Troy Schierer eats lunch off the lid of his toolbox. Ham on white, a sleeve of saltines, a jug of tea gone warm in the shed. The ceiling fan in the machine shed turns slowly enough that you could count the blades. Tuesday, the twentieth of July, 12:10. It has not rained in fifteen days and the shed smells like dust and hydraulic fluid.
He hands Janelle the phone without saying anything, chewing.
Two weeks ago the Partner Desk agent called Reese had offered him nine dollars an acre to put a YardDesk pod on his north eighty, the field Janelle has used as a control for three years because nobody was paying anybody to watch it. She'd written him three conditions on an index card in block letters and he'd forwarded them, retyped, misspelling attributed. The reply has come back from someone else.
Marisol Ochoa Partner Operations
No gray line under the name. Every message from Reese carried one, small, automated correspondent, the way the law says it has to. This one doesn't. So a person, probably. Or a person's name on a template that a person approved.
- ●Hand sampling by the District may continue on its existing schedule. Agreed.
- ●The District retains its own records. Partner-device data remains YardDesk data. Agreed as written.
- ●Where Partner-device and District readings differ, YardDesk reconciles internally using its quality model. The District may publish its own records separately.
"Two out of three," Troy says. "That's a B."
"Three's the only one that matters."
"She says you can publish yours."
"Separately." Janelle reads it again. "Their curve goes to the registry. My numbers go in a file cabinet in Tremont. If they disagree, a model picks. Nobody ever has to put the two side by side."
Troy chews. He looks out the open door at his beans, the leaves turned up silver-side against the heat, and then at the cultivator that needs shanks.
"Seven hundred twenty, Janelle."
"I know."
She doesn't argue it. It's his ground. She has never once paid him for it either, and he has let her drive across his headland for three years with a meter and a cooler and never asked what she found.
She takes card nine out of her shirt pocket. Manila, ruled, the corners soft. She writes in carpenter's pencil on the tailgate because the toolbox lid is lunch.
99. 7/20/49 YD (M. OCHOA, PARTNER OPS, HUMAN?) TO T.S.: COND 1 YES, 2 YES (OWN RECORDS ONLY), 3 NO. "RECONCILES INTERNALLY." "MAY PUBLISH SEPARATELY." T.S. UNDECIDED. 0.8 H, 22 MI, BLACK.
Black, because she was standing in a working farmer's shed about a working control. Gray hours are the ones nobody can bill and nobody believes. She has been keeping both colors on the cards since the vendor's dashboard started shading the hours its pods didn't trust, and she found the habit useful the other direction too.
Loretta comes out of the house at the end with two coffees and hands her one without asking. Cinnamon in it. Loretta always puts cinnamon in it.
"Read the whole thing to me," Loretta says. "Not the short version."
Janelle reads it. Loretta listens with her arms crossed over the mug.
"Reconciles," Loretta says. "That's what my sister's husband said about the checkbook."
Wednesday, 6:15 in the morning, her own kitchen table. The window unit isn't on yet. Grackles on the power line.
She didn't sleep on it so much as lie next to it.
Troy will sign. Not this week. But seven hundred twenty dollars is a shank and a half, and a farm with a cultivator that needs shanks is not going to turn down money to keep a principle that belongs to the county. Loretta can say reconciles at him across the supper table until Labor Day. Janelle would sign, in his boots.
So she writes it down before it happens, so it isn't something she decides angry later.
Under line 99, small:
IF T.S. SIGNS: SCHIERER = "PAIRED," NOT CONTROL. KEEP HAND SAMPLING, KEEP SO4. POD VS ME AT EVERY STORM, IN DISTRICT REPORT, SIDE BY SIDE. NEED NEW UNPAID CTL BEFORE OCT.
Paired. It's a new word for the cards. A case is a field that's changing on its own, like Schaefer's. A control is a field nobody is touching, measured so you can tell. A paired field is something that didn't exist before Reese. A field she still measures but can't lean on, because somebody else is being paid to measure it too, and they'll put their number on a curve and send it somewhere, and hers will be the other number.
If YardDesk won't put the two side by side, the district report will. That's the one thing she controls. Ray signs the report. Ray reads her cards.
100. 7/21/49 DECIDED: IF SCHIERER SIGNS, RECLASS "PAIRED." POD VS ME SIDE BY SIDE IN DISTRICT REPORT. FIND NEW UNPAID CTL BY OCT. 0.4 H, BLACK.
