Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

A horse that size drinks ten or twelve gallons a day in September, more if the afternoons run hot, and ours had been running hot. Three horses is thirty-some gallons. She had been carrying it a few gallons at a time, eighty-six years old, for two days, and had not called me.

“Why didn’t you call?” I asked.

“Because you’d do exactly what you’re about to do,” she said. “Go up there and have words. And then it’s a family fight, and I’ve had enough of those to last me.”

I stood there with the empty pail. I could feel my heart going in my neck. I am not a yelling man. My dad was not a yelling man either. But I wanted to walk up that slope more than I had wanted anything in a long while.

I did not. I asked her to tell me the whole thing first.

We sat on the bench outside the tack room, in the shade, with the horses still sucking at the bottom of the trough. The mountains were sharp and blue to the south. The hay on the neighbor’s ground had been cut and baled and the field looked like a buzz cut.

Here is how the place works, and I have to explain it, because it is the whole reason this happened.

My grandpa bought forty acres in the Gallatin Valley in 1971. He drilled one well, put a pump house on the north end where the ground was highest, and ran lines to the house and the barn. That one well has watered everything on that place for fifty-some years.

In 1995 he deeded the north ten acres, including the pump house, to my dad, so Dad could put a home on it close to his folks. Dad did. He and my mom lived there until she passed, and later he married Corbin’s mother, and Corbin came with her, a sullen fourteen-year-old who never got over moving to the country.

The water arrangement was a handshake. Dad’s place and Grandma’s place both ran off the one well. Grandma paid half the electric on the pump. Nobody ever wrote a word of it down, because it was family, and because my grandpa and my dad would have been insulted at the idea.

Dad died two years ago this spring. Heart attack, in the shop, with a wrench in his hand. The ten acres went to his widow, Corbin’s mother, and she moved to her sister’s in Billings and signed it over to Corbin last fall.

So the well, the pump house and the valve that fed Grandma’s barn all sat on Corbin’s ground now. Her house still had water. He had only shut off the barn line. He was smart enough not to cut off an old woman’s kitchen.

“What does he want?” I asked.

Grandma folded her hands. “He wants the horses gone.”

“Why?”

“There’s a man who’ll pay three thousand dollars a season to run yearlings on my thirty acres. Corbin found him. Corbin says he’s earned the lease for finding him, and that I’ll get a share. But the horses have to go first, he says, because the man doesn’t want them in with his cattle.”

“And you said no.”

“I said those horses are going to die on this place, same as their old cowboy did. I said it nicely.” She looked at her hands. “Then Thursday the water stopped.”