“I hear you.” Harry studied the midsized John Deere tractor parked fifty yards off, boom on the back. “Mind if I look? I’d love to get a boom and I’d sure love to get a drill seeder, too.”
“I’ll tell you if I see anything used that’s in good shape. Stuff new costs as much as a car or a house these days.”
“Yeah, I know.”
They reached the green and yellow tractor. It had a tank affixed to the back, with a long boom off that. “I used to rely on a gravity feed, but now I’ve got a small pump to suck out any stuff on the bottom,” Buddy told her.
“You thought of everything.” Harry admired practical solutions.
He smiled. “Try. I need to flush this baby out and take her back to the shed for the winter. You know, Harry, I kind of lost heart. Since I pulled down that first husk and saw the damage, I haven’t done much in here.”
Tucker, right under the machine’s tank, called out, “No chemicals. Can’t smell a one. What’s he spraying with?”
The two cats joined her.
Pewter sniffed. “Smells, though.”
“Does,” Mrs. Murphy agreed, then jumped on the back of the boom hitch and up onto the tank, where she balanced herself and tapped at the screw-on cap.
Harry laughed. “Looks like we’ve got a Future Farmer of America here.”
“Open it up. Come on. There’s no chemicals in here. We’d know,” the cat pleaded.
Smiling, Harry did untwist the cap as Mrs. Murphy jumped off. Harry peered into the tank. “Buddy,” she said, sniffing, “Buddy, look at this.”
He dutifully did and immediately became enraged at the sight. “Goddammit to hell!” Then he apologized. “Sorry.”
“Buddy, I’d have said worse.”
The tank had smut in the bottom. With his own system, Buddy had infected his crop.
“Harry, I calibrated the gallons per acre. I flushed the system clean, I checked every screw, nozzle, everything. And I refilled this tank each morning.”
“Well, Buddy, someone drained your tank halfway, put a smut slurry in, then refilled it. How would you know? And I bet they cleaned it after you left the day’s work. Someone who knows farming also knows your schedule. And smut spores are easy to grow. You can do it in your kitchen.”
His face blanched, then turned scarlet. “Why? Who would do such a thing?” He paused, color deepening. “I’ll kill the S.O.B.”
Harry said nothing. Any talk of killing right now gave her a chill.
Adjustable wrench in hand, Fair frowned as he worked in the big red shed near the barn. “That’s strange,” he said, squinting at the dismantled ATV in front of him.
“Honey, there’s so much weird stuff going on around here, this is just one more thing, but to deliberately put smut in a spray tank …” Harry shook her head. “Why?”
“You don’t think it could have occurred naturally?”
“No.”
“Well, it will all come out in the wash.” He checked the sun, now low in the sky above the fields. “I’d better start putting this back together.”
“Did you find the problem?”
“The first problem was the fuel line clogged. The second problem—I’m not sure but this generator isn’t going off.”
Harry peered down into the ATV’s engine. “It’s a bitty thing.”
“Anything compared to the engine in your ’78 Ford is a bitty thing. Well, let me put this back together. We need it.”
“If we can’t get it back working, I’ll call Wayne’s Cycle.” She mentioned the place where they had bought the ATV years back in Waynesboro, then realized her husband didn’t want to hear that.
“It will run,” he loudly announced.
As she walked back to the house, Tucker beside her, she looked over her fields, the sunflowers all harvested. “Time to plow stuff under,” she said to the corgi.
“If you leave it alone, rabbits will come in,” Tucker said. She liked to chase rabbits.
Pushing open the screen door, Harry heard a frantic scramble on the kitchen countertops.
“You forgot to completely close the toaster oven,” said the corgi. “I smell the corn bread.”
Stepping into the kitchen, no cats in sight, Harry noticed corn bread crumbs strewn across the counter in front of the toaster oven.
“Those boogers!”
The cats had hooked the corn bread inside the toaster oven, tearing pieces off, pulling them out of the oven and onto the counter, where they ate them. However, they had been interrupted in their thievery, so crumbles—golden evidence—lay scattered on the counter and on the floor.
Since some was on the floor, Tucker ate it. No point in letting food go to waste.
Before Harry could cuss, the phone rang.
“Susan,” Harry greeted her.
“I got a job,” came her enthusiastic voice.
“Where?”
“At Ivy Nurseries. I’ll be making arrangements and stuff like that.”
“Wonderful.”
“Well, I learned a lot from you.”
“You learned more from Miranda.”
Miranda Hogendobber, a passionate gardener and former co-worker at the post office, possessed a gift for arranging height, color, breadth. If it involved a flower, Miranda could grow it, then display it.
Susan replied warmly, “How about I give you both credit? I need to do more than I’ve been doing.”
Harry then told her about the corn smut and Buddy. “Never saw him so mad.”
“Remind me, what’s corn smut?”
“It’s a fungus. It can survive during the winter if it finds the right place to hide. It can survive in old cornstalks, but usually the wind has blown spores all over the place after the swollen infected kernels explode. Not a lot left in the stalks. You and I could grow smut ourselves in corn. The later-maturing corn varieties are more susceptible to it. Has a lot to do with the change in nighttime temperature from midsummer. And when kernels explode, you can see the stuff. It’s actually not that hard to control if you spray before you get it. Once you get it, though, you might as well forget it, and sweet corn is pretty vulnerable.”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“No, it doesn’t. Before I forget, when do you start your job?”
“Monday.”
“I’ll drop by the nursery around quitting time.”
“Great.”
They hung up. Harry looked out the window over the sink. She could tell from her husband’s walk that he hadn’t fixed the ATV. She wouldn’t bring it up but she would make sure the magnetic card for Wayne’s Cycle was moved to the front of the refrigerator.
Given the scowl on his face, she thought she’d better distract him. She disappeared into the small workroom and turned on the computer.
Mrs. Murphy and Pewter smelled the computer. Humans couldn’t detect the smell computers gave off when they were working, but for the cats the odor was coppery, distinctive.
“She gets wrapped up with that nonsense,” Pewter gloated. “She’ll forget what we did.”
“She won’t forget but she will be occupied. That corn bread, oh, full of butter.” Mrs. Murphy smiled.
The two cats wiggled out from under the bed where they’d been hiding and silently made their way into Fair’s small office, where Harry peered at the screen.
Fair, calmer now, stuck his head in. “What’s cooking?”
“Lasagna,” answered Harry.
“No, I mean, what’s cooking here?” He pointed to the computer.
“Lasagna,” Pewter said, sounding crushed. “Not my favorite but it’s okay.”
“You’ll eat. You’ll eat anything,” said Mrs. Murphy.
The culprits tiptoed to one side of the desk, sitting to listen.