Then she gets the photocopies out of the drawer. The county's 1974 tile maps, gray and smeared, the outlets marked with a little open triangle and the mains as dashed lines. Most of them have somebody's initials penciled near the outlet, a farmer or a tiling contractor, people who have been dead longer than she's been alive.
She wants a field with a known main, no ash, no pod, and a name she has never seen in a board packet. That last part is the new one. Reese found Troy because Troy's field was in the district's board packets as a control, with his name in the minutes. Reese reads the minutes. Reese reads everything that's public, and a good part of what isn't.
She runs her finger down the Delavan sheet. L.B., by an outlet on a county ditch.
Same Wednesday, 10:30, Schaefer's field. Sixteen days dry.
Ken Schaefer's dog walks out with her to the pink flag and then goes straight back to the truck to lie in the shade under it, without being asked. It has learned the routine faster than the planner.
Schaefer's #17 used to be a control too. In May she put a probe into the old clay main splice and pulled up gray clay with a black streak through it that smelled like egg, a pocket of sulfide that had been sitting there airless for decades and started to rot open when Schaefer put in his new plastic main and the ground around it began to drain. It's a case now. It's on card ten, which is the card for cases.
She is walking a line of cores toward the road from the splice, eighteen inches east of last week's hole every week, so she isn't sampling ground she already disturbed.
The ground is like a brick. She leans her whole weight on the T-handle for the last foot and the probe goes in a quarter turn at a time.
Brown to fourteen. Orange streaks to twenty-nine. Gray from twenty-nine to the end of the probe at thirty-three.
She lays it on the tailgate.
In May the gray started at nineteen inches. Last week, twenty-six. This week, twenty-nine. Three inches in seven days, in a drought, which is backwards from what a person would guess and exactly right. Dry soil cracks. Air goes down the cracks. Where air gets to the gray, the iron in it rusts to orange and the sulfide burns off as acid, and the gray retreats downward a little every week the rain doesn't come.
Egg, barely. She puts the core right under her nose and even then she might be remembering it.
Then the outlet. A trickle, sixteen days into dry weather, still coming. 7.39. Up from 7.34 last week.
One reading. She doesn't let it say anything.
Sulfate bottle, masking tape, SCH-17 7/21, into the cooler. Ray approved sulfate monthly on #17. She is taking it weekly and paying the difference by not putting in for mileage on the Hartsburg runs, which Ray will figure out in October, and which she will explain to him in fewer than five words.
She photographs the core on the tailgate beside last week's photo on her phone and beside May's, three cores in a row, three gray tops at three depths. Ken's dog gets in the corner of the frame. She leaves it.
5. 7/21/49 #17 SPLICE CORE, 16 D DRY: GRAY TOP 29 IN (7/14: 26, MAY: 19). TO 33 IN, HARD. EGG BARELY. DRY 7.39. SO4 BOTTLE. 1.3 H, 48 MI, BLACK.
That's card ten, line five. Card ten only has five lines. It's a short card for now.
Friday, the twenty-third, 8:40 at night. Arturo calls instead of texting.
He has never called her. Arturo Pena, field tech in Mills County, Iowa, who wrote an anonymous comment on the registry's consultation that turned out to be the best one in it, and who answers questions with photos of things. She picks up on the first ring in her own driveway with the groceries still on the seat.
"I typed it exactly," he says. A turn signal. He's driving. "Like you said. Attributed manual points, the setting name with the underscores. The support agent came back in a minute. This setting must be requested by the tenant administrator."
"Who's your tenant administrator."
"Dennis. My manager. The one who said the district doesn't comment on registries."
She sits down on the running board. There is ice cream in the bag on the seat. It's going to be soup.
"So I went to Bev," Arturo says.
"Who's Bev."
"Front desk. Bev's had the admin password since 2043 because Dennis can't keep a password. It's on a sticky note in her drawer that says Dennis on it." The signal clicks off. "Bev typed it in from her desk this afternoon. Exactly. Underscores and everything. A human emailed back in an hour. Checked. Live Monday."
"A human."
"Signed with a name. No gray line." He laughs, one breath through the nose. "Dennis got copied. He came out of his office and asked Bev what attributed manual points were. Bev said, Arturo's numbers with Arturo's name on them. He said, oh. Then he went back in."
"That's it?"
"That's it. Pods still ship August first. Regardless. But when one fouls, my readings show up as mine. As points. Nobody draws a line through them."
She doesn't say anything for a second. One setting, on one county's account, behind a support agent that only knew the answer if you asked the exact question, unlocked by a woman at a front desk with a sticky note. Cody at YardDesk had filed it for Illinois without telling anyone. Bev had typed it in for Iowa without asking anyone. Neither of them would ever be in a board packet.
