Tuesday, the fifth of September 2051, ten past five in the morning, Ken's ditch.
The radar agent's alarm went off at 9:52 Labor Day night while Janelle Woith was signing a permission slip for a field trip to the Dickson Mounds. Point eight of an inch was on the way, ten to one o'clock, onto ground August had dried out again. She weighed it with the pen still in her hand. A rising half would make a fourth pair. A falling half would still make a tenth storm, and the tally only counts storms. The kid had school. The kid stayed home. She set her alarm for 4:40.
So she gets the back half only. BM check, 0.00. The lath stakes are still up, their orange bleached pale by a month of sun. Staff 0.27. Bucket 19.8, 20.1, 19.9 seconds, call it one liter a second, right on her curve. EC 620. pH 7.20. F on every cap. The water is clear enough that she can see the gravel under the plate, and a leopard frog sits in the pool below the V like it's also waiting on a number.
The beans have gone yellow up to the knee. The combine is a month off, maybe less. After the combine the residue lies down and the next rain hits the field differently. After the lime, nothing coming out of this pipe will be a before again. These five weeks of storms are the only before there's going to be.
Dale calls at 10:20. ALK 3.1.
She makes the tenth stroke on the back of card thirteen and checks the first of six boxes. It's the first box on the card that the weather checked for her. Every other mark there, she put there herself.
238. 9/5/51 S27 0.8 IN (LABOR DAY NIGHT). FALLING ONLY (SCHOOL NIGHT, NO R). BM 0.00. H 0.27, 1.0 L/S, EC 620 pH 7.20, ALK 3.1. TALLY 10/12. BOX 1/6 X.
Tuesday, the twelfth, half past four in the afternoon, Gary Holtz's machine shed.
Gary calls her in, which he never does, and shows her the tablet propped on the seat of his combine. The combine is three-quarters greased.
FALL 2051 RECOMMENDATION, HOLTZ G., EAST 80 (WEST HALF): Lime 2.0 t/ac. Soil pH 6.0 below target 6.5. Estimated yield response +3 bu/ac. Book co-op spreader window Oct 9-27?
The west half is the B half, the half he didn't lime in 2049, the half that lateral B drains.
"It's been bugging me since spring," Gary says. "I'm not running half a farm sour for a science fair."
"It's the only pair in the county where one ditch takes both sides."
"You said three points don't tell you anything."
"I said three points in one year can't tell lime from August. Four points across two Augusts can."
She doesn't make a speech. She does the math out loud so he can hear that she can't match it. Three bushels at last week's bean price is about thirty-five dollars an acre. Forty acres is fourteen hundred dollars. Wendell's budget line covers twelve before-storms and six Kuhl monthlies, and Gary isn't on it.
He looks at the tablet a long time. "What if I lime B and leave a strip over the lateral?"
The laterals on his place are about sixty feet apart, and each one drains a band about that wide. She asks for sixty feet centered on B's line, all the way back to the ditch. Call it under two acres. He works it out: maybe seventy dollars of beans.
"I can lose seventy dollars," Gary says. "I can't lose fourteen hundred."
He opens the map and draws the strip with his finger. The co-op agent asks, Reason for exclusion? He types RESEARCH, waits a second, and adds DISTRICT. It takes both words.
She'll sample the strip's soil before and after the spreader, because a no-apply zone on a map isn't a no-apply zone in a field until somebody checks for dust.
They walk it before supper, Gary pacing and Janelle with a roll of pink flagging off the truck. Thirty steps out from the tile line on the east side, thirty on the west, a flag at each corner by the ditch and two more at the far end, where the beans give way to the fencerow and somebody's old stone pile. Gary pulls a bean pod, cracks it with his thumb, and eats the beans raw, chewing like a man doing sums.
"Seventy dollars," he says. "You know what it'd cost you to rent two acres from me for a year?"
"More than seventy."
"A lot more than seventy." He spits a hull. "So don't tell Wendell what a deal he got. He'll want another one."
