Sometimes there was no rain; sometimes the rain came at the wrong time. The land was thirsty. All over the country, the cattle were dying, and the corn was drying up on the vine. In April 2016 the president of El Salvador declared a national water shortage emergency. That had never happened before. Some 3.5 million people in Central America were at risk of food insecurity or were already hungry.

The old man with thirteen children—three up north, six here in El Salvador, four buried in the churchyard—sometimes went out to the land to pray.

That summer his tomato crop was bad, due to a problem he’d never seen before. The tomatoes, though they had a good enough flavor—not his best, but good—were pallid in color, their skin a mottled orange-yellow. Seen from far away, they were easily mistaken for citrus. He couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. His wife took them into town anyway, but she couldn’t make the sale. “Sweet flavor, good price!” she crooned to the crowds of the roadside market. But who wanted to buy the wrong-color fruit?

Then there was the dust. A dust cloud from the Sahara, as he understood it, had flown in and settled onto his crops. Who knew what damage it might be doing to the soil? And last year there had been the problem with the coffee—rust, they called it. Every crop had its own plague.

Wilber Sr. was still feeble from sickness, from age. His sons weren’t helping much anymore, so he was mostly on his own out there in the sun, harvesting the forlorn tomatoes. He hadn’t been a perfect father, a perfect husband, but he’d tried.

A thought came to him, as it often did after prayer: beets.

“I came up with an idea,” he announced to his family—the members who remained—that evening. “The tomatoes don’t have the right color, and they aren’t sweet enough. So my solution is as follows. You know that in some places they use beets to make sugar? Yes, exactly. Well,” he paused, “my plan is to grow beets, take the juice from the beets, and pour the juice at the base of the tomato plants.”

That way, he reasoned, the roots would suck up the deep dark color as well as the sweet flavor. Either it would bring life back to the farm, or it would work otherwise. Whatever God’s will.

A person could slip out of this world so easily. But this project with the beets made him want to stay at least a little longer. Every plan was a Hail Mary for the faithful, after all. Even if the rain never came again, even if he was forced to sell his land, his inheritance, he’d work until he no longer could.