Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

I did not ask if she had talked to anybody else. I knew she had not. My grandmother would rather carry water till her arms gave out than tell the church ladies her stepgrandson had padlocked her hydrant.

I went up the slope anyway. Not to fight. I wanted to see his face when he said it.

Corbin was in the yard by his truck, a blue three-quarter-ton with a cracked windshield, loading fence posts. He saw me coming and kept loading. He is forty-four, five years older than me, and he has always carried himself like somebody owes him an apology.

“Rowdy,” he said.

“There’s a padlock on Grandma’s hydrant.”

“Yep.”

“She’s carrying water to those horses in a kitchen pail.”

He stopped loading then. Something crossed his face, quick, and then it was gone. “Nobody’s making her,” he said. “She can sell them. There’s a guy in Three Forks who takes old horses. She can sell them today.”

“She doesn’t want to sell them.”

“Then she can keep carrying water.” He threw another post in the bed. “It’s my well, Rowdy. It’s my pump. I pay the electric now. I’m not running a water line for three horses that ought to have been put down years ago.”

“Grandma pays half the electric. She always has.”

“She paid Dad half. Your dad’s gone.”

He had called him Dad once, years ago, when he was sixteen and had wrecked my father’s pickup and my father had not yelled at him. I remembered that. I did not say it.

“I could get the county involved,” I said. “Water rights. A shared well that’s served her barn for fifty years.”

Corbin laughed, but there was not much in it. “Go ahead. You know how long that takes? You know what a lawyer costs? By the time the county figures out whose water it is, those horses will be dog food anyway.”

That was the thing. He was right about that part, and he knew it, and that was why he had done it.

Arguing over a shared well would take weeks at the least, maybe months, and three old horses cannot wait weeks for water. My grandmother could not carry it for weeks. Her heart would not let her.

I looked at him a long time. He looked back. He was the one who looked away.

“I’m three payments behind on this place,” he said, to the truck bed more than to me. “Three. The bank’s sent the letter. That lease would cover it, and then some. I’m not the bad guy here, Rowdy. Those horses are eating grass that could be paying a mortgage.”

I believed him about the payments. I had heard he had lost his hours at the mill in Belgrade in the summer. It was a real reason. It was not a reason to make an eighty-six-year-old woman haul water in a pail.

“You could have told her that,” I said. “You could have asked for help.”

“I’m not asking that old woman for money.”

“No,” I said. “You just turned her water off.”