The post went in harder than it should have.
Harmon drove it with the eight-pound maul, the way he had driven fence posts for fifty years, and the soil that should have taken it in six strikes took fourteen. He counted. He had been counting since Day 40, when he first noticed that the soil inside the line was changing. The count was one of the things he did instead of calling.
He was going to call today.
The post stood at the new edge. He squared it with the maul-handle, checked the line against yesterday's post — the one he had driven at dawn on Day 144 — and found the new post twelve meters further out. Twelve meters, give or take. He paced it and wrote it on the tag he kept in his shirt pocket. 145 — 12m — NW quadrant. The handwriting was smaller than it used to be. His eyes were not.
The wheat inside the line leaned toward the center of the field. The stalks on the far side of the new post stood straight. The stalks on the near side bent at what Harmon estimated was eleven degrees. He did not have a protractor. He had the Polaroid.
He pulled the camera from the canvas bag slung at his hip. The bag was older than his marriage. The camera was older than the bag. He framed the new post so the straight wheat and the leaning wheat both showed, pressed the shutter, waited for the print to come out the front. The motor whined. The picture slid out gray.
He tucked it under his arm while it developed and walked the line.
The line was what he called it. He had no other word. It was not a fence, because there was no fence. It was not a circle, because he could not see it. It was the place where, five months ago, his John Deere 8320R had slowed down for no reason he could diagnose, and when he climbed down to check the engine the engine was fine, and when he climbed back up and put his foot on the pedal the tractor moved again the way it should. He had driven that field for forty years. The tractor had never slowed.
The tractor had slowed.
He had walked back to the spot where it slowed and stood on it and felt his knees complain in a way he had stopped blaming on his knees three weeks ago. He had driven a fence post there. That post was now three hundred meters inside the line. That post was one of the ones that had fallen over in September when the wheat started bending.
He walked the full perimeter every morning. It took him an hour and forty minutes on a good day. He was sixty-seven. His knees were going to go anyway. They were going to go faster inside the line than outside it, and he had stopped walking inside the line except when he had to.
He had to this morning.
At the west edge, where the new post stood, he stepped across. One foot, then the other. The air did not change. The light did not change. The ground under his boot felt, the way it always felt when he crossed, like a staircase that had one more step than his body expected. He caught his balance and walked to the fallen post from Day 40 and put his hand on it. The post was half-buried. The soil had not buried it. The post had settled into soil that was compressing under its own weight.
He took a Polaroid of the buried post. He took a Polaroid of the wheat bending around it. He walked back out across the line. The staircase went the other way this time, one step short instead of one step long, and he stumbled, and he caught himself on the new post, and he stood there for a minute breathing with his hand on the wood.
He was going to call today.
The Polaroids were drying in the bag by the time he got back to the truck. He laid them on the passenger seat in the order he had taken them and drove the quarter mile up the cart track to the house. The house had been his father's and his father's father's. The barn beside it was older than the house. He parked by the barn.
Inside the barn, on the south wall, was a board. On the board were nails. On the nails were photographs. The photographs were in a grid, five wide, going down. He had started the grid in a three-ring binder and moved to the board on Day 60, when the binder ran out of sleeves and he realized he was going to need a bigger system.
He climbed the stepladder and drove two new nails at the bottom of the grid. He hung Day 145's photographs — four of them, the new post and the straight-and-leaning wheat and the buried post and the bending — beside the photographs from Day 144. He climbed down. He stood at the foot of the ladder and looked at the board.
One hundred and forty-five days of photographs. Five hundred and eighty-one Polaroids. A circle growing outward in the lower-left corner of the wall, because he had started in the upper-right and worked down the way you read a book.
He did the math he had been doing for weeks. Five months ago the line had been eleven meters across. This morning the line was — he used the tape measure on the truck, he used the GPS on the phone his daughter had bought him, he used the odometer on the quad when he couldn't be bothered with the other two — the line was a circle three hundred and twelve meters across. The growth rate had been three meters a day in June. It had been seven meters a day in August. It had been twelve meters overnight. He was not a mathematician but he had been a farmer long enough to know a curve when he saw one, and this was a curve.
He looked at the board one more time. Then he went into the house to find the phone number.