A third said:
“Better farmers than a seventeen-year-old girl have tried to make that ground useful.”
Dale looked toward him.
“She knows it’s bad ground.”
“Then why plant it?”
Dale picked up his receipt.
“Ask her.”
He left.
At home, he said nothing to Opal.
She heard anyway.
Small towns do not require newspapers.
Opal wrote in her notebook:
May 2. First leaves opening. Men at elevator think trees are funny. Trees appear indifferent.
Ruth read the entry later.
She laughed until she coughed.
The first summer nearly proved the men right.
Drought arrived.
Rainfall fell below average.
Six hundred seedlings died.
Not gradually.
Some dried within days.
Others held green leaves until suddenly they did not.
Opal walked every row.
Marked every dead tree.
The number increased.
Two hundred.
Three hundred.
Four hundred.
At six hundred, she stopped counting aloud.
Kurt found her one evening sitting beneath the windmill with the notebook closed beside her.
“You okay?”
“No.”
He sat.
She looked toward the Flat.
“Twenty-seven days.”
“What?”
“Since meaningful rain.”
Kurt nodded.
“I heard.”
“Six hundred dead.”
“You knew some would die.”
“Not that many.”
“What’re you going to do?”
Opal looked at him.
“What do you think?”
He smiled.
“Plant six hundred.”
“Yes.”
The replacement seedlings went in that November.
The hardpan had not softened.
The digging bar bounced.
Opal’s shoulders hurt for days.
Then winter rabbits found the young trunks.
By spring 1982, nearly two hundred additional trees showed bark damage.
Some were girdled badly enough they would not survive.
Opal cried that morning.
Privately.
Then went to Ruth.
“Rabbits.”
Ruth nodded.
“What do I do?”
“Protect the stems.”
“With what?”
“Wire mesh.”
“That’ll take forever.”
Ruth smiled.
“So?”
Three weekends.
Mesh around hundreds of vulnerable trunks.
Kurt helped.
Dale helped once.
Only once.
He claimed he was passing by.
Opal did not challenge the lie.
The second summer was better.
The native grasses began appearing unevenly.
Some rows remained thin.
Others developed green strips.
The trees grew slowly.
No dramatic transformation.
Nothing a passing farmer could see at thirty miles per hour.
That mattered because public judgment depends heavily on visible speed.
By 1983, the switchgrass thickened.
Roots filled surface soil.
Leaf litter began accumulating beneath the young oaks.
Opal performed simple infiltration tests using a metal ring pressed into the ground.
Measured amount of water.
Stopwatch.
Outside the planted rows, water often sat on the crusted surface for eleven or twelve minutes before visibly infiltrating.
Inside the tree rows, where grass and organic material had developed, the same quantity disappeared far faster.
Eventually under ninety seconds.
Opal repeated the tests because she did not trust results she wanted to be true.
Again.
Again.
Different locations.
Same pattern.
She wrote every number down.
Nobody asked.
So she told almost nobody.
At the elevator, jokes continued.