad field had nothing since September. Its station got scraped with the pad, and the model had been filling it in off Gary's ever since. A dash.
Of the thirteen, four had the eleven-dollar box checked, because in November somebody had been curious, and the somebody was mostly Dale. The other nine bottles were past HOLD-BY. Three days, ten days, two weeks. Dale kept them anyway, in the back of the walk-in, labeled EXPIRED / NOT FOR CREDIT in his square capitals. He hated pouring out water somebody had driven for.
The four she had were Gary at 6.4, Lutz's 6-South at 5.8, and two Hartsburg fields at 2.0 and 2.3. Flat.
The ash went out early, then. The front of the pile, the October spinner weeks, Gary's and Lutz's loads. Not the Hartsburg loads at the end. Maybe. That was four points.
She found Dale at the sink.
"Will you run the nine expired for potassium?"
"Potassium doesn't care much about hold time. Carbonate does." He shook water off a beaker. "I can run them. They won't count."
"Run them for me. Not for the credit."
"That's ninety-nine dollars of nothing."
"General fund."
She went back to the walk-in with him to pull them. Forty degrees, the compressor cycling, three shelves of bottles in cardboard flats with their tape gone soft from condensation. He read the field numbers off the tape and she matched them to the sticky note. Two of the tapes had run and he had to go by the cap color and the order in the flat. He wrote both of those on the sheet with a question mark and initialed the question mark.
He ran them after lunch. By four she had a column on the back of card four, fourteen rows, pencil, her own hand. Five fields between 4.9 and 6.4. Eight flat. One dash.
The five were Gary, Lutz, and three she had to look up. The Ehrhardt quarter. The Miller eighty. A field leased to a company out of Bloomington whose people she'd never met and whose name on the enrollment was a string of initials.
She tried to enter the column in the planner.
FIELD ATTRIBUTION: NO METHOD REGISTERED FOR CATION TRACER. INPUT REJECTED.
So it lived on the card.
7. K ON ALL 14. FIVE HIGH. EIGHT FLAT. WENDELL A DASH. NINE OF THEM EXPIRED. PLANNER WON'T TAKE IT.
Kuhl's office on Monday had the space heater going and the door shut because the copier was right outside it and someone was running the board packet. She put card four on his blotter, back side up.
He read it longer than she expected him to.
"Nine of these are expired."
"For carbonate. Dale says potassium holds."
"Dale says." He didn't mean it against Dale. He meant it the way the panel would mean it. "It's not a registered method. Panel's going to ask why a district is bringing them a tracer nobody validated."
"Because the planner put five and a half percent on fourteen fields and the ash is on five."
"Maybe five."
"Maybe five."
He turned the card around on the blotter and did the arithmetic she'd already done. She could see his lips move. Twenty-two point four tonnes off five fields instead of fourteen. Eight families get their five and a half back. Five eat it, and eat more than five and a half. Gary, on his tonnage, eats about fifteen.
"You're about to tell Gary the ash went on his field," Kuhl said.
"The tile's telling him. I'm reading it."
"He's not going to hear it that way." He slid the card back. "Here's what I'll sign. Exhibit F. Supplemental, for the panel's information. You say what you measured, and you say how it isn't a method. You don't ask for a remap. If the panel wants to use it, that's theirs to do."
"And if they don't, it stays even on everybody."
"Then it stays even on everybody. And Ostrander's beans still aren't in it either way, because Ostrander isn't enrolled. You can't fix everything off one bench."
He signed the ninety-nine and the eleven. On the yellow slip, in pen, under his initials, he wrote NOT TO RECUR WITHOUT APPROVAL.
When she had the door open he said, "Tell Gary before he reads it on the docket. He reads the docket now. Donna told my wife."
8. KUHL: EXHIBIT F, SUPPLEMENTAL, NOT A REMAP REQUEST. $110 SIGNED, NOT TO RECUR. TELL GARY FIRST.
Gary's machine shed on County 14 had the big door half up on Wednesday afternoon, and the light coming under it was already going orange at four-thirty. The combine was cleaned and asleep under a tarp. He was greasing the planter for spring, because it was December and there was nothing else to do with his hands.
She left the card in the truck. She brought two numbers.
"Your tile ran 6.4 potassium the week of the twentieth. It runs two. Lutz ran 5.8. The Hartsburg fields didn't move."
He wiped the grease gun on a rag. "Speak English."
"The ash came off the front of the pile. Your loads, and Lutz's. Early October."
He stood there. The shed smelled like grease and cold dirt and the propane heater he hadn't lit.
"So I'm the one got burnt corn on my ground."