She ties the last flag and steps back. The strip doesn't look like anything, sixty feet of beans the same as the beans on either side. That's the point. Next August it'll look like nothing too, and it will be the only nothing in the county that anybody measured.
239. 9/12/51 HOLTZ: CO-OP REC 2.0 T/AC ON B. G.H. LIMES B EXCEPT 60 FT NO-APPLY STRIP OVER LAT B (~1.8 AC, ~$70). ZONE 'RESEARCH/DISTRICT'. VERIFY STRIP SOIL PRE/POST.
Tuesday, the nineteenth, twenty to three in the morning, Ken's ditch.
A squall line brings 1.1 inches, starting at 12:50, with real wind behind it. The alarm went at 12:31. In place of the kid she put his cap on the dashboard, the one with the backward R, which he negotiated at dinner in exchange for writing the R on Saturday's grocery list.
The stakes are leaning in the wind. The post isn't. BM 0.00. Staff 0.32 at 2:40 and climbing. Bucket 17.2, 17.0, 17.1, which comes to 1.17 liters a second. EC 660. pH 7.18. R, R.
It peaks at 0.40 at 3:25. Then the first dead leaves of fall start coming over the plate, cottonwood mostly, and she clears the V with a stick three times to keep the nappe clean. A leaf on the crest means a flagged head, and she isn't going to lose a storm to a cottonwood.
At 4:50 it's back down to 0.32. Bucket 17.1, 17.3, 17.0. EC 600. pH 7.22. F, F.
The gap is 60. On the back of the card it goes under the other three: 90, 65, 80, 60. Four numbers. She can feel herself wanting to see them going down, because the ground's been drier each time and the first flush shorter. She writes GROUND DRIER EACH STORM? and leaves the question mark on, because that's what it's for.
Dale's numbers at ten: ALK R 3.0, F 3.2. The falling half is higher again, the same sign four storms out of four, and never by the same amount.
Ken drives past at 7:15. He slows but doesn't stop, which is how Ken asks how many. She holds eleven fingers out the truck window, ten and then one. He lifts one finger off the wheel.
240. 9/19/51 S28 1.1 IN (SQUALL). R + F. H 0.32 R EC 660 / F EC 600, 1.17 L/S BOTH. LEAVES CLEARED 3X. GAP 60 (90/65/80/60, NO AVG). ALK R 3.0 F 3.2. TALLY 11/12.
Tuesday, the twenty-sixth, ten past eight in the morning, creek forty on the Kuhl place.
FLOW_TYPE: BASEFLOW, seven days into the S28 recession. Two-hundred-fifty-milliliter cup, 52 seconds. EC 660, pH 7.19. BF on the cap.
The boxed reminder on card thirteen says 9/30. Marcy has beaten it. She's on the bank with her phone and a paper copy, since she doesn't trust the phone, and she reads it out like a grocery list.
"Date first. Refusal number three. Kuhl M., creek forty and all owned acres. Refuses ASH-C trial and any contact on or after 2051-10-01. Refuses use of district or public data about this farm in marketing. Signed."
"You added a sentence."
"You said the first field's what they read. I wanted the second one to be what they choke on."
She sends it standing in reed canary grass, and the answer is back before the phone's in her pocket.
Your preference has been recorded. Re-contact eligibility: 2052-04-01. Note: public data use is governed by the source agency's terms.
"April," Marcy says. "And they told you the data's your problem."
Janelle thinks about the blank form she wrote in January, one line for Wendell about landowner consent, still sitting unsigned in his tray. "It's the district's problem. I'll put a line in the site history. It won't stop them. It'll be there when somebody asks."
"April's when they spread anyway."
"April's when you file number four."
Marcy writes 3/31/52 on the paper copy, in pen, and hands it over to go on a card that doesn't exist yet.
Dale, Thursday: ALK 3.0. The five monthlies read 3.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.0, 3.0. The last of Wendell's six falls after Ken's lime, which makes it the first month the pair is really a pair.
