The buckets had stood on the linoleum all night, ten of them in two rows of five, and at six on Sunday morning Janelle Woith came down in socks to see what the night had done to them.
It had done what she hoped. A quarter inch of clear water stood on top of each one. Under the water the grey mill ash had pulled down and left a line on the white plastic, a soft pale ring like the one her mother used to scrub out of the tub with Comet. Janelle crouched by bucket 7 and ran her thumbnail through the ring. It came away on her nail smooth and light, the color of an ashtray. It did not grit. It did not shine. It was nothing like the black char the carbon ledger kept asking her to call it.
She went to the truck for her phone because the good camera was at the yard, and she photographed bucket 7 from the side with the strip of masking tape on its rim where she had written 1.9 on Saturday. The tare and the ring in one frame. Whoever verified this on Monday would see the line was there before anyone put a finger in it. She took a second picture closer. Then a third, because the kitchen light was yellow and she did not trust the phone.
The coffee maker clicked behind her. She had not set it. Gerald must have, before he left for his brother's.
Janelle poured a cup and drank half of it standing. Then she got the turkey baster out of the drawer by the stove, the one with the cracked bulb they used on the Thanksgiving bird, and a quart canning jar from under the sink. She wrote on a strip of tape with a Sharpie: DECANT PILE B 10/11 J.W. She pressed the tape on the jar and smoothed it with her thumb.
The water came off easy if she went slow. She held the baster tip just under the surface and let the bulb fill, then moved it to the jar and pressed. If she went too deep she pulled up a grey cloud and had to wait for it to settle again, so she did not go deep. Bucket 1. Bucket 2. By bucket 4 she had the rhythm and stopped thinking about it and thought about Monday instead. Monday the buckets went on the spring scale in front of the field verifier, and the number the verifier wrote down would be called recovered spread, and somebody at the co-op would multiply it by a factor and call that tons of carbon, and somebody in a building she would never see would sell the tons.
None of that worked if the buckets were full of rain.
Bucket 7 had been 6.4 kilograms on the spring scale last night. She hung it again after the baster and watched the needle bounce and settle. 5.8. She went out to the truck in her socks, the gravel cold through the cotton, and got the index card from behind the visor. Under the Saturday lines she wrote 6.4 and drew one line through it, not a scribble, so you could still read it. Beside it she wrote 5.8. She looked at the two numbers for a while. Six hundred grams of rain that would have been carbon on Monday if she had slept in.
She put the card back behind the visor and went inside and finished the other three buckets.
By eight the jar stood full on the windowsill over the sink. Water and a little grey cloud turning slowly in it. She did not touch it. She made eggs and ate them at the counter, watching it.
Gerald called at nine-thirty from his brother's place outside Delavan.
"You get your number?"
"Not till tomorrow," she said. "I told you. Monday scale."
"Lyle's asking. His whole east eighty went through the same mill."
"Lyle can ask the verifier."
"He says you're making it hard."
Janelle looked at the jar. The cloud had come down to the bottom by then, a grey skin under clear water, maybe a finger wide.
"I'm making it weigh what it weighs," she said.
Gerald made the noise he made when he agreed with her and did not want to say so. He asked whether she had eaten. She said she had. He said he would be back by supper. She said fine.
When he hung up she took the jar off the sill and tilted it against the window. She did not shake it. The skin on the bottom moved like wet flour and then stopped. She set it on the kitchen scale Gerald used for his deer sausage and the display said 0.62 kg with the lid on. She went out to the truck again, in boots this time, and wrote it on the visor card under the bucket 7 lines. Then she held the pencil over the card for a moment and wrote beside the number: ASH LOT, NOT CARBON.
She went back in and tore off a strip of masking tape and ran it across the lid and down both sides so the lid could not come off without somebody noticing. Gerald poured things out. He had poured out a jar of her soil cores once in August because it looked like dishwater. The jar rode Monday with the buckets. She wrote that on the tape too, smaller.
She spent the early afternoon on the work she was actually paid for. The tile-drain sample sheets for the Hollis outlets were three days behind, because the LIMS had gone down Thursday and the weathering dropdowns still came up blank on the new form. She filled them in on paper, then typed them in again where the form would take them, and left a note in the comment box where it would not: dropdown empty, see paper sheet in truck. She had written that note eleven times this month. Nobody had answered it. She did not expect anybody to.
