The Water Right My Grandmother Left Me

Chapter 4

The night after Garrett left his check on my porch rail, I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen table where Carl and I had eaten ten thousand suppers, and I tried to put my father’s words back together exactly.

Your grandmother filed first, he used to say. June of 1921. She rode the buckboard to the county seat with your dad on her lap and she filed on Spring Creek before anybody else on this creek ever thought to. That paper is why we are still here.

A water right in this country is not a thing you keep in a drawer. It is a court decree, recorded at the courthouse and filed with the state water office, with a priority date on it. The priority date is everything. It is your place in line.

If my grandmother’s date was June of 1921, and the Ferris right was 1954, then on paper my water came first by thirty-three years. The company could dam that creek all they wanted, but by law they could not take one single drop that belonged to a senior right below them until that right was satisfied.

The law was on my side. I was almost sure of it. But almost sure does not run water downhill to a dying cow. I needed the paper.

I went through Carl’s filing cabinet first. Then the strongbox in the closet. Then the old humpback trunk in the spare room that had been my grandmother’s, that I had not opened in years because it smelled like her and it hurt.

I found the deed, the brand registration, Carl’s discharge papers, my father’s birth certificate from 1920. I found a photograph of a young, hard-faced woman standing beside a wooden headgate with a baby on her hip.

I sat on the floor of the spare room with that photograph in my lap for a long time. The woman in it was not smiling. She had a man’s coat on over a long dress and her sleeves were rolled and there was mud to her knees. The baby on her hip was my father.

I had seen that photograph a hundred times growing up and never once really looked at it. A young woman, alone, standing in a creek, with a baby and a brand new headgate. I had always thought of it as a picture of the old days. Sitting on that floor at sixty-eight, I understood for the first time that it was a picture of exactly the morning I was living through, a hundred years early.

I did not find the water decree.

And then I understood why. A recorded decree does not live in a trunk. It lives at the courthouse, in the county records and the state archive, where it has lived since the day it was filed. All these years I had been looking at the headgate in the creek and had never once gone to look at the paper that stood behind it, because I had never needed to. Nobody had ever challenged it.

The paper was not lost. It was exactly where my grandmother had put it in 1921. It was waiting at the county courthouse for somebody to go ask for it.

I want to be honest about the fear, because I think a lot of women my age will know it. I sat there at two in the morning and I was afraid I was wrong. Afraid the date was later than my father remembered. Afraid the right had somehow lapsed, or been sold, or been forgotten so long it did not count anymore.

Afraid that I would drive to town and find out that the one true thing I had been holding onto was not true, and that I really did have nothing left but Garrett’s check.

But afraid is not the same as beaten. I learned that from calving in the dark alone. You do the next thing with your hands even while your head is telling you it will not work, and often enough the doing is what carries you past the fear.

I made a list at the kitchen table, the way I make a list before branding or before winter. Where the paper might be. Who would know. What I would do if it was there, and what I would do if it was not. Having a list did not make me less afraid. It made me able to move anyway.

I got up before light, I hauled my three loads of water to the cattle, and then I put on a clean shirt, and I drove to the county seat to find my grandmother’s water.