The Ditch That Drowned My Corn
What it cost, and what it saved
It cost him. I won’t make it more or less than it was.
The stop-work order held eleven weeks. His construction loan ran $4,300 a month in interest while the backhoes sat idle, and two of the lot buyers took their deposits and walked. The Dorseys, a young couple who had put a down payment on lot 23 and watched their back yard fill to the sill of the garage slab, wrote the board a letter that Dallas read in July, and in September they asked for their money back too and got it. The tile came up in the second week of August. I walked it with the crew. When the backhoe broke the concrete plug, the water that had been waiting behind it for four months came out of the clay in a rush, brown first and then clearer, and it ran for two days. Harlan stood on the creek bank for an hour that afternoon with his cap pushed back and watched it come out his end.
The culvert went back in on the nineteenth of September, a twenty-four-inch pipe, and Dallas Rasmussen stood beside it with his clipboard and passed it. The detention basin was finished the last week of October, with a week to spare.
The money came the way money does, by letter. After the board meeting I went down to Marion and paid the man who does water cases one hour at $350. He read Dallas’s findings, the engineer’s letter, and the log, and said he would write one letter, and he did. Hensley called him back in nine days. It never saw a courtroom. In September four checks came from an insurance company in Fort Wayne: $2,900 to Michelle, $4,100 to Lyman for the pond dam, $3,350 to Harlan, and $9,350 to me, which covered two replantings and the soybeans from the year before. Michelle looked at hers on her porch and said it would just about do the pasture fence, and she thanked me for the walk.
Josh Mathis kept his job through the summer. Garrity put him on a dump truck for the rest of the season and did not speak to him. Dutch Vandiver left in August for a job in Indianapolis. In October the county highway superintendent, who had heard about the culvert from Dallas, hired Josh into the garage on a salary with health insurance, and he drives a grader now, and I understand he writes in a new notebook.
As for Trent Garrity, he sold the unfinished lots over the winter to a builder from Fort Wayne, who put a sign at the gate and a crew on the street. I have not seen a white pickup with that land company’s name on it since. He never made me another offer. I think he knew better.