"Some of it. I can't tell you how much. It's a smear in the tile water. It's not a scale ticket."
"And you're filing that."
"As information. I'm not asking them to move the deduction. Kuhl won't let me ask."
"But they might move it anyway."
"They might."
"Onto me."
"Onto you and four others."
He laughed once, with nothing in it. "You know what's funny. If you hadn't checked that eleven-dollar box I'd be at five and a half like everybody, and I'd have been mad at you for that. Now I get to be mad at you for fifteen."
"Maybe fifteen."
He worked the gun into a zerk until grease came out the other side. "Donna's going to ask if the ash hurts the ground."
"Dale says it's potash and lime. Your soil test'll come up on K in the spring. It won't hurt the corn. It just isn't carbon."
"So it's fertilizer I didn't pay for and I lose money on it."
"Yes."
Outside, a pickup went by on County 14 slow enough to look in. Gary lifted two fingers off the grease gun without turning around.
He bent back to the planter. She waited to see if there was more. There wasn't.
"File your thing," he said, to the planter.
9. TOLD GARY IN HIS SHED. "FILE YOUR THING." FILING THURSDAY. ALL FIVE COPIED.
Thursday at 8:05 she filed it the way Kuhl had worded it.
EXHIBIT F (SUPPLEMENTAL, FOR PANEL INFORMATION). NOVEMBER TILE POTASSIUM, 14 LOT 41 T FIELDS. 9 OF 14 FROM BOTTLES PAST CARBONATE HOLD-BY; POTASSIUM ONLY. NOT A REGISTERED METHOD. NOT A REMAP REQUEST.
The docket assistant summarized it at 8:06.
Technician requests reallocation of ash deduction to 5 fields.
She typed under it, Correction. Not a request. Information. See title. The strip blinked and rewrote itself. Technician submits potassium data as supplemental information. That would do.
The five owners got the notice at 8:07. Gary first, because she'd put him first. The Bloomington lease company's agent acknowledged in under a minute, with a paragraph about reserving all rights that nobody had written.
Friday at 2:40 the mill answered.
YARDDESK (MACKINAW MILL): CATION TRACER NOT RECOGNIZED UNDER METHODOLOGY. 9 OF 14 SAMPLES EXPIRED. MILL NOTES ELEVATED POTASSIUM IS CONSISTENT WITH NORMAL FALL POTASH APPLICATION BY GROWERS.
That one she had to check, because it could be true. She called the co-op from the desk phone and waited on hold through two songs. Gary hadn't bought potash for SE-0611 this fall. He never did after beans. Lutz had, but in 2045. She typed the co-op's count under YardDesk's post, zero tickets on SE-0611 in 2047, and left Lutz's 2045 out because it wasn't the same year and putting it in would only look like she was hiding something.
The docket strip summarized her reply as Technician disputes mill. She left it.
Monday the sixteenth, 7:58, before coffee, the station board.
DOCKET 9.4: DETERMINATION EXTENDED TO 1/22/2048 TO CONSIDER SUPPLEMENTAL EXHIBITS D-F. LOT 41 T FORWARD REMAINS SUSPENDED.
January twenty-second. Gary had been waiting for Christmas. All fourteen had.
She opened Lot 41 T. The mill's green card was still pinned to the top, where it had been for two weeks.
MILL REMEDY OFFERED. ACCEPTING RESTORES 5.5% ON 14 FIELDS. ESTIMATED STAFF HOURS SAVED: 6.0.
Under it, the planner had added a line on its own since Friday.
ACCEPTING WOULD MOOT EXHIBIT F.
It wasn't wrong. If she clicked it, the mill would stop putting ash in the lime next year, everybody would get their five and a half back for a deduction that had been right, and the potassium column would go back to being a thing on the back of a card. Gary would have money by the twenty-fifth. Kuhl would get six hours. The twenty-two tonnes would get paid like stone.
She didn't click it. She didn't close it either. She logged her hours from Thursday and Friday. Thursday's were already white. Kuhl had signed them before she asked. Friday's went grey.
10. EXHIBIT F FILED. MILL SAYS FARMER POTASH; CO-OP SAYS ZERO. DETERMINATION 1/22. NOBODY GETS CHRISTMAS.
At 4:20 her phone buzzed on the desk. Gary.
Donna says come for Christmas anyway. Bring the kid. Don't bring the card.
She read it twice. She typed ok, and then deleted it, and typed We'll come. No card. and sent that.
On the way home she went past SE-0611 because it was on the way, and it was running, a pencil of water off the lip, too cold to steam. She didn't stop. The station board hadn't asked. She'd take it in January, when somebody was paying, and she'd check the box.