The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

What My Grandma Said

I walked back down to the house. Grandma had sat down on the porch step with her hands folded in her lap.

“He put a board in it,” I said. “Right across the lateral. Everything goes onto his hay.”

She closed her eyes. She did not cry. Grandma did not cry over weather or water. She had buried a husband and a son and she saved her crying for those. “Well,” she said.

“Grandma, that is your water. It is in the decree. You could call the ditch company and the water commissioner, and if he won’t take it out you could take him to water court.”

That is what I would tell any of my ranchers. I said it fast, like a bookkeeper reading a ledger.

Grandma opened her eyes and looked at me like I had said something in a foreign language. “Water court,” she said. “Against the man who lives across my fence.”

“It’s your right.”

“Renee, I have lived on this ditch eighty-four years. Your grandpa and I never once sued a neighbor. Not over water, not over fence, not over cattle. You know why?”

I knew why. I had heard it my whole life. But I let her say it.

“Because you have to live next to them after,” she said. “Water court takes a year. Lawyers take money I haven’t got. And my trees will be dead in a week. I don’t want to win a lawsuit. I want my trees to live.”

She stood up slow, one hand on the porch post.

“And I want that young man to learn how a ditch works,” she said. “Somebody should have taught him. Nobody did.”

That was my grandma. She was madder than I was, I think, but she put it somewhere I could not see. “Then what do we do?” I asked.

“Call Amos,” she said. “That’s what he’s for.”

The Ditch Rider

Amos Leffingwell had been the ditch rider on our company’s ditch for thirty-one years. Before that his daddy had done it. He was sixty-nine and drove a white pickup with a shovel in the bed and a cooler of water on the seat.

A ditch rider is the man the shareholders pay to walk the ditch, set the headgates, measure the water and keep everybody honest. In a dry year he is the most important man in the valley, and the least thanked.

I called him at a quarter to eight. He answered on the second ring from his truck. “Renee,” he said. “How’s your grandma’s orchard?”

“Dying, Amos. The man on Delphine’s old place put a board across the lateral four days ago. He’s taking all of it.”

There was a long quiet on the line. I could hear his truck idling. “All of it,” he said.

“Every drop. He cut a new turnout below the board.”

“Well, that’s not his to do,” Amos said. “I’ll go talk to him this afternoon.”

“Amos, I went up and knocked on his door at half past seven this morning, and nobody’s there. His car’s gone. And Grandma’s trees won’t wait for a talk.”

Another quiet. Then I heard him put the truck in gear.

“I’ve got a headgate to set on the main ditch at five in the morning anyway,” he said. “Meet me at the corner of Delphine’s old field at sunup. Bring a shovel. Bring those boys.”

“Is that all right? Taking out his board?”

“That lateral belongs to the ditch company, and the ditch company says how the water’s split,” he said. “Setting it right is my job. I’d rather do it with family standing there so nobody can say it was done sneaky.”