“Since 1912,” he answered. “There wasn’t a thing here when Mrs. Lundgren and I staked out our section corners.”

“Just open land?”

“Prairie and breaks. Our first year here we cut sod for the front wall of a house we built into a hill. It’s Mrs. Lundgren’s cold cellar now. We put our first crop into the raw ground we’d exposed.”

“What did you plant?”

“Just garden produce that year, so we wouldn’t starve. But by the next spring we’d broken enough land to put in a wheat crop.” Mr. Lundgren’s eyes looked someplace past me. “This is wheat country. You wait and see, young man. We’re due for a crop that’ll be something to talk about.”

Nate and Maggie exchanged glances, and Mrs. Lundgren pressed her lips together.

“Dad,” Nate said, “you know the chances of that are—”

“I told you, not now, Nate!” Mrs. Lundgren said. “Maggie, maybe this is the time to ask those questions you had about the CCC.”

“I’ve been storing them up!” Maggie declared. “Moss, Nate has not written one letter home. I bet you’re writing back to Texas, aren’t you?”

“Well, I. . .”

“I want to know all about the camp and who the other fellows are. What the soldiers are like. Is it true that one of the camp’s projects is going to be planting trees? Because—”

“Whoa!” Mr. Lundgren said. “Moss, don’t mind my daughter. Sometimes she seems more like a rolling locomotive than a well-mannered female.”

“I won’t,” I said and then realized my answer made it sound like I agreed with the description. “I’m used to it,” I elaborated. “I’ve got three sisters.”

The silence that followed told me I hadn’t fixed much, so I plunged into answering the only one of Maggie’s questions I could remember.

“I don’t know about the tree planting,” I said. “We’ve been so busy trying to get the camp built, nobody’s been talking about what we’re going to do once it’s done.”

“Folks are discussing it around here,” Maggie said. “In a town small as ours, talking’s the main entertainment, and people do a lot of it at the mercantile.”

She told her father, “My boss says he heard the government wants to plant trees and shrubs, a lot of them, along stream banks and gullies. If the government wants to put some on private land, we ought to volunteer ours.”

“I don’t have any land to give to the government,” Mr. Lundgren said.

“I didn’t mean for us to give away anything,” Maggie said. “But if the government’s looking for places—”

Nate broke in. “What she means is if the government’s after eroded land to fix up, we’ve sure got it.”

Mr. Lundgren’s neck darkened. “Ours isn’t worse than elsewhere,” he said. “And when we get some rain—”