She took a shovel from the shed and drove it through the light covering of snow and into the soil. Then, she put her booted foot on the edge and gave it a good shove, putting her weight into it. A lift and twist brought up dirt along with the snow.
“It’s workable enough. And those trees need to go in today.”
“All of them?”
Lord, give me patience. “Yes, all of them.”
Getting thirty-six trees into the ground shouldn’t be a problem with everyone she had working even if she couldn’t get the backhoe operational right away. She scanned the work crew now shuffling into the shed, counting four behind Eddie. There should have been seven.
“Where’s the rest?”
Head turn, spit. A dribble of spittle hung on his bottom lip. It was no wonder the guy was still single.
“With Kief.”
Her brother Kiefer was in charge of the vegetable fields, and as far as she knew, there was nothing pressing going on there. “Doing what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Rick said he needed them.”
Tina’s ire increased. Unless it was an emergency, she needed them working on the orchards more than whatever her brother had them doing. She’d deal with Rick later—after she took a look at the tractor. Hopefully, it was a quick fix and something that could be handled on-site. Two other machines were already in the shop, and she couldn’t afford to go without for the week or more it would take to have someone else fix it.
“More work for you then, huh? Better get started.”
They grumbled, Eddie in particular, but she stared them down until they started moving. She’d learned early on not to back down, or they’d walk all over her.
They didn’t like taking orders from a woman. She got that. She didn’t care. She was an Obermacher first, a female second. As long as she ran the orchards, they worked for her.
Only when they went into the shed to grab shovels and pickaxes and wheelbarrows did she pull the toolbox from the back of her truck. When she was younger, she’d spent hours tinkering in the garage with her grandfather while her father and brothers were out in the fields, and she had picked up a thing or two about improvisational repair.
As she was passing the door, she heard one of the crew say, “Man, I feel sorry for any man who has to deal with her every day.”
Another laughed. “Yeah, well, we won’t have to deal with her for much longer from what I heard.”
Tina paused and listened, but they said no more before they moved away.
What did they know—or think they knew—that she didn’t?
She shook her head and chalked it up to pure speculation. Everyone knew there’d been offers to buy up their farmland; that was nothing new. Developers had been wanting to strip the fertile soil and sell it off, turning their rolling fields into residential complexes with luxury townhomes and single-family mansions. One of them had even gone as far as to design an entire community village with restaurants and shops and God knew what else and present it to the township board—or so she’d heard. Apparently, it was the new thing among rich folk looking to get out of the congested city.
Those offers were just offers, and those rumors, just rumors. Tina wasn’t overly concerned. Obermachers had been working their land since the late 1600s and would continue to do so for the next four hundred years. Farming was in their blood.
Even if they were inclined to sell off a few parcels, the citizens of Sumneyville wouldn’t stand for it. They disliked outsiders and would be especially unaccepting of city folk coming in and building multimillion-dollar homes and golf courses, driving up the tax base and looking down their noses at everyone.
Plus, the township board would never approve the kind of rezoning necessary to allow any of that to happen. Not even the greedy ones.
At least, she didn’t think they would. Things were changing around Sumneyville, and not all of it was good. The old guard, as she called them—men like her father and grandfather along with Sam Winston and others—were slowly disappearing, and those rising up to fill in the gaps weren’t made of the same honorable stuff.
The moment Tina started up the tractor, she knew what the problem was. The machine was rolling coal—shooting black smoke out of the exhaust—which often indicated a faulty glow plug.
Tina dug down into the bottom of her toolbox, grabbed a spare, and swapped out the bad one.