He sent for a widow to help his dead hillside before harvest — but the purple flowers he hid made the whole county come knocking

Part 3

The Charlotte buyer’s name was Silas Mercer, and he had the kind of manners that made insult sound like concern.

He stood on Emmett Callaway’s porch with one gloved hand resting on the rail and the other tucked near his vest pocket, where Ruth suspected he kept either a contract or a pistol permit, though he looked more dangerous with paper than any weapon. His hat was brushed clean. His boots had not seen mud except by accident. His smile never reached his eyes.

Emmett stepped between Mercer and the kitchen door.

“My wife’s debts are not your harvest,” he said.

Mercer’s eyes moved over him with faint amusement. “A noble sentiment. But trade has a longer memory than marriage, Mr. Callaway.”

Ruth felt the old shame rise in her throat before she could stop it. Not guilt. She had learned the difference. Guilt belonged to wrongdoers. Shame was what other people laid across your shoulders until you forgot it was not your own coat.

“My late husband’s accounts were settled with the estate,” she said.

“Partially settled.”

“You bought those accounts for pennies after he died.”

Mercer’s smile thinned. “Debt is debt.”

“Then take it to a judge.”

“I may.” He looked past Emmett into the kitchen, where Clara was bending over drying trays and the first crimson threads lay like fine red fire on muslin. “Or I may take a more practical road. A specialty spice harvest depends on reputation. Purity. Trust. Buyers do not care for uncertainty. If word spreads that the new Mrs. Callaway came west with unpaid trade obligations connected to imported saffron—”

“This is not imported,” Emmett said.

“No. That is what makes it interesting.”

The two men stared at one another.

Ruth knew that look on Emmett’s face now. It was the same stillness he wore before driving a fence staple into hard post oak, before deciding where water would run, before speaking a truth he had weighed heavily enough to make it permanent.

“You are trespassing,” he said.

Mercer gave a small bow. “For now.”

He walked down the steps and crossed the yard at an unhurried pace, as if he owned the road already. At the fence, Wade Drummond watched him leave, eyes narrowed. Half a dozen neighbors pretended not to have heard. All of them had.

Ruth stood very still until the buggy disappeared.

Then she turned toward the kitchen.

Emmett caught her gently by the wrist.

She looked at his hand first, then his face. He let go at once.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

“You need not.”

“Yes, I do.”

That nearly undid her.

All her life men had grabbed in anger, in warning, in possession, in false affection. Few had released before being asked. Fewer still had apologized for wanting to hold her steady.

From inside, Clara called, “The next trays are ready.”

Ruth drew in a breath. “Then we work.”

Emmett’s brow tightened. “Ruth—”

“If Mercer wants us frightened, he may stand in line. There is a field full of flowers opening whether I tremble or not.”

She went inside before he could answer.

The harvest did not wait for private grief.

For eight mornings they rose when the house still belonged to night. Ruth, Emmett, and Clara moved up the slope by lantern and moonlight, baskets looped over their arms, fingers numbed by cold dew. The crocuses opened low to the earth, soft violet cups holding their crimson treasure. Each one had to be plucked before the sun climbed high enough to bruise the quality. Each stigma had to be separated by hand, dried carefully, guarded from damp, smoke, dust, and foolish handling.

There was no room for wasted motion.

On the first morning after Mercer’s threat, Ruth’s hands shook so badly she crushed three flowers.

Clara saw and said nothing. A few minutes later she knelt beside Ruth, her shoulder nearly touching.

“When my mother died,” Clara said, “Father boiled potatoes every supper for six weeks.”

Ruth blinked at her.

“Plain potatoes. No salt. Sometimes not cooked through.” Clara reached for another bloom. “I thought grief had taken his taste. Then I realized he was afraid to cook anything she had cooked well.”

Ruth’s fingers slowed.

“He is better now,” Clara said. “Not at seasoning, perhaps. But at courage.”

“I do not doubt your father’s courage.”

“No. You doubt whether you may lean on it without losing your own.”

The words were too exact. Ruth looked at her.

Clara’s face was calm, practical, and kind in a way that reminded Ruth strongly of Emmett, though Clara’s tongue was quicker.

“I came ready to dislike you,” Clara said.

“That is honest.”

“I thought you had married him for shelter.”

“I did.”

