The Ditch That Drowned My Corn

Monday night

Harlan came to the house on Monday after ten o’clock. I was sitting over the plat map, which I had spread across the kitchen table and weighted down with Eileen’s sugar bowl, marking every scoured bank and gully in red pencil. Headlights swung across the window, and then a second set behind them.

Harlan’s pickup stopped in the yard. A smaller truck stopped behind it. Harlan got out of the first one and did not come up to the house. He stood by his door with his hands in his back pockets. A young man got out of the second truck and stood by it for a good half minute before he started up the steps, which told me he had been thinking about it for a while.

He was around thirty, thick through the shoulders, with a gray T-shirt and a sunburned neck. He took his cap off when I opened the door.

“Mr. Teague? I’m Josh Mathis. I’m married to Harlan’s Dana.”

“Come in, Josh.”

He didn’t want coffee. He stood in my kitchen turning the cap around in his hands and looked at the map. Harlan came in behind him after all and took the chair by the stove, and did not say a word.

“I run the excavator for Garrity’s outfit,” Josh said. “I’m the one who cut that ditch. And I’m the one who capped the tile.” He took a breath and let it out. “Sunday dinner, Harlan’s been asking me what we been doing out on the Lindquist ground. I told him. I’d been telling myself I didn’t know whose field it’d run to.”

“Did you know?”

“No, sir. Dutch Vandiver, he’s the foreman, he told me the engineer changed the plan and to dig it east and cap the old tile line and swap out the culvert under the county road. I said, doesn’t the pond go in first? He said not on this phase. Mr. Garrity said so.” He swallowed. “I’ve got two little girls, Mr. Teague. One’s five. Dana’s a nurse’s aide and we’ve got a truck payment and a mortgage on a trailer. I can’t lose that job.”

“I’m not going to ask you to stand up in front of anybody,” I said.

“That’s what Harlan said.”

Harlan studied the stove.