The Ditch That Drowned My Corn

“The ditch was a field decision,” Trent said. “We were behind. The detention basin needs a lot of excavation and I had a lender and a deadline.” He stopped there. I thought he might say more, but he looked at the room and I watched him decide that there was nothing in it to say it to.

“I’ll comply,” he said.

“Not ‘I’ll comply,’ Mr. Garrity,” Sue Ann Mabry said. “I’ll want dates.”

I will say this for him. He took out a pen and he gave her dates.

Ronnie Fultz moved that the board find a violation of the drainage code for the unpermitted outlet and the unpermitted work in the right-of-way. Jarvis Tidwell seconded. Three to nothing. A stop-work order on every remaining lot in Sugar Fork Estates, until the surveyor had inspected and passed the following: the old tile uncapped and restored along its line; the east ditch filled or regraded so that no water left the property except through the permitted outlet; the twenty-four-inch culvert put back in at the developer’s expense. The detention basin, as shown on the plans from the beginning, to be built by the first of November, with no further permits issued on the property until it was.

“The board cannot award damages,” Dallas Rasmussen said to the four of us, quietly, as the clerk wrote it up. “That’s a civil matter, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But what it can do is what it just did. You’ll have a finding of fact from a public body in your hand. A lawyer will tell you what that’s worth.”

There was no cheering. Harlan, beside me, let out a long breath and said, without turning his head, “Well, I’ll be.”

The room emptied slowly. In the hall, Trent Garrity came past with Hensley a step behind. He slowed when he reached me. I thought he might speak, and I watched him think about it, and then he nodded the way you nod to a man at a funeral you did not come to, and went on down the stairs. I did not say anything either. There was nothing in that hallway to say.

Noah was waiting by the water fountain.

He had his cap in his hand, and he looked up at me with a sort of worried seriousness.

“Mr. Teague, are you still going to have your corn?”

I crouched down. It took me a moment, with my hip. “I’m going to have my ground, son. It’s a little late for this year’s corn. But I’m going to have my ground.”

He thought about it. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of notebook paper.

“I drew your post,” he said. “With all the rings.”

He had. In pencil, a crooked cedar post, and three rings, and a fourth ring above them, drawn in red. Blue crayon for the water, which he had made rise about a foot higher than my head. At the foot of the post stood a stick figure with a cap on and a tape measure the size of a hubcap, and beside it, in a nine-year-old’s block letters, me.

“The water wasn’t that high,” I said.

“I know. I made it big so people would see.”

I folded the paper along its creases and put it in my shirt pocket, and I did not correct the drawing, then or later.