It was a lot going on, and it looked bad.

I was standing atop the berm one afternoon, resting on my shovel, when Nate came over.

“I know this mess is going to go away,” he said. “But I hadn’t pictured it.”

“Me neither,” I said. Every direction I looked, there was chewed-up earth spiky with ripped-out plant roots. No order at all till the Lundgren place, where a field was being prepared for planting.

“I wasn’t sure Dad would go through with the changes,” Nate said. “Back when it was just plan and pretend, they seemed like a great idea. But now, seeing him do things differently than he ever has—I’m sure hoping they’re not going to prove a mistake.”

“I don’t see that they can,” I said.

“He’s putting less acreage into money crops. Even with the subsidy, they’re going to have to come in good to balance out.”

From where we were, we had a bird’s-eye view of the work going on in the Lundgrens’ nearest field. A tractor was plowing it into gently curving strips that hugged the roll of the land.

A horse team followed, dragging a wide, spike-toothed harrow, breaking up clumps of earth and leaving a pattern of stripes. “Who’s driving the horses?” I asked Nate.

“Maggie,” he said. “Even if I was home to do it, she’d be wanting to. She’s a worker.”

“Like us,” a nearby fellow said. “Just prettier.”

“No joke,” someone answered, with enough edge to say he didn’t think the way the 597th was working was any joke at all.

All the fellows were angry over how Captain Hakes was pushing us. Our eight-hour days had gone to ten and then twelve, and he’d worked us straight through two Saturdays.

And things were going to get worse, too, because we were about to lose twenty men to a spike camp Pops was to set up in the woods some distance away. We’d soon be needing the fence posts they were going after, but their departure would leave us down twenty workers.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Pops. “Why do we have to be in such a hurry?”

“I imagine the captain’s concerned we get the reservoir filled before the snowmelt’s all gone and the dry season hits,” Pops said. “And the sooner we plant the willow starts and other trees, the longer growing season they’ll have to take hold.”

But Sam told me Hakes didn’t know a growing season from a month of Sundays. What had Hakes stirred up was that district would be sending out an inspection team in a few weeks. “I keep telling you,” Sam said. “With him it’s all show.”