The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

Grandma’s apple trees were curling their leaves on the third of July, and the ditch that had watered them since 1952 was nothing but dry cracked mud with a few dead grasshoppers in it.

I stood in her orchard at seven in the morning with my coffee going cold and looked down the row. Twelve trees and a big garden. Every one of those trees older than me, and every one of them drooping like a tired horse.

Grandma came out the back door in her faded red flowered housedress and her house slippers. She was eighty-four. She walked straight past me to the headgate and looked down into the empty box for a long time.

“It came for two days,” she said. “Then it quit. I thought maybe a ditch broke up above. But Amos would have said.”

“When did it quit, Grandma?”

“Monday noon.” She counted on her fingers like she did when she was tired. “That’s four days, Renee. They won’t make four more. Not in this heat.”

It was ninety-eight degrees the day before in Delta County. The dry hills behind the place had gone the color of a paper sack, and the mesa stood up blue at the top of everything like it always did.

I am a bookkeeper for three ranches around Cedaredge and Eckert. I know what a dry week does to a crop, because I am the one who writes down the loss afterward. I knew Grandma was right.

My grandfather planted those trees the spring after he came home from Korea. He planted them on the same ground his own father had watered out of the same ditch since before the First World War.

The family had six shares in the ditch company. That was the water right that came with Grandma’s forty acres, and it ran down a little lateral off the main ditch, past one place above us, and into her headgate.

For seventy-four years that water had come down the lateral every summer on the same schedule. Nobody had ever needed to think about it. It was like the sun coming up.

“Did the place above you sell?” I asked, though I knew it had. My son Cash had told me in the spring.

“Delphine’s place,” Grandma said. “Delphine went to her daughter’s in Grand Junction last fall. A man from Denver bought it. Holloway. He put in alfalfa.”

She said alfalfa the way some women say whiskey. “Have you talked to him?” I asked.

“I took him a loaf of bread in April.” She smoothed the front of her dress. “He was polite. He said he’d never farmed before. I told him if he needed anything to holler.”

I set my coffee on the fence post and walked up the lateral along the bank. It was a little ditch, maybe three feet across at the top, lined in places with old rock my great grandfather had set by hand.

A quarter mile up, right where the lateral passed the corner of the Holloway field, I found it.

Somebody had cut two slots into the old concrete check and dropped a wooden dam board across the whole ditch, two-by-twelve, wedged tight. Above the board, the water stood brown and full. Below it, nothing.

Just past the board, a new cut had been dug into the bank, and every drop that came down the lateral was turning into that cut and running out across a green field of alfalfa.

It was not his share. It was all of it. His six shares and Grandma’s six shares and every bit of it was going onto his hay.

I stood there in the sun and felt something hot come up in my chest. Then I thought about my grandfather, who never in his life raised his voice to a neighbor, and I made myself breathe.