Year-end close came on the nineteenth, a Thursday, at 3:10 in the afternoon. The planner did it to everybody at once, so the yard desk at Pekin was quiet except for keys and the scale-house radiator knocking.
It totaled her grey column for 2047 without being asked.
GREY HOURS (SUSPENDED FORWARD SE-0611 / LOT 41 T): 31.5 H. SIGNED: 12.0 H. PENDING KUHL: 19.5 H. LAB ADD-ONS: $121.00 (GENERAL FUND).
Under it was a line Janelle had never seen, because nobody had ever spent this far down.
SWCD GENERAL FUND, LAB ADD-ON SUBLINE: $0.00 REMAINING FY2047. NEW ADD-ONS WILL DEFER TO FY2048.
A hundred and twenty-one dollars. That was the whole subline. Eleven for Gary's bottle B. Ninety-nine for nine expired bottles that didn't count. Eleven for one she'd forgotten. Dale had told her once that the subline existed so a tech could chase a weird number without filling out a form, and that in nine years nobody had used more than forty.
She walked it back to Kuhl's office. He was in his coat already and read it standing up.
"Nineteen and a half," he said.
"I can eat some."
"You can't eat hours. That's the whole point of hours." He signed seven on the screen with his finger, the Exhibit F week, because that week had been him telling her to do it. The other twelve and a half he moved to DEFERRED FY2048 and typed a reason into the box. AWAITING DOCKET 9.4.
"If the panel throws F out," she said.
"Then I find out whether I'm a guy who pays for things the panel threw out." He zipped the coat to the chin. "Ask me in January."
Card four was full. She started card five in the truck with the same pencil.
11. YEAR CLOSE. 31.5 GREY. KUHL SIGNS 7 MORE. 12.5 DEFERRED, "AWAITING 9.4." LAB SUBLINE AT ZERO. NOBODY EVER SPENT IT BEFORE.
Christmas was a Wednesday. Gary and Donna's kitchen on County 14 at 1:30, the window over the sink white with potato steam. The kid went straight to the dog and stayed there.
She'd left her jacket in the truck so the card wouldn't be in a pocket.
It held for an hour and a half. Ham. The green bean thing with the onions on top. Donna's sister from Delavan, who didn't know anything, asked what Janelle did. Janelle said water samples. The sister said, "Oh, for the government," and that was the end of that.
Pie. Gary went out to check the heat lamp in the shop. Donna stayed at the table with her coffee and slid a brown envelope across the oilcloth. Co-op logo. Soil test, spring 2046, SE-0611, three cores.
"K was 168," Donna said. "I looked it up. Is it going to be 300?"
"No. Most of it's still in the top inch. Dale thinks you'll see it come up some. Twenty, thirty. It won't hurt the corn."
"Gary says it's fertilizer we got for free and they're charging us for it."
"It's fertilizer you got for free and they're taking it out of the lime."
Donna nodded. She had done the books on that farm since 2031. "If they take fifteen off us, that's propane for January and February."
Janelle didn't say maybe fifteen. She'd said it enough times that it had stopped meaning anything.
"Pull a soil test in March," she said. "Same three cores, same depth. Then you have your own paper. Not mine. Not the mill's."
"Who pays?"
"Co-op does it for twenty-two bucks a sample."
Donna wrote 3/48 SOIL — SAME CORES across the envelope and put it on the fridge under the seed-corn magnet.
Gary came back in with the cold on him, said the lamp was fine, and nobody said anything about any of it for the rest of the afternoon.
In the truck after, the kid asleep against the door, she wrote it under the dome light.
12. CHRISTMAS AT GARY'S. NO CARD. DONNA: K 168 IN '46, IS IT 300. TOLD HER PULL HER OWN IN MARCH. HER PAPER.
The thaw came on the eighth of January. An inch and a tenth overnight on frozen ground, so it went sideways off the surface and down the cracks at the same time. By 6:40 on the ninth the ditch along County 14 was brown and loud.
The station board had posted at 5:12.
DOCKET 9.4 PANEL REQUEST: TILE SAMPLE SE-0611, LUTZ 6-SOUTH, ONE FLAT FIELD (TECHNICIAN'S CHOICE). LAB COST: DOCKET. HOURS: DOCKET.
Hours: docket. White, before she'd done anything. She read it twice in the truck with the engine running.
