The Water Right My Grandmother Left Me

Chapter 8

Saturday came clear and hard and already hot by seven, the kind of high dry morning where the light is so clean it hurts.

I drove up to the headgate in Carl’s old truck with the certified decree in a folder on the seat, the same seat where Garrett had slid his check, and I was not alone on the road. There was a line of trucks behind me a quarter mile long.

The headgate sits where Spring Creek crosses onto my ground, in a cut in the bank my grandmother made in 1921. Above it, that August, the creek bed was bone dry, because a mile upstream the company’s dam had turned the whole flow east into their ditch.

The steel wheel on the gate had not been turned under a full head of water in years. There was no water to turn it into. It stood over a dry bed like a monument to something finished.

I had not slept the night before. I had sat at Carl’s and my table again with the certified decree in front of me and I had talked to him out loud like a foolish old woman, and I had told him I was scared I would stand out there in front of the whole valley and turn a wheel over dry rock and be the sad story Garrett thought I was.

And then I had done what I always did when I was scared. I checked my equipment. I greased the wheel on the gate by lantern light so it would turn clean. I laid out my clothes. I made the coffee. You cannot control the morning, but you can control whether the gate turns, and so I made sure the gate would turn.

By eight o’clock there were maybe eighty people standing on both banks. Ranch families. Old men I had known fifty years. The water commissioner in his state truck, keeping his distance, watching. The clerk came out from town with her husband. Somebody’s grandkids sat on a tailgate.

A woman I did not know well, from a place at the south end, came up and took my hand and did not say anything, just held it, and then went back to the bank. That was the moment I knew the valley had come, and not just come to watch.

And at a quarter past eight, the clean white company pickups came up the road and parked along the fence, and Garrett Vance got out with two men in city clothes who had the look of lawyers.

Garrett came down the bank toward me with his hands open, almost pleading.

“Hazel, don’t do this. You open that gate and there’s nothing to open it onto. The creek’s dry. You’ll stand out here in front of everybody and turn a wheel over a pile of rocks, and then these men will take you to court and it’ll be worse. Let me still help you. The number’s still good.”

He truly thought he was saving me from humiliation. Even then.

One of the city men stepped up and said the company held the senior right on Spring Creek and that any interference with their diversion would be met with legal action, and that Mrs. Dunmore was welcome to pursue her claim through the proper channels over the coming years.

He used that phrase, the coming years, because the coming years were the one thing a dying herd did not have, and he knew it.

I did not argue with the lawyer. You do not win that kind of morning with an argument.

I opened the folder. I took out the certified decree with the county seal pressed into it, and I read it out loud, slow, so the whole creek bank could hear it over the wind.

Spring Creek. Effie M. Dunmore. Priority date, June 14, 1921. First on the creek.

Then I handed it to the water commissioner, and I asked him, in front of everyone, a question with only one legal answer.

“Is this the oldest decreed right on this creek, yes or no.”

He held it a long moment. He looked at the two lawyers. Then he looked at eighty of his neighbors, and he was, after all, an elected man who had to live in this county.

“Yes,” he said. “By the record, this is the senior right on Spring Creek.”

“Then under the law,” I said, “my water comes before theirs. All of it, before one drop of theirs. Is that right or is that wrong.”

“That is the law,” he said.

I put my hand on my grandmother’s wheel.