Looking over crops and finances...

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Golden Crop

It was late morning when I rolled up to Gus's place, dust trailing behind me like a lazy snake. The sun was high—then again, it was always high—and the air smelled like warm grass and engine grease. Gus was by the silo, elbow-deep in some auger repair, grease up to his sleeves.

He looked up and grinned. “You come to steal more of my cider or just my company?”

“Neither,” I said, swinging down from the mule. “I came to buy. You got any corn to spare? I'm lookin’ for maybe half a hectare’s worth. Not seed, mind you—grain.”

Gus raised an eyebrow. “Gonna feed hogs or make the good stuff?”

“Little of both. But mostly the latter.”

He wiped his hands on a rag and nodded. “I’ve got a spare section I was savin’ for trade. If you got the credits, I got the corn.”

We shook on it, and by sundown, I’d loaded every last sack into the storage shed behind the stillery. Lu raised her brow when she saw the pile.

“Planning a corn festival?”

“Just makin’ sure we don’t run dry. You keep brewin’, I’ll keep feedin’ ya.”

The first mash went in that evening. I ran the grain through the grinder, added water, and stirred till it smelled like warm cereal. The boys gathered around like I was casting spells. Uno asked if the steam coming off it was “liquor breath.”

“Not yet,” I told him. “But it will be.”

The next few days were full of busy hands and full baskets. The hops we’d planted in the spring came in thick and sticky, perfect cones of green that smelled like pine and citrus. Lu had them drying on racks in the barn’s upper loft. Seis helped, though he nearly fell off twice reaching too high.

Out in the side plots, the radishes had popped through like little red marbles, and our bush beans curled around the supports we’d hammered in weeks ago. The boys took turns harvesting, sorting, and sampling. Dos had a nasty habit of biting into raw vegetables like he was testing for poison.

“You’re not a taster,” Lu told him, swatting his hand away from a tomato. “You're a picker.”

“What if it’s bad?”

“Then we compost it. We don’t chew it.”

The corn mash bubbled slow in the fermenting drums, each one giving off a low hiss now and then like it was sighing in satisfaction. I checked the stills every morning, took notes like a schoolboy. The whiskey would be sharp but good, and I had plans for aging some in the new oak barrels Gus gave me at discount.

Meanwhile, the saloon sent another request: double the growlers and a sample of anything new. I sent back a batch of honey pilsner and one bottle of the new corn mash, just to tease them.

Uno made a sign for the still room door: Ron’s Rocket Juice. I didn’t have the heart to take it down.

Lu found me later that night in the garden, hoe in hand, staring up at that ever-shining sun.

“You think we can keep up with it all?”

“Maybe. Might need more hands. But for now…”

I glanced around at the rows of sprouting food, the hum of the stills, the laughter of boys not far off.

“…I think we're doin’ alright.”

She nodded and slipped her hand into mine. For a second, the sun didn’t feel quite so blinding.

We stood there in silence as the wind carried the smell of fresh earth and promise across the fields.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Beans and Bucks

I'd been putting it off, truth be told. Not outta laziness—well, not just that—but because when you run a place like this, things come at you fast. Cows get out. Hoses leak. One of the boys falls into a feed trough and needs hosing off before supper. But today, Lu found me in the stillery, scribbling mash notes with my finger in the corn dust, and said, plain as anything, "We need to talk money."

So we did.

We sat at the long kitchen table, sunlight stretching across the wood like a warm arm. Lu brought out a little folded ledger she’d been keeping, with tiny numbers and neat columns, each labeled with exactness that’d make a banker blush. She handed me a mug of cider, cleared her throat, and got down to business.

"You’ve got income from the saloon deliveries, the growlers, the weekly produce exchange, and Gus's referrals," she began. "Also the barter goods—remember the boots you traded for last week?"

"Yeah, still breaking those in," I muttered, sipping.

"And then there’s what you’re stockpiling—barrels aging, mash fermenting, seeds drying. That’s all value. Not cash yet, but it’s assets."

I leaned back, eyebrows raised. "You’ve really been tallyin’ all this?"

"Someone had to. You’re brilliant at brewing, Ron, but you keep numbers like a coyote keeps chickens."

I laughed, but she wasn’t wrong. We went line by line—expenses for feed, new tools, replacement parts, and all the extra mouths to feed. But even after subtracting every bit of it, we were still firmly in the black. More than just stable—we were thriving.

"If this was Earth," she said, flipping the last page, "you’d be paying city taxes."

"Thank the stars it ain’t."

I ran a hand through my hair and looked out the window toward the two hectares of land we hadn’t touched since we landed. They’d been fallow, mainly ‘cause I wasn’t sure I had the manpower or the reason to stretch that far.

"We should plant ‘em," I said aloud, more to myself than her. "We got the tools. The boys are capable. Seeds are cheap from the co-op."

Lu folded the ledger and smiled. "You’re thinking long-term now. That’s good."

"Just thinking like someone who might not want to be poor again."

"Then let's go shopping."

We took a ride to the co-op outpost, a squat silver building near the transport depot. A young woman behind the counter recognized me—apparently our cider had made its way around—and she pulled up a seed catalog on a floating screen. We picked fast-growing barley, a mix of legumes, and some experimental root vegetables the locals swore by.

On the way home, the back of the mule rattled with seed sacks. The boys ran out to greet us like we’d come bearing treasure.

"You’re planting all that?" Seis asked.

"Sure am. And I’ll be needin’ help."

The sun overhead never shifted, but something felt brighter in the air. Maybe it was just purpose. Or maybe, finally, it felt like we were doing more than just surviving.

We were settin’ down real roots.