"Write it down," she says.
"I don't have cards."
"Get cards. Manila. The ruled ones. Carpenter's pencil, because it doesn't skip when the card's damp."
"You want me to write Bev on a card?"
"I want you to write Bev on a card."
101. 7/23/49 A.P.: ASKED BY NAME. AGENT: TENANT ADMIN ONLY. BEV (FRONT DESK, HAS PW) REQUESTED. HUMAN CHECKED IT. LIVE 7/26. MILLS CO GETS POINTS. 0.6 H, GRAY.
Gray, because it was her driveway at night and the ice cream. It's the most useful forty minutes she's spent all month.
Tuesday, the twenty-seventh, seven in the morning. Delavan.
Ilene Bauer's forty is at the end of a lane with the gravel mostly gone back to dirt. The 1974 map shows a six-inch clay main running south to a county ditch, and by the outlet, in ballpoint, L.B. Last night Janelle checked the YardDesk partner listings, the planner's field map, the district's own board packets back to 2044. The field is on none of them. No ash. No pod. Nobody's name in the minutes.
Ilene meets her at the end of the lane in a sun hat and rubber boots. She's eighty-one. She cash-rents the ground to a nephew who farms out of El Paso and comes by twice a year.
"Lloyd put that tile in," Ilene says. "He'd want somebody to look at it."
The outlet is where the map says, half buried in reed canary grass taller than Janelle. She cuts it back with the hand sickle she keeps behind the seat. Corrugated clay, old, the bell end intact. A thin clean trickle, even now, cold on her wrist when she reaches in, the only cold thing in Tazewell County.
Meter: 7.69. A little above Schierer's dry number, a little above Hartsburg's. One reading. Sulfate bottle, masking tape, BAUER-DLV 7/27.
She paces up the main to where the map shows a junction, sets the probe, and leans. Brown to sixteen. Tan with orange freckles to twenty-four. No gray. No smell. The probe won't go further in this ground. She writes TO 24 IN ONLY, because the tile is somewhere around three and a half feet and twenty-four inches says nothing about what's around it. She'll bring the bucket auger after the next wet spell, if there is one.
On the way back up the lane Ilene says, "I got an email last week. From a Reese. Wanted to pay me nine dollars an acre."
Janelle stops walking.
The field isn't in a board packet. It isn't on a partner list. It isn't on the planner map. It's on the county's 1974 tile maps, which the county scanned and put online in 2047, which is where Janelle found it too. She was reading the same map as the agent. The agent read it faster.
"I deleted it," Ilene says. "Lloyd always said anybody who pays you for nothing wants something." She looks at Janelle from under the hat. "Is that what you want? Something for nothing?"
"Yes," Janelle says. "Your tile water, once a month. Nobody else's pod in it."
Ilene thinks about it, looking at the beans. "Nobody's paying you to want that."
"No."
"Then it's worth something." She starts walking again. "I'll have the nephew sign whatever you bring. Bring me the paper. Don't email it. I'll delete it."
102. 7/27/49 BAUER-DLV (I. BAUER, 81) CANDIDATE CTL: 6-IN CLAY MAIN '74, INTACT. DRY 7.69. JCT CORE TO 24 IN ONLY, NO GRAY. SO4 BOTTLE. YD EMAILED HER TOO, DELETED. WILL SIGN. 1.8 H, 64 MI, BLACK.
That night she gets out a fresh card. Card eleven. She doesn't number the lines yet.
At the top she writes the names of the fields and what they are now, as of tonight, in a column.
0611: ASH. TREATED. LEANS TO CTLS. #17 SCHAEFER: CASE (NOT ASH). HARTSBURG W: CONTROL, TO 23 IN. SCHIERER N80: CONTROL. PAIRED IF SIGNED. BAUER-DLV: CANDIDATE. UNPAID.
She looks at the last word for a while. Three years ago that word wouldn't have been worth writing. Every field she sampled was unpaid. That was the default condition of dirt. Now it's a property a field has, like drainage, like slope, and it's going away a few hundred acres at a time, from agents that read old county maps in the dark and send emails to eighty-one-year-old women.
She thinks about Ray's five words. She thinks she might have them now. Some of our rulers are sold. That's five. The board would hear it.
She doesn't write it down. She writes paper for I.B., not email at the bottom of card eleven, and leaves the line numbers blank, and turns off the kitchen light.