The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

My Boys

I have two sons. Cash was seventeen that summer and as tall as his father. Ward was fourteen and still all elbows and knees.

My husband was running a pipeline crew up by Rock Springs, Wyoming, that whole month, four hundred miles away. He called every night after supper.

When I told him on the phone, he was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Do it with Amos. Do it in daylight. Don’t say one word you’d mind your grandma hearing.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“I know you weren’t. I’m telling the boys.” And he had me put Cash on the phone, and I heard Cash say “Yes, sir,” three times in a row.

Around midnight I heard Grandma moving around in the kitchen. I got up and found her at the table with her Bible open and a glass of water she wasn’t drinking. “Couldn’t sleep,” she said.

“Me either.”

She turned the page with one finger. “Your grandpa used to say a man who steals water mostly doesn’t know he’s stealing. He thinks the ditch is just a ditch. He thinks it comes from nowhere.”

“Do you think that’s what this is?”

“I think he’s a young man from the city who’s scared,” she said. “Scared men do dumb things. That doesn’t make it right.”

She closed the Bible and patted my hand. “Go to bed. We’ve got water to fetch.”

Sunup

At a quarter to six the sky over the mesa was turning from gray to gold. I had the boys up and dressed. Cash wore a white T-shirt and his old boots. Ward wore his ball cap backward, and I made him turn it around.

I wore my straw hat, my light blue work shirt and my rubber boots, and I carried Grandpa’s long-handled shovel out of the shed. My dark hair was in a braid down my back, the way Grandma had braided it when I was small. Grandma stood on the porch in her housedress and watched us go.

“You be decent,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I mean all three of you.” She looked right at Cash.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

We walked up the ditch bank in the cool. The meadowlarks were singing out in the pasture. The dirt on the bank was so dry it puffed up white around our boots.

Amos’s white pickup was already parked at the corner of Delphine’s old field when we got there. He was standing on the ditch bank with his hands in his back pockets, looking at the board.

He did not say good morning. He said, “Well, look at that.”

The water stood up behind the board, brown and still. A few cottonwood leaves floated on it. Below the board, the lateral was a dry trench. Just past it, the new cut ran out into the alfalfa, where the water was spreading across the field in the low light.

“Fella did a pretty good job of it