SE-0611 was running a full pipe. She waded in to the knee. The cold came through the neoprene in about a minute and stayed. Bottle A under the lip, then bottle B. Grease pencil on the tape: HOLD-BY 1/23. Fourteen days was the district's own house rule since October, not the method's. The method gave an acidified potassium bottle six months. The district gave it two weeks and a temperature, because it had been burned once. Thermometer, 2.1 C, and she wrote that on the tape too, because in October a locker excursion had voided one of her own bottles and she wasn't handing anybody that again.
Lutz 6-South next. Then Hartsburg north for the flat field, because it had been 2.0 in November and she wanted to know whether 2.0 stayed 2.0.
Dale had the bench clear when she came in with her boots squelching. He checked the ICP box on all three work orders himself. Nobody asked who was paying.
By 2:00 he turned the screen toward her.
SE-0611: K 3.4 MG/L. LUTZ 6-SOUTH: K 3.1. HARTSBURG N: K 1.9.
"Coming down," Dale said. "Six to three in seven weeks. It's washing out."
"So in March it's gone."
"In the tile it's gone. In the ground it's there for years. You just won't be able to see it from here by planting."
He pointed his pencil at the 2.1 C she'd written on the tape. "That's the other thing. Tile water in January ought to be five, six degrees. It's come down through a meter of dirt. Two point one came down the cracks off the top in a few hours. That's bypass flow. Whatever's still sitting in the top inch rides it straight to the pipe." He wrote BYPASS next to the number. "If you want to see surface ash, that's your best day. First cold full-pipe after a thaw."
She wrote that down for the protocol, word for word, because it was a field rule and not a calendar.
Which meant if anybody wanted to show where twenty-two tonnes of dryer ash had landed, this was about the last bottle that could, and it was a better look than she'd thought.
She logged the hours. 5.5 H. They went in white. She looked at the white longer than she looked at the potassium.
YardDesk posted under the results at 2:06, faster than any person at the mill could have read them.
YARDDESK (MACKINAW MILL): MILL NOTES PANEL SAMPLES POST-DATE APPLICATION BY 12 WEEKS. DECLINING VALUES ARE CONSISTENT WITH ANY SOLUBLE SOURCE. MILL RESERVES ITS POSITION ON FARMER POTASH.
"It's not wrong," Dale said, reading over her shoulder. "Declining is what anything does."
"Hartsburg didn't decline. It was flat in November and it's flat now."
"That's your argument, then. Not the three. The one that didn't move."
She typed it under YardDesk's post, plain. Hartsburg N: 2.0 in November, 1.9 in January. No ash loads per scale tickets. Control field. The docket strip read it and wrote Technician cites control field, and for a second she didn't recognize her own reasoning in somebody else's words. Then she did. It was right. It was the first time anything on the strip had sounded like Dale.
She rinsed the bottles herself before she left, because the thaw bottles were the last ones and she wanted to be the one who did it.
13. THAW SAMPLE, PANEL PAID. 0611 K 3.4, LUTZ 3.1, HARTSBURG 1.9 FLAT. WASHING OUT. LAST BOTTLE THAT CAN SEE IT. HOURS WHITE.
On the sixteenth at 10:20 the green card pinned to Lot 41 T turned yellow.
MILL REVISED REMEDY (MACKINAW): (1) 2048 LIME SPEC: NO COMBUSTION RESIDUE IN AG LIME LOTS. (2) GOODWILL PAYMENT TO GROWERS EQUAL TO 5.5% DEDUCTION ON ALL 14 LOT 41 T FIELDS, PAID BY MILL. (3) REGISTRY DEDUCTION STANDS. (4) CONDITIONED ON DOCKET 9.4 CLOSING BY STIPULATION. PARTIES: MILL, SWCD, ENROLLED GROWERS.
The planner added its own line underneath, the way it had started doing.
STIPULATION WOULD CLOSE EXHIBITS D-F WITHOUT DETERMINATION.
Kuhl called instead of walking over, which meant he was in the car.
"You see it."
"I see it."
"The growers get paid. All fourteen. Gary gets his five and a half from the mill instead of the registry. The credits stay honest because the deduction stays. Mill stops putting ash in lime. That's everything you wanted."
"Except where it went."
"Except where it went." He didn't argue. She could hear his blinker. "District has to say whether the technician objects. That's you. I'll sign whatever you say, as long as you can say it in one line."