Clara nodded. “He married you because the house was too quiet and the work too much.”

Ruth swallowed. “Yes.”

“And now?”

The fog moved low along the slope. Down by the road, men were already gathering at the fence, hungry for sight of what had become the county’s mystery.

Ruth looked across the field to where Emmett bent over the rows, his hat brim low, his big hands handling the small flowers with reverence.

“Now,” she said, “shelter has become a dangerous word.”

Clara smiled faintly. “Most worthwhile words are dangerous.”

By the third day, a woman from the agricultural college in Blacksburg came with a notebook and mud on the hem of her skirt. Miss Eliza Harrow was not easily impressed. She knelt in the field, examined root structure, took soil between her fingers, and asked Emmett questions about amendments, drainage, cover crops, and corm spacing until Wade Drummond at the fence looked as if the world had begun speaking Greek.

Emmett answered simply.

He had bought the farm after a knee injury ended his work as a soil technician. He had watched depleted ground his whole life. He knew the land was not dead, only misused. The clay below had needed opening. The rocky upper slope had needed protection, compost, mineral balance, and a crop that wanted drainage more than depth. He had spent two years restoring the soil before trusting it with anything valuable.

“Most men would have planted corn the first spring,” Miss Harrow said.

“Most men did,” Emmett replied. “That is why the soil looked the way it did.”

Ruth, passing with a basket, hid a smile.

Wade did not.

That evening, while Clara dried the day’s harvest and Emmett strained his notes by lamplight, Ruth stood alone in her room with her trunk open.

She had kept it packed more than unpacked. A habit. A defense. Women with nowhere secure learned not to scatter themselves too freely in any house. Her black dress lay folded beside two nightgowns, a packet of letters, a small Bible, and the seven silver spoons she had saved from her mother’s things before her late husband’s creditors came through.

She touched the spoons one by one.

Then she took out the packet of debt notices she had carried from Lynchburg.

She had told Emmett the estate settled them. That was true. Mostly. What remained was uncertain, a tangle of purchase orders, shipments her husband had accepted but never paid for, and claims men like Mercer could stretch in public if it suited them. Ruth had not stolen. She had not cheated. But reputation did not always need truth to bleed.

She heard Emmett knock.

The gentleness of it made her close her eyes.

“Yes?”

He opened the door only when she answered and stood in the hallway as always.

“Clara says you did not eat.”

“Clara observes too much.”

“She is my daughter.”

“That explains the family failing.”

He almost smiled, then saw the papers in her hand.

“Are those his?”

“My late husband’s ruin, written in several hands.”

“May I see?”

Ruth held them tighter.

Emmett did not step forward. “You may say no.”

“I know.”

That was the trouble. She did know. And because she knew, the yes came harder.

She handed him the packet.

He read slowly. Ruth watched his face for disappointment, suspicion, calculation. She saw none of those. Only concentration and, once, anger so quiet it barely moved his jaw.

At last he refolded the papers.

“This one bears Mercer’s mark,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He bought the claim after your husband died.”

“Yes.”

“And doubled the amount with storage penalties.”

“Likely invented ones.”

“Not likely. Invented.” Emmett tapped the paper. “There is no receiving signature here.”

Ruth stared.

“I kept accounts for tobacco men before I worked soil,” he said. “A missing signature is a missing leg. A claim may stand in a parlor on one leg. It limps in court.”

She let out a breath that hurt.

“Why did you not tell me?” he asked.

The question held no accusation. That made it worse.

“Because I was tired of being a problem men had to solve.”

“You are not a problem.”

“I brought one to your porch.”

“Mercer brought it.”

“He brought it because I am here.”

“No,” Emmett said. “He brought it because there is profit in frightening honest people before they learn the lock on the door is only painted on.”

Ruth looked at him, and the laugh that rose in her throat came dangerously close to a sob.

He held the packet out. “We take these to Judge Albright after harvest.”

“We?”

“Yes.”

“You would put your name beside mine in this?”

“I already did.”

“That was marriage.”

His eyes held hers. “Yes.”

The room seemed smaller suddenly, not from threat but from the nearness of him. He stood in the hall, respecting the line he had drawn for her comfort, and Ruth wanted with a sudden ache for him to cross it. Not because he owned the right. Because she wished to give it.

She stepped to the doorway.

Emmett grew very still.

