The Ditch That Drowned My Corn
“There’s something I do, though,” Josh said. “Because of Dutch.” He went out to his truck and came back with a dirty red notebook, the kind a man keeps in a pickup cab, and he opened it on the table. “Dutch has a way of saying he never told you something. So I write it down. Everything he tells me, the day, the station number, who said.”
I put my finger on the page. In pencil, in a cramped hand, one line to a job. A Tuesday in April: cut east ditch sta 0+00 to 19+00 per Dutch, plan changed. A Thursday: cap 12 in tile at sta 3+60, concrete plug, per Dutch, says Garrity okayed it. A Saturday morning: pulled 24 in culvert at the county road, set 12 in, no county on site, per Dutch.
“The county never touched that culvert,” I said.
“No, sir. We did it on a Saturday.” He looked at the floor. “I figured that was why.”
I called Dallas Rasmussen at home. He had a bad back and it was past ten-thirty, and he listened to the whole thing without a sound.
“Have him at my office at eight,” he said. “I’ll take it as a signed statement and I’ll copy the log. He won’t have to say a word at the meeting unless he chooses. I’ll read it into the record.”
Josh looked at Harlan. Harlan nodded, once.
The seventh of July
The commissioners’ room on the second floor of the annex is not big. It has a long oak table at the front, two rows of chairs, and a window unit that rattles. There were thirteen of us in it at five minutes to nine, counting the clerk.
Harlan sat on my left in a clean shirt, and Lyman Keck beyond him with his hat on his knee, looking at the ceiling tiles like a man waiting on a dentist. Michelle had her tabbed folder on her lap and Noah beside her, who had asked to come again and had not been told no. Josh Mathis sat at the end of our row with his hands between his knees. Dana had to work. She had written him a note on the back of a prescription pad, and I saw him look at it once.
The three members of the board sat at the long table in front. By law the county drainage board is the three county commissioners, and Dallas Rasmussen sat at the end as the surveyor, with his reading glasses on and his binder open, to give the board the technical say. Sue Ann Mabry was president. She was sixty-one, a retired school-lunch manager, and the only one of the three who had never pretended to know about drainage. Jarvis Tidwell farmed. Ronnie Fultz sold insurance.
Trent Garrity came in at two minutes to nine with a man in a gray suit and a rolled set of plans. He saw the row of us, and for a half second his face did something I had not seen it do at my fence. Then he put the smile back on and sat at a side table and spread out his plans.
Sue Ann Mabry looked at me over her glasses. “Mr. Teague?”