The Ditch That Drowned My Corn

The list

There were three.

Harlan Pitts farmed two hundred and forty acres on the other side of the road from me, and a pasture beyond that, and a man named Lyman Keck ran sixty head of cattle on the creek ground below Harlan. And Michelle Wirick, who was seventy-four and a widow, farmed eighty acres of her late husband’s with her grandson helping her on weekends, and her bottom pasture was the lowest of all, right where the water finally ran out into the Sugar Fork drain.

Everything that ran off those forty-one lots, if it did not run west like the plan said, ran through my field and then down through theirs.

The trouble was that Harlan Pitts and I had not spoken in eleven years.

It started over nothing. A section of line fence, and who owed who for the posts, and a borrowed disc harrow that came back with a cracked gang. You know how it goes. We had grown up four miles apart. We had been in the same Sunday school class. Eileen used to take his wife a pie every Christmas, and after the fence business she stopped, and the pies stopped, and eventually Harlan’s wife passed and I went to the funeral and stood at the back and left before the lunch.

I found him that afternoon in his machine shed, bent over a grain auger.

“Lowell.”

“Harlan.”

“You’re on my place.”

“I know it.”

He wiped his hands on a rag. He was seventy-three and heavier than I remembered, with a face the color of a saddle. “If it’s about that disc.”

“It’s not about the disc. Come look at your tile outlet. And then I’d like you to come to my place Saturday morning and walk my water line with me. Lyman too, and Michelle Wirick. Bring a tape measure.”

“What for?”

“Because it’s going to do to you what it’s doing to me. It just hasn’t done it yet. And I can’t prove it by myself.”

He studied me for a long moment. Then he walked, without a word, out the back of the shed and across his own pasture to the tile outlet at the low end, where a sixteen-inch clay pipe came out of the bank into the creek. I followed him.

The pipe was running full. Muddy water was shooting out of it, the color of chocolate milk, two days after the rain, when a tile that size should have been down to a dribble by then, and the bank below it had been scoured out in a curve a man could stand in.

“That wasn’t like that last year,” Harlan said quietly.

“No.”

He looked at it a good while longer. “Saturday,” he said. “Seven. I’ll bring the tape.”