“Ruth,” he said, and there was warning in his voice, though not against her. Against himself.

“I am only taking back my papers.”

He looked down. She laid her hand over the packet, but did not take it. Her fingers rested against his.

They stayed that way for three heartbeats.

Then Clara called from the kitchen, “If the two of you are finished pretending paperwork is fascinating, the drying trays need turning.”

Ruth snatched the papers back.

Emmett coughed into his hand.

Clara, unseen, added, “I am thirty-two, not blind.”

For the first time since Mercer’s visit, Ruth laughed freely.

The county’s curiosity became a living thing by the fifth day.

Wagons lined the old Ridge Road before sunrise. Farmers came from Galax, Independence, and beyond the creek valleys. Some asked polite questions. Some leaned on the fence and counted rows. One man tried to step over the wire and found Emmett beside him so suddenly he backed down without argument.

A spice merchant from Asheville sent a telegram. A restaurant keeper from Roanoke offered cash on delivery. Two ladies from town asked whether saffron would cure melancholia, liver complaint, and poor husbands. Ruth told them it might improve custard, which was the safer claim.

Wade Drummond watched more than anyone.

He came each morning in the same coat, hat low, jaw working. On the sixth day, he approached Ruth while Emmett was in the barn and Clara had gone for clean cloth.

“Mrs. Callaway.”

She straightened from the drying table set in the shade. “Mr. Drummond.”

“That Charlotte man says there’ll be trouble.”

“Men who bring trouble often announce it as if it were weather.”

Wade looked toward the slope. “How much is it worth?”

“That depends on who is asking and whether they intend to pay honestly.”

His mouth tightened. “I walked this place before Emmett bought it.”

“I have heard.”

“Nothing profitable grows in ground like this. I said that.”

“I have heard that too.”

He stared at the rows, where the late blooms still purpled the hill. “A man says a foolish thing in public, it echoes longer than he expects.”

Ruth softened despite herself. “Yes.”

“Did he know from the start?”

“Your question is not really about the crop.”

Wade looked at her then.

She wiped her fingers on her apron. “You want to know whether he saw what you missed.”

His face darkened, but he did not deny it.

Ruth could have struck him with the truth. Part of her wanted to. But she thought of Emmett, who never gloated, who had endured laughter because the land mattered more than pride.

“He saw what patient work might make possible,” she said. “That is not the same as luck, and it is not the same as magic.”

Wade looked down at his boots. “I have four hundred acres.”

“So I understand.”

“And less peace than he has on forty.”

Ruth said nothing.

After a while, Wade cleared his throat. “Tell him I’d pay to learn the soil work. Not the saffron. The soil.”

Ruth nodded. “Tell him yourself.”

Wade winced as if she had asked him to dance in church, but later that afternoon he found Emmett by the barn. They spoke for half an hour. No laughter passed between them. No handshake either. But when Wade left, he looked smaller and less certain, which Ruth considered an improvement.

The final morning of harvest came with frost threatening.

Emmett woke before the clock struck three. Ruth woke because his absence had become something she felt in the air. She dressed quickly and found him on the porch, looking toward the field.

The moon was sharp. The grass glittered. A white edge lay over the fence posts.

“If frost settles hard before the flowers open,” he said, “we lose what remains.”

“How much remains?”

“Enough to matter.”

Clara came out behind them, already tying her scarf. “Then we pick in the dark.”

So they did.

Lanterns bobbed over the upper slope like low stars. Ruth’s fingers went numb within minutes. Clara worked with her jaw set. Emmett moved row by row, silent and tireless, though Ruth saw how his knee troubled him on the incline.

By five o’clock, Wade appeared at the fence.

He did not call out. He climbed over with a basket in his hand.

Emmett looked up.

Wade said, “Frost does not care whose field it is.”

For a moment, neither man moved.

Then Emmett nodded toward the lower row. “Start there.”

By dawn, six more neighbors had joined. Not all from friendship. Some from curiosity, some from self-interest, some because no farmer can watch a crop die and keep his hands clean in his pockets. Miss Harrow from Blacksburg arrived breathless, skirts muddy, carrying two sacks of cloth. The storekeeper’s wife came with coffee. Even the preacher knelt beside a row until his knees protested loud enough to shame him.

Ruth looked over the field as the eastern sky paled.

