I entered it in the book like this: Fourteenth of July. Traded four flats of satsuma starts and one working belt-drive for two pecks of flint corn, a jar of dried ramps, and directions we did not ask for and needed anyway.

The directions were about the river.

We drove up the valley to the Greengrass place with Dad's newest resurrection riding in the truck bed: a seed drill he'd un-bricked over the winter, talking to it with the Chaplain until its dead brain lit up and remembered it was a machine and not a paperweight. The co-op's trade line to the Ho-Chunk growers up the valley is older than we are here; corn has been coming down that road and starts going up it since before anybody thought to enter it, because good trades don't have anniversaries. But this was the first time the whole family went, and the first time I brought the book.

Winona Greengrass met us at the gate with her arms crossed and a look that said she had already priced everything in the truck and found it wanting.

"That drill run?" she said.

"Like a dream," Dad said.

"Dreams don't plant corn." But she was already walking to look at it, so I knew we were fine.

I want to put down here that I had a whole idea about the Greengrass place before I got there, and the idea was stupid, and I'm entering it so I remember how stupid it was. I thought; I don't know what I thought. Something with the word wisdom in it. Something soft-focus. What I got instead was a woman who haggled like Mom does over freight and who laughed like Theo does when someone falls down.

She and Dad argued about the belt-drive for twenty minutes in the yard.

Dad's position was that the belt had come along to show the drill running, not to stay. Winona's opening position used no words: she ran the belt through her fingers the whole length of it, twice, stopped both times at the same spot, and set her thumbnail there and looked at him.

"Season left in this," she said. "Maybe two."

"That's a March belt. Barely stretched."

"Off what?"

"Off a baler that didn't need it anymore."

"So it's a used belt with a good story." She let go of it. "It runs on this belt or it doesn't run."

Dad restated his position. It took longer the second time. Winona heard him all the way out, not nodding, and when he finished she looked past him into the truck bed at the flats and said, "Those stay." Not a question, and not revisited.

I kept the terms as they moved. By minute five her column had the belt-drive in it. By minute fifteen it had the flats. Ours said corn and ramps at the start and corn and ramps at the end, and the whole twenty minutes sounded, with your eyes shut, exactly like Dad holding his ground.

She won. She got the belt-drive and the four flats, and we got the corn and the ramps, and I could tell Dad was delighted to have lost, because losing to someone that good is its own kind of education.

"Your trees," Winona said to Grandmother, nodding at the flats. "They'll take the cold?"

"They are learning," Grandmother said, in the voice she uses for the tin. "We are all learning."

Winona looked at her a second longer than she needed to. Something passed between the two old women that I didn't get an invitation to, and I have learned not to reach for those. I just entered it: T. and W.G. a look. Filed under: not mine.

Then it was work. Theo and I walked the flats off the tailgate one at a time, Theo narrating the weight, and Winona pointed with her chin at the strip of shade along her fence and moved a coil of wire out of the way herself to make room.

Dad stayed with the drill. He walked her through it the way he walks me through a panel: where the winter left it touchy, and how the belt wants its tension set warm, never cold. Winona stood with her hands in her back pockets and took all of it without writing anything down.

"You treat all your machines like this?"

"The ones that were dead."

She looked at the drill a while, and then at him a little less long. "It'll plant straight," she said, and I entered that under the terms, where a warranty goes.

Here is the corn thing, which I am still turning over.

She showed us the flint corn in her hand, red and hard as gravel, and said it had been grown by her people in this valley and then it left when they left (she said "when they left" the way you'd say "when it rained," a fact with a whole flood behind it) and then it came back. Somebody two states away had been keeping it in a coffee can for a hundred and some years, and one day mailed it home in a sock.

"It rematriated," she said, and grinned at the word like it was a good joke and a serious thing at the same time, which I am learning is how the best words work.

Grandmother went very still. Then she took out the tin.

She does not take out the tin for strangers. I have the whole book to prove it. The tin holds the last dried orange from Buras, from before the salt came up through the ground and the water came over the top and the maps quietly stopped drawing our parish, and here she was in another woman's yard, one hour into knowing her, thumbing it open so Winona Greengrass could look at a shriveled black thing that used to be fruit.

Winona looked at it a long time. She didn't say anything soft. She didn't say anything at all for a while. Then: "You carried that the whole way up the river?"

"The whole way."

"Huh," Winona said. And that was the entire ceremony, and it was enough, and I entered it without another word, because some things you diminish by describing.

What she would not do: she would not tell us how her people read the water. She'd tell us that they read it. That was the trade she was offering, and she was precise about its edges.

"There's a bend below the second bridge," she said. "When the willows there start showing their undersides three days running, you move your low stock to the ridge. Don't ask me the rest of it. The rest of it isn't for sale and isn't a story I tell to trucks I met this morning."

Dad, who has spent nine years learning that not authorized and not able are different words, understood this immediately. "Fair," he said. "We'll take the willows."

"You'll take the willows," she agreed. "And when the willows are right and you're moving stock at two in the morning, you'll remember I told you, and you'll wonder what else I know, and that", she pointed at me and the book like she'd known about the book the whole time, "you can write down. Wondering's free."

I wrote it down. I'm writing it down again now.

Here's the part I'll only put in the book and not say out loud, because Grandmother says a thing loses its salt when you explain it. The river we live on is called the Kickapoo, after people who used to live in this country and don't anymore, because they were made to go. The valley we farm was Ho-Chunk ground, and they were made to go too, four times over, and four times they walked back. We came up the Mississippi running from water that ate our home, and we landed on ground other people got run off of, and now the woman whose family kept coming back is selling us the trick of not drowning.

I don't have a word for that. I looked. Winona has a word for the corn and no word for this, or if she has one, she filed it under not mine, and I respect the filing system. So I entered the facts in order and let them sit next to each other on the page, where anybody can see what they add up to.

Fourteenth of July. Traded a belt-drive for the willows. Saw the tin come out for a stranger. Learned the river's name means "he moves about, standing here then there," which is either about the water or about all of us. Did not ask which.

Theo wanted to know if the flint corn was for popcorn.

"No," Winona said.

"Can we try?"

"You can try once," she said, "and then you'll agree with me," and she was right, it nearly took his tooth out, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the drill she'd just won off us, and that, a grown woman wheezing on a freshly acquired seed drill while my little brother inspects his molar for damage, is the truest thing I know about the Greengrass place. Truer than anything with the word wisdom in it.

We drove home with the corn and the ramps and the willows in my head. The jar rode in my lap. The corn sat between my boots, heavier than the entry makes it sound. The drill went home with us too, hers now, boarding with us until she wanted it, and Dad checked the mirror for it more often than the road strictly required.

Theo worked the tooth against his thumb the whole way down and somewhere past the county road pronounced it sound, to nobody, in his official voice. Nobody said much after that. By our gate the day had settled into the order I would enter it in.

That night I couldn't sleep, so I read the entry back, and I added one line: the only editorial I will allow myself in this whole book, and I'm allowing it because it's a question and not a lesson:

If the willows save us in the fall, what do we owe, and to whom, and in what?

I don't know yet. But I've noticed that's the kind of question Grandmother answers with the tin and Winona answers with corn. Which is to say: not in words. In the thing itself, handed across.

I closed the book. Downstairs I could hear Dad in the yard, saying goodbye to a seed drill that wasn't ours anymore, like a fool, like a romantic, like a man who knows exactly what things cost and pays anyway.

I entered that too. Dad said goodbye to a machine that isn't ours. Nobody stopped him.