The Water Right My Grandmother Left Me

Chapter 5

The county courthouse is a square brick building from 1911 with a clock that has been stopped at ten past four for as long as I have been alive. I have paid taxes in that building, registered brands, and buried most of a generation out of the church across the street. I had never once gone in for the water.

The clerk’s office is on the first floor. A young woman at the counter asked if she could help me, and I told her I needed to find a water decree filed in 1921.

She looked at me like I had asked for something off a shelf nobody had reached in years. Then an older woman came out from the back, the senior clerk, a woman I had gone to school with, and she said, “Hazel Dunmore, is this about the creek?”

Word travels in a small county. She knew the land company had dammed Spring Creek. Half the valley knew. She took me back to the vault herself.

The old decrees are in bound ledgers, enormous books with marbled covers, the pages filled in by hand in ink that has gone brown. She pulled the 1921 book and set it on the table and we turned the pages together.

My hands were not steady. I want to say that plainly. I had hauled water at three in the morning and buried a calf before breakfast and driven to town on no sleep, and now a woman I had known since the third grade was turning the pages of a book that held either my whole future or nothing, and I could not make my hands be still.

She found it before I did. She put her finger on a line and went quiet, and then she said, “Hazel. Look.”

And there it was.

Spring Creek. Appropriator, Effie M. Dunmore. Priority date, June 14, 1921. A right to a specific flow for stock and domestic use and the irrigation of the home ditch, decreed and recorded, first on the creek by a full generation.

Underneath, in the same brown ink, in a hand I did not recognize but a name I did, my grandmother’s own words were copied into the record. A short statement she had made when she filed. I read the first line and had to sit down.

I will tell you what that statement said at the end of this, because it is the heart of the whole thing, and because I did not understand it myself until the morning at the headgate. For now it is enough to say that my grandmother had not just filed a water right in 1921. She had left a message for whoever came after her, and she had been right about everything.

I asked her to help me understand exactly what I was holding, because I was not going to carry a thing out of that vault that I could not explain to a yard full of ranchers. She brought the state water rules down off the shelf and we read them together at the vault table for the better part of an hour, two women past sixty with their glasses on, tracing the lines with our fingers.

The right was good. It was decreed, it was recorded, it had never been sold off or transferred away from the ranch. It ran with the land, which means it belonged to whoever owned the Dunmore place, and that was me. Everything the company would later say about it was an argument. The decree itself was a fact, and the fact had a date, and the date was 1921.

She made me two certified copies with the county seal pressed into them, and she would not let me pay for them.

“You go run your water, Hazel,” she said. “Effie would be ashamed of all of us if we let them dry you out.”

I drove home with the certified decree on the seat beside me where Garrett’s check had sat, and for the first time in two weeks I was not afraid.

I had the paper. The date was real. June 14, 1921, senior to the Ferris right by thirty-three years, senior to the land company by a hundred years of nerve.

But a paper in a widow’s hand is not water in a creek. I knew that too.

The company had lawyers in the city. They had a dam already built and pivots already turning and a great deal of money riding on the hay they could grow with my grandmother’s creek. They were not going to open that headgate because I asked nicely and waved a photocopy.

I was going to have to make them. And I was going to have to do it in a way that the whole valley could see, so that it was true in front of witnesses and could never be whispered away.