241. 9/26/51 KUHL MONTHLY #5 (BF). EC 660, ALK 3.0. SERIES 3.0/3.0/3.1/3.0/3.0. M.K. REFUSAL #3 FILED EARLY. RE-CONTACT NOW 4/1/52. SITE HIST: NOT FOR MARKETING. [REMIND M.K. 3/31/52.]
Tuesday, the third of October, three in the afternoon, Ken's ditch, and then her desk.
Ken combined the south half Saturday and Sunday. Forty-eight bushels by the monitor, which he told her without being asked, so he's pleased. Behind the ditch the field is stubble now, beige and loud underfoot. The grain cart ran the headland six feet from the bank and the stakes are still up. BM 0.00. The plate is dry. The tile isn't even weeping, because the beans pulled the last of the water out of the ground on their way to the elevator.
Box four, empty. Box five, today, empty. Box six is next Tuesday, two days before the spreader.
The radar agent's ten-day says No significant precipitation expected in the TAZ-17 catchment through 2051-10-12, and shows a sun icon. She's started to read it as a smirk.
There's a message at her desk from Terraline's partner inbox, stamped 4:11.
Stakeholder comment logged (ref SC-2051-0884): 'R-F EC gap, TAZ-17, N=3.' Classification: informational. Methodological impact: none at this time.
So they read the row and gave it a number, and then they decided it didn't count.
"They filed you," Ray says.
"They filed the row. The row's still there."
She doesn't answer them. She updates the SUMMARY: N=4 STORM PAIRS, 90, 65, 80, 60. ALK GAP R-F -0.2, -0.2, -0.1, -0.2. FALLING HIGHER, 4 OF 4. Then she adds a clause at the end: LOGGED BY TERRALINE AS SC-2051-0884, 'NO IMPACT.' If they get to number her, she gets to number them back.
Then she writes the row she's been writing in her head for a week. It goes where the parsers will find it on the morning of the twelfth if it doesn't rain.
2051-10-12 PRE-APPLICATION SERIES, TAZ-17: [ ] OF 12 BEFORE-STORMS. COUNT IS THE FIRST FIELD. IF UNDER 12, THE BEFORE IS SHORT. DO NOT FILL.
The brackets stay empty. Eleven or twelve is up to the weather, and the weather has nine days.
Ken calls at six, which he doesn't do either.
"Saw your row," he says. Ken reads the file now. She doesn't know when that started. "Eleven. You want me to push it a week? The co-op'll hold. I can say the ground's too wet."
"The ground's dry as a floor."
"I can say it anyway."
She looks at the card on the desk, at the tenth and eleventh strokes and the four empty boxes, and she wants the week badly enough that it's in her jaw. A week is another chance at storm twelve. A week is also Ken telling the co-op a lie for her, so that a number in her file comes out round.
"Don't push it," she says. "Lime on the twelfth. If it's eleven, the row says eleven."
"Wendell said twelve."
"Wendell said twelve before-storms. He didn't say the sky owed him any. If it's short, I write it short, first field."
Ken is quiet. Then: "Okay. The twelfth." And after a second, "You'd have hated it at twelve if I lied for it."
"Yeah."
"Figured." He hangs up without saying goodbye, which is Ken saying goodbye.
She drives home the long way, past Ken's, and the plate in the ditch is a dry steel V with a cottonwood leaf stuck to it. She doesn't stop to clear it. Nothing's coming over it, and a leaf on a dry crest doesn't flag anything. It just sits there being October.
242. 10/3/51 K.S. COMBINED S HALF, 48 BU. BANK OK, BM 0.00, TILE DRY. RADAR: NONE THRU 10/12. TERRALINE: SC-2051-0884 'NO IMPACT.' SUMMARY N=4, SIGN 4/4. LIME-DAY ROW: '[ ] OF 12. DO NOT FILL.' TALLY 11/12. BOXES 4, 5 EMPTY. ONE LEFT. K.S. OFFERED TO PUSH LIME A WEEK ('GROUND WET'). DECLINED: LIME 10/12, COUNT AS IT FALLS.