Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

“Those horses aren’t going anywhere,” Grandma said. “Not while I’m alive. You know that now. And this water isn’t yours, so you can’t turn it off.” She looked at the key in his hand. “So I guess that’s yours to keep.”

She turned around and walked back to the tank.

I think if she had yelled at him, he could have yelled back. I think if I had, he would have taken a swing. But she did not yell. She just told him the truth in front of three neighbors, and then she went back to her horses.

Corbin stood there a while longer. Gus did not move. Idella did not move. Then Corbin put the key back in his pocket and turned around and walked up the hill to his porch, and stood there, and did not go inside.

He was still standing there an hour later, when the sun dropped toward the Tobacco Roots. I know because I looked.

We finished backfilling by six. Gus crowned the trench so it would settle level by spring. Royce and I put my fence panels back and stretched the wire.

Idella went in the house with Grandma and they made a pot of chili, and the five of us ate on Grandma’s porch, with our boots full of dirt, looking out at the horses standing around the new tank like it was a church social.

Gus did not let me pay him for diesel. “You’ll fix my pressure switch next time it goes,” he said, which it does, about twice a year.

Royce would not take anything either. Idella took her brownie pan home empty and said that was payment enough.

After the others left, I sat on Grandma’s porch with her a while, in the last of the daylight. The horses stood by the gate with the low sun on their backs.

“You know what they’ll say at church,” she said.

“What?”

“That Lorene Kessel’s grandson dug her a ditch.” She smiled. “And that Gus Ballantyne finally did something useful with that tractor.”

“Gus will love that.”

“Gus will pretend he doesn’t.” She was quiet. Then she said, “You did right, Rowdy. You didn’t fight him. You just made it so his fight didn’t matter.”

I did not know what to say to that. So I just sat with her till the light went gold and she said she was getting cold.

Here is what happened after, because people ask.

The news went around the valley the way news does in our valley, which is to say by Sunday dinner everybody knew. Nobody said a word to Corbin about it. Nobody had to. Gus had been there. Idella had been there. Royce had been there. You cannot padlock an old woman’s hydrant in a valley where the neighbors bring their own tractors.

The man who wanted to run yearlings on Grandma’s pasture was a rancher from over by Amsterdam. He heard the story at the sale barn Tuesday. He called Corbin that afternoon and said he had found grass somewhere else.

Corbin’s ad for the pasture lease had been pinned to the bulletin board at the feed store for two weeks. Idella said she saw it there on Monday. By Friday it was gone.