Then slowly diminished.
Not because anyone admitted being wrong.
Because jokes require novelty.
By 1984, the Vance girl planting trees was old news.
The oaks were waist high in places.
Too small to impress.
Too established to be entertaining.
People shifted from ridicule to classification.
Opal was odd.
Bookish.
Too interested in soil measurements.
Too patient with land that should simply be abandoned.
Kurt’s father told him to stop helping.
“People are starting to think you’re part of it.”
Kurt looked at him.
“I am.”
His father sighed.
“A serious farm needs serious priorities.”
Kurt asked:
“What’s unserious about erosion?”
His father had no answer he considered worth giving.
Kurt kept helping.
Opal did not fully understand what that cost him until years later.
In 1985, Dale walked the Flat alone.
Opal saw him from the house.
He did not know she was watching.
He moved between the rows.
Touched one trunk.
Kicked at the grass.
Looked downhill.
Then stood for a long time.
At dinner, he said:
“The east side looks better.”
Opal tried not to react.
“It does.”
“Grass is holding.”
“Yes.”
“You losing fewer seedlings?”
“Much fewer.”
Dale ate potatoes.
Then:
“Good.”
One word.
Opal carried it for months.
The oaks reached six and seven feet in places by 1986.
Canopies began approaching one another.
Nothing enormous.
But enough that wind behaved differently inside the planting.
Enough shade for leaf litter to remain longer.
Enough root mass to alter surface structure.
What nobody could see mattered most.
Below ground, roots were driving downward.
Working cracks.
Following moisture.
Entering the hard layer that had prevented shallower annual crops from developing deep systems.
Every year added another network.
Every dead leaf returned material to soil.
Every grass root slowed runoff.
Every storm had to negotiate more resistance than the storm before it.
Opal’s notebook became thick.
Rainfall.
Tree heights.
Mortality.
Rabbit losses.
Wind.
Infiltration.
Gully depth.
Dates.
Sometimes she wrote personal observations too.
Dad walked rows without me.
Kurt repaired three rabbit guards. Pretended he came for tractor part. There was no tractor part.
Grandma says patience looks exactly like stupidity until the day it doesn’t.
Ruth was becoming weaker.
Arthritis.
Age.
Some mornings she no longer walked to the Flat.
Instead Opal brought the notebook onto the porch.
Ruth would read.
One evening she reached the latest infiltration figures.
She nodded.
“Land’s waking up.”
Opal smiled.
“You make it sound alive.”
“It is.”
“Not like a person.”
“No.”
Ruth looked toward the trees.
“Better.”
Then came 1987.
Winter was dry.
The driest in eleven years according to extension records.
Farmers watched the sky through February.
Then March.
Snowpack poor.
Subsoil moisture limited.
Everyone expected a difficult season.
Dale reduced planned planting slightly.
Neighbors did the same.
Dust began earlier than usual.
The Flat looked better than it once had.