One sheet she could not fill at all. The outlet at Hollis 4 had run cloudy on Wednesday, after the rain, and she had taken the bottle and capped it and labelled it and put it in the cooler, and on the paper sheet she had written turbid, grey, see photo. The new form wanted a weathering class from a list. The list was empty, except that the form's suggest agent, the little grey box in the corner that read her photos, kept offering one class in italics: biochar, 82% match. She closed the suggestion. It came back when she scrolled. She could not choose a word from nothing, so the bottle sat in the cooler at the yard with a word on its label that the system had no place for. She wondered whether that grey was the same grey as the ring on bucket 7. She did not write that down. It was a guess, and she only wrote down what she had weighed or seen.
At three the cat walked across the counter and stopped by the jar and sniffed the tape. Janelle moved the cat.
At four she lifted the lid.
She did it carefully, peeling the tape back on one side only so she could lay it down again. The jar had gone two layers while she worked. On the bottom a band of grey-white ash about three quarters of an inch deep. On top of it water so clear she could read the Sharpie on the tape through the glass from the far side. She got the flashlight out of the junk drawer and held it behind the jar and looked through it the way her father used to candle eggs.
Nothing floated. No black flecks. No char. She leaned in over the open mouth and breathed in through her nose and it smelled like a fireplace the morning after it rains down the chimney, cold and wet and a little sour. It did not smell like a field. A field smelled like iron and worms. She knew both smells better than she knew her own handwriting.
She took the card out of the truck and wrote under ASH LOT, NOT CARBON: settled 3/4 in, no floaters, smells like wet fireplace not like field. She thought about crossing out "smells like" because the verifier would laugh at it, and then she did not cross it out, because it was true and the verifier could laugh.
She laid the tape back down and pressed it flat. Then she carried the jar across the kitchen and set it on the linoleum next to bucket 1, the one with the 1.9 tare written on its rim. If the jar sat with the buckets, Monday could not forget it. Monday would have to pick it up to pick up the buckets.
Gerald was not back by supper. He texted at six that Lyle's truck had a flat on the Delavan blacktop and he was helping. She ate cold chicken over the sink.
At seven-thirty she decided she did not want to bring a jar of water to the co-op. She wanted to bring the thing itself.
She peeled the tape all the way off this time. She worked the baster down slowly to just above the grey band and drew the clear water off a little at a time into a mixing bowl, stopping each time the band stirred. It took twenty minutes. When she could not get more water without getting ash she stopped. What was left in the jar was a wet grey paste on the bottom, sitting there like spackle.
She weighed a paper plate on the sausage scale. Then she scraped the paste out onto it with a rubber spatula, every bit she could reach, running the spatula around the inside of the jar twice. She weighed the plate again and subtracted. 31 grams of wet ash.
She turned the oven on at its lowest and opened the door and set the plate on the inside of the door where the heat came out soft. Gerald dried his seed packets there. She sat at the kitchen table and did the dishwasher while she waited and then she did not have anything left to do so she just sat.
At nine the paste had gone pale and cracked into a cake. She weighed it again. 19 grams dry.
Nineteen grams. Out of ten buckets that had been going to weigh, together, something like sixty kilograms on Monday. She did not do the arithmetic for what nineteen grams of mill ash would have been as carbon. It did not matter. It was not carbon. It had never been carbon. It came out of the Pekin ethanol mill's boiler stack and went onto the fields with the spread because the hauler did not clean his box between loads, and everybody knew that, and the ledger did not have a field for it.
She went out to the truck in the dark, the yard light buzzing over the barn, and got the card. Under the 0.62 kg jar line she wrote, pressing hard so it would carry through to the back of the card:
PILE B: 19 g mill ash per jar. NOT carbon. NOT credit.
She looked at it under the dome light. Then she went in and broke the cake into a sandwich bag with the back of a spoon, pressed the air out, and zipped it. She wrote J.W. on the bag. She got the Monday proof list off the fridge, the one on the back of the LIMS receipt, and laid the bag flat on it and taped all four sides down with masking tape until the bag could not slide.
The lab would get a number. They would also get the thing the number was made of, under tape, with her initials on it. If they wanted to call it carbon they would have to peel her tape off to do it.
She put the proof list on the passenger seat of the truck with the index card on top of it. Then she went back inside and turned off the oven and closed its door.
Gerald's headlights came up the lane at ten-fifteen. She heard him in the mudroom kicking his boots off, and heard him stop in the kitchen doorway.
"There's a bucket in the way," he said.
"Leave it," Janelle said from the stairs. "It's going Monday."
She heard him step around it.