The county that had come to stare was now bent over the flowers, saving them.

Mercer arrived at full sunrise.

He took in the scene—the neighbors, the baskets, the trays, the field nearly cleared ahead of frost—and his face showed the first honest emotion Ruth had seen from him.

Displeasure.

He approached the porch where Clara was spreading threads to dry.

“I see Mr. Callaway has hired quite a force.”

Clara did not look up. “People volunteered.”

“How touching.”

Ruth came down the slope with a full basket. Emmett followed a few steps behind.

Mercer smiled. “Mrs. Callaway. I expected more caution from you.”

“And I expected better paperwork from you.”

His smile paused.

Emmett handed him a folded notice.

Mercer did not take it. “What is that?”

“A copy of a complaint filed with Judge Albright,” Emmett said. “Regarding a purchased claim with no receiving signature, inflated penalties, and threats made against my wife to influence sale of agricultural goods.”

The neighbors nearest the porch went quiet.

Mercer’s eyes flicked toward them, calculating damage.

Ruth stepped beside Emmett. Not behind him. Beside.

“You may pursue any lawful debt,” she said. “You may not invent scandal to steal a harvest.”

His face hardened. “You overestimate the protection a mountain county gives a woman with a shopkeeper’s debts.”

“No,” she said. “I finally stopped underestimating the protection truth gives itself when spoken plainly.”

Mercer leaned closer. “Truth is costly.”

Emmett’s voice came low. “So is trespass.”

Wade Drummond walked up then, still holding a basket of crocuses. “Mercer, if you are buying spice, name a price. If you are buying fear, this road is closed.”

Ruth could have kissed him for that, though only in the Christian spirit.

Mercer looked from Wade to the preacher, to Miss Harrow, to the storekeeper’s wife, to the men at the fence whose gossip would spread faster than any notice he could print. He understood the harvest had grown witnesses.

“I will remember this discourtesy,” he said.

Ruth smiled. “Do write it down. Accurately, if you can.”

A few people laughed.

Mercer left with his boots dustier than when he arrived and no contract in his pocket.

That afternoon, the frost melted off the fields and the last trays went into the warm room Emmett had prepared above the kitchen stove. The house smelled of drying saffron—earthy, sweet, faintly metallic, like hay, honey, and autumn sunlight caught in thread. Ruth had never smelled anything so delicate that had required so much labor.

The final weight was less than rumors later claimed and more than Emmett had dared hope.

It was enough.

Enough to pay the seed debt. Enough to repair the barn roof. Enough to hold back the bank. Enough to prove that the forty acres Wade Drummond had dismissed could produce something men from Charlotte, Asheville, and Roanoke would cross mountains to buy.

But that night, after Clara had gone to bed and the last lantern was turned low, Emmett sat at the kitchen table without touching the ledger.

Ruth poured coffee and set it before him.

“You should be pleased,” she said.

“I am.”

“You look like a man attending his own funeral.”

“I am thinking.”

“That explains the expression.”

He looked up, and the weariness in his face gentled.

“You could leave now,” he said.

Ruth went still.

“The debt claim is challenged,” he continued. “Mercer’s power over you is weakened. Once the harvest sells, I can give you money enough to settle elsewhere if you wish. Roanoke. Lynchburg. Somewhere no one knows your husband’s name.”

The coffee pot felt suddenly heavy in her hand. She set it down.

“Is that what you want?”

“No.”

The answer came at once, rough and unguarded.

Ruth waited.

Emmett looked toward the stove, the shelves, the drying room above, anywhere but her face. “Wanting is not the question.”

“It is often the question men hide under nobler words.”

His mouth tightened, but he accepted the blow.

“I brought you here for practical reasons,” he said. “You came for shelter. That bargain was honest. I will not turn it into a cage because I have grown used to hearing you move through the house.”

Grown used to.

The phrase might have sounded small from another man. From Emmett it trembled with all he would not claim.

Ruth sat across from him.

“I spent my first marriage being useful,” she said. “Useful in the shop, useful with accounts, useful smiling at customers when my husband had bought more than he could pay for. After he died, I was useful as a warning. Then as a burden. Then as a name men could attach debt to.”

Emmett’s eyes returned to hers.

“When I came here,” she continued, “I told myself usefulness would be enough if it came with a locked door and no raised hand.”

