The Old Farmer laughed before the Young Woman had finished the first row.
He stood at the edge of the hillside with one boot resting on the rusted wire fence, watching her kneel in soil so dry that every movement raised pale dust around her gloves.
“You’re really doing all seven hundred eighty?”
The Young Woman did not look up.
“Yes.”
The Old Farmer glanced at the wooden crates behind her.
Each one contained carefully sorted garlic bulbs with purple streaks running through the papery skins.
He shook his head.
“That hill hasn’t grown a profitable crop since before you were born.”
She pushed another bulb into the earth.
“Then it’s had plenty of time to rest.”
Two men beside the Old Farmer laughed.
He did too.
“That’s not how dead ground works.”
The Young Woman brushed loose soil over the planting hole.
“Good thing I’m not asking it to grow corn.”
The Old Farmer’s smile faded slightly.
He had expected embarrassment.
Instead, she moved to the next mark in the row.
Seven hundred eighty small flags crossed the hillside.
She had measured every one herself.
Twenty inches between rows.
Enough room for cultivation.
Enough slope for drainage.
Enough distance from the low field where spring water collected after storms.
The Old Farmer watched her for another minute.
“You know what those buyers pay for garlic?”
She finally looked up.
“Which buyers?”
He laughed.
“You know exactly who I mean.”
Everyone in the county did.
For almost twenty years, the Old Farmer had tried to sell produce to one of the most selective specialty distributors in the region.
They supplied expensive restaurants in Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, and several luxury grocery chains.
The Old Farmer had sent them sweet corn.
Rejected.
Pumpkins.
Rejected.
Heirloom tomatoes.
Too inconsistent.
Green beans.
Wrong size.
Onions.
Too ordinary.
Even one year of beautiful red potatoes had earned only a polite letter saying the crop did not fit their current program.
The rejection letters lived inside a drawer in his farm office.
Everyone knew about them because the Old Farmer complained every time another arrived.
Now he pointed down at the garlic.
“You think you’re going to plant grocery-store bulbs on dirt I gave up on fifteen years ago, then those people are going to come begging?”
The Young Woman stood.
She was twenty-six, sun-browned from work despite fair skin, with long chestnut-brown hair braided beneath a worn tan cowboy hat.
Her faded blue work shirt was dark with sweat across the shoulders.
She wiped one glove against her jeans.
“I didn’t say anyone was begging.”
“You called them.”
“Yes.”
The men behind him stopped smiling.
The Old Farmer narrowed his eyes.
“How do you know?”
“Because I told your nephew I sent samples last winter.”
The Old Farmer turned toward one of the men.
His nephew looked suddenly interested in his boots.
The Young Woman returned to planting.
“What did they say?”
“They said to contact them after harvest.”
The Old Farmer barked a laugh.
“That’s buyer language for no.”
“Maybe.”
“It is.”
She pressed another bulb into the soil.
He watched her.
“You spend money on these?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“That means too much.”
“Probably.”
“And if they don’t buy?”
“I sell somewhere else.”
“Who?”
She shrugged.
“Farm stands.”
“Restaurants.”
“Online.”
“Seed stock.”
“Maybe nobody.”
The Old Farmer stared.
She added:
“But if I don’t plant them, I already know what they’ll produce.”
“Nothing.”
That irritated him.
Not because she was wrong.
Because he recognized the logic.
He stepped away from the fence.
“Suit yourself.”
The Young Woman looked up.
“I usually do.”
The men followed him back down the hill.
One laughed quietly.
The Old Farmer did not.
The hillside had not always looked dead.
Thirty years earlier, grass grew waist-high there.
His cattle grazed it.
Before that, according to stories his father told, vegetables had once been planted along the lower edge.