She thought about the envelope on Donna's fridge. About the eight flat families who would have been made whole by her column and the five who would have been made worse, Gary worst. Thirteen families on fourteen fields, because the Millers farm two. The goodwill payment made all fourteen fields whole and put nobody on the hook. It was better for Gary than she was.
It also meant nobody would ever say whether tile water could tell you which field the ash hit. Next time a mill blended a pile, it would be five and a half on everybody again, and some other sampler would check an eleven-dollar box and get told it wasn't a method.
She typed it into the box. One line, the way he'd asked.
SWCD TECHNICIAN: NO OBJECTION TO PAYMENT. OBJECTS TO CLOSING EXHIBIT F WITHOUT REFERRAL. REQUEST F BE REFERRED TO METHODOLOGY COMMITTEE, NOT DETERMINED.
The docket strip summarized it at 10:41: Technician conditionally objects. She let that one stand. It was close enough, and it made her sound more reasonable than she felt.
14. MILL OFFERS MONEY ON ALL 14 IF WE CLOSE. NO OBJECTION TO MONEY. OBJECT TO F VANISHING. ASKED FOR REFERRAL. ONE LINE.
The panel posted on the twenty-second at 9:00 exactly, because it was a machine posting for a panel.
DOCKET 9.4 DETERMINATION. STIPULATION ACCEPTED IN PART. (A) MILL GOODWILL PAYMENT, 14 FIELDS, DUE 1/29/2048. (B) REGISTRY DEDUCTION ON LOT 41 T STANDS AS ALLOCATED. (C) LOT 41 T FORWARD RESTORED FROM 2/1/2048. (D) EXHIBIT F RECEIVED, NOT RELIED UPON. CATION TRACER REFERRED TO METHODOLOGY COMMITTEE FOR 2049 SEASON REVIEW. TECHNICIAN MAY SUBMIT PROTOCOL. (E) EXHIBITS D-E CLOSED.
Received, not relied upon. She read it the way she'd read Donna's soil test: a number that only meant something if you knew what it had been before. F had been in the record for six weeks. Now it was in the record and nobody was standing on it.
The docket strip summarized it at 9:01. Mill pays growers; technician's tracer sent to committee. For once it was right, and she felt slightly cheated by that.
Gary texted at 9:14. Donna says the mill money is the propane.
Then at 9:15. She says thank you. I say file your protocol.
The forward coming back meant her hours came back, and the planner reached into the deferred column on its own.
DEFERRED FY2048 (AWAITING 9.4): 12.5 H. DOCKET CLOSED. ROUTE TO SUPERVISOR.
Kuhl signed nine of them at 11:40. He left three and a half grey with a note. NOV 28–29, NOT DOCKET WORK. That was Thanksgiving and the Friday after, her driving bottle B to Peoria on a holiday because nobody else was going to. He wasn't wrong. She didn't ask.
He stopped in the doorway with his coffee.
"Protocol," he said. "Committee meets in March. Write it like Dale would."
"Dale would want it validated."
"Then write that it isn't. Page one."
She opened a blank document. The planner offered her a template: METHOD PROPOSAL. ANALYTE. HOLD TIME. BASELINE. DETECTION WINDOW. She filled in DETECTION WINDOW first because it was the one she knew.
7 WEEKS AFTER FIRST WET WEEK FOLLOWING APPLICATION. AFTER THAT THE TILE CAN'T SEE IT.
Then she went back up to the top and typed the first line of page one: This is not a validated method.
15. 9.4 CLOSED. MILL PAYS ALL 14 ON THE 29TH. F "RECEIVED, NOT RELIED UPON," REFERRED. 9 HRS SIGNED, 3.5 GREY FOR THANKSGIVING. WRITING THE PROTOCOL. PAGE ONE SAYS IT ISN'T ONE.
On the way home she went past SE-0611. The ditch had dropped back to a normal winter trickle, and the tile was running a pencil of clear water off the lip, nothing in it you could see.
She didn't stop. Dale had run the thaw bottles inside the district's fourteen days, and the next cold full-pipe event would be reading a field that had already rinsed itself down to the control. There was nothing left in that pipe she could prove.
At home the kid had drawn a picture of Gary's dog on the back of card four, which she'd left on the counter. She let it stay there. The dog had five legs. The line about the lab subline was still readable under one of them.