“I never wanted only use from you.”

“I know.” Her voice softened. “That is why I became frightened.”

He closed his hand around the coffee cup but did not drink.

Ruth looked at the kitchen—the curtains she had hemmed, the clean table, Clara’s shawl over a chair, Emmett’s ledger open beside her own notes, the faint red gleam of saffron threads visible through the open drying-room door.

“This house no longer feels borrowed,” she said.

His face changed.

“But I will not stay as charity,” she added. “Nor as hired hands wearing a wedding ring.”

“No.”

“I want my name on the accounts for the saff“I want my name on the accounts for the saffron.”

“Yes.”

“I want the right to refuse a buyer if I judge him dishonest.”

“You have it.”

“I want a proper drying room before next harvest, not trays balanced over every warm surface like we are feeding spice to mice.”

Despite himself, Emmett smiled. “That can be built.”

“And I want you to tell me what you are planting before the whole county knows.”

He looked down, chastened. “Yes.”

Ruth reached across the table and laid her hand over his.

“Most of all,” she said, “I want to stay because I choose it. Not because you need me. Not because Mercer frightened me. Not because loneliness is easier in company. Because this land is becoming something, and so am I.”

Emmett turned his hand beneath hers with great care.

“And us?” he asked.

The simple word struck through every defense she had left.

Ruth rose, still holding his hand. He stood too, slowly, as if afraid one wrong movement might send the moment fleeing.

She stepped close enough to see the silver in his beard, the tired lines at the corners of his eyes, the soil still caught near one thumbnail from that morning’s harvest. This was not a young man’s romance, swift and fevered by ignorance. This was something steadier. Two people old enough to know what vows could cost, lonely enough to value kindness, and brave enough—just barely—to begin again.

“You may court your wife now,” she said.

His breath left him in a quiet laugh. “May I?”

“If you do it badly, I will advise you.”

“I expect nothing less.”

He lifted one hand, giving her time to refuse, and touched her cheek. Ruth leaned into his palm.

The kiss came slowly.

It was not the hungry claim she had once learned to endure, nor the dutiful peck of strangers bound by law. It was careful, questioning, and then deeply tender. A promise asked and answered. His other hand settled lightly at her back, not trapping, only sheltering. Ruth felt the last cold room inside her open like those purple flowers before dawn.

When they parted, Emmett rested his forehead against hers.

“I am fifty-nine years old,” he murmured, as if confessing a fault.

Ruth smiled. “I had noticed.”

“I thought this part of life was finished.”

“So did I.”

Outside, frost silvered the yard. Inside, the house held warmth.

The sale of the saffron changed the county, though not all at once.

At first, it changed how men spoke at the feed store. They no longer called Emmett’s hillside dead. They called it “particular ground,” which meant they wanted to respect it without admitting they had been wrong. Wade Drummond began sending soil samples to Blacksburg and stopped mocking compost where anyone could hear. Miss Harrow wrote a report that traveled farther than Emmett liked and not as far as Clara intended.

Clara stayed through November.

She and Ruth became allies by slow degrees, then family by accident. Clara had her father’s habit of watching before trusting and Ruth’s habit of speaking once trust arrived. They argued over accounts, laughed over Emmett’s cooking, and spent three evenings designing labels for the spice jars until Emmett asked whether saffron truly required more discussion than a bank loan.

“Yes,” both women said.

By December, the Callaway farm had orders from three towns and one hotel kitchen in Charlotte whose owner had better manners than Silas Mercer. Ruth insisted on written terms. Emmett insisted she sign them. The first time she wrote Ruth Bell Callaway beneath an invoice, she paused over the name.

Emmett, pretending not to watch, mended a harness buckle at the stove.

“You may write it however you like,” he said.

“I know.”

“Bell can stay.”

“I know.”

He looked up then.

She smiled. “I like seeing both.”

After Christmas, Emmett built the drying room.

It stood off the kitchen, small but tight against damp, with shelves Ruth could remove, a little stove, muslin screens, hooks for herbs, and a window facing the upper slope. He made the latch smooth. He hung the door himself.

When he showed it to her, he did not step inside first.

Ruth stood on the threshold, one hand pressed to her mouth.

“You do have a habit of building women doors,” she said.

“Only when they ought to own the rooms behind them.”

