Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

On Wednesday I came over to check the tank and found the padlock gone from the barn hydrant. The old hydrant just stood there by the dry trough with its handle down, the bracket empty.

I opened it. Water came out. Corbin had turned the barn line back on at the pump house.

I never asked him about it. I never said a word. Neither did Grandma. She kept using the new tank, because it was closer to the gate and the horses liked it better, but she let the old trough fill too, and she started paying Corbin the half of the pump electric again, in cash, in an envelope, every month. He took it.

About three weeks later, on a Saturday in October, I saw his blue truck parked by Grandma’s barn. He was up on a ladder, nailing down a loose sheet of tin on the roof where the wind had been worrying it all summer.

Grandma was standing below him with a cup of coffee in each hand, waiting.

I did not go over. Some things a man ought to get to do without anybody watching.

At Thanksgiving she asked him to dinner, and he came. He did not say much. He ate two plates of turkey and a piece of her pumpkin pie and went home before the dishes were done. But he came.

I heard later from Royce that Corbin had picked up work with the county road crew, the one Gus used to run, and that it was Gus who put in the word. Neither of them ever told me that. I would not have known if Royce had not let it slip.

The trench settled over the winter, just like Gus said it would, and by May you could only see it if you knew where to look. A line of greener grass, straight as a string, running from my shop to Grandma’s gate.

Smoke died that next spring, in April, at thirty-one. He went down in the pasture on a warm afternoon and did not get up, and Grandma sat with him till the vet came. We buried him on the hill behind the barn, next to where Grandpa’s old dog is buried.

Corbin came and helped dig the hole. He did not say anything. He just dug.

Bess and Penny are still there. Grandma is eighty-seven now. She still goes out to the tank every afternoon and runs the hose a minute, even when it is full, just to hear the water on the steel.

She says she likes to talk to them while it runs. I know who else she talks to.

The brass padlock is in my shop now. Corbin left it on my porch rail in a feed sack one Sunday morning that winter, no note, the key still in it.

I hung it on a nail over my workbench. It does not lock anything. It is there to remind me that the quickest way through a fight is sometimes four feet down and four hundred feet long.

But the part I tell people first is the simple part, from that very first week, before the roof or the pie or the county job.

The next week the padlock was gone and so was Corbin’s lease ad.