She turned away quickly, but not before he saw her tears.

In January, Judge Albright dismissed Mercer’s claim with language polite enough for court and sharp enough for satisfaction. The missing receiving signature did what Emmett said it would. Mercer’s inflated penalties collapsed under scrutiny. He left the county without farewell and, to Ruth’s knowledge, never again spoke her name where it could be answered.

Spring came wet and green.

The hillside that had bloomed purple in autumn now rested under mulch and careful watch. Emmett prepared another small plot, not hurriedly, though half the county advised expansion as if greed were an agricultural method. He refused to rush the soil. Ruth backed him so firmly that even Wade laughed and said, “Callaway, your wife guards dirt like a bank vault.”

Ruth replied, “Dirt has better character than most banks.”

The remark traveled to three counties.

By summer, visitors came not only to buy saffron but to ask what else neglected land might become. Some brought sale bills. Some brought soil wrapped in newspaper. Some brought pride in such large quantities Ruth made extra coffee before receiving them. Emmett spoke little at first, then more as people learned to listen. Ruth kept notes, set fees, and refused to let anyone take advice without understanding the labor behind it.

“Knowledge is not gossip,” she told one impatient farmer. “You cannot collect it by leaning on a fence.”

Emmett heard and loved her so sharply in that moment he had to leave the room under pretense of checking the mule.

Their marriage grew in practical tenderness.

He learned she liked her coffee with more cream than she admitted. She learned his bad knee stiffened before rain, though he denied it until she began leaving liniment by his chair without comment. He built her a narrow shelf by the bed for books. She sewed a lining into his winter coat and tucked a note inside the pocket that read, Since you will not remember your scarf, remember this.

He carried that note until the folds wore soft.

One evening in late August, near two years from the first soil work and nearly a year from Ruth’s arrival, they walked the upper slope at dusk. The corms slept beneath them. The air smelled of warm grass and creek water. Down by the barn, Clara’s buggy stood near the gate; she had come for a week and was already talking of moving home to help with the business.

Wade Drummond leaned on the far fence, speaking with Emmett earlier than Ruth had ever thought possible. He had begun restoring twenty acres of his own, and though he still talked too much, he listened better.

The land itself seemed quieter now, not less alive, but less wounded.

Ruth slipped her hand into Emmett’s.

“Do you remember the day I arrived?” she asked.

“I remember thinking you looked ready to fight the train if it disappointed you.”

“It had disappointed me.”

“I suspected.”

“And you would not tell me what you had planted.”

He sighed. “I have apologized.”

“Not enough.”

“I will continue, then.”

She smiled.

They stopped where the first crocuses had opened the previous fall. The ground looked plain now, only mulch, low leaves, and patient earth. Anyone passing might have dismissed it again.

Ruth knew better.

So did Emmett.

“I thought the secret was the crop,” he said.

“And now?”

“The secret was what the land could become when someone stopped insulting it long enough to learn.”

Ruth leaned against his arm. “And people?”

He looked down at her.

She met his gaze steadily. “People are sometimes the same.”

A meadowlark called from the fence. The sun slipped behind the ridge, turning the sky rose and gold. The red barn glowed in the last light. The house below held Clara’s laughter, bread cooling on the table, ledgers stacked beside seed catalogs, and trays waiting clean for the next harvest.

Emmett kissed Ruth’s hand, a courtly gesture from a man who had never wasted effort on show until love taught him that tenderness could be useful too.

“I sent for a practical wife,” he said.

“You received one.”

“I received more.”

“Yes,” Ruth said, looking over the hillside, the creek, the house, the life she had chosen freely. “You did.”

That October, when the purple flowers opened again, wagons still came before sunrise.

But this time, no one stood at the fence guessing.

They came with baskets, clean hands, and respect.

Ruth walked the rows beside Emmett as dawn lifted over the Blue Ridge. Clara laughed somewhere below them. Wade complained about his knees. Miss Harrow took notes. The first crimson threads of the morning lay bright in Ruth’s palm, delicate as silk and dearer than gold, not because of the price they would bring but because of all they had proven.

The land had not been dead.

Ruth had not been ruined.

Emmett had not been finished.

And the house on forty acres, once lonely under the mountain wind, had become what neither of them had dared ask for when they made their bargain: a place where work became trust, trust became love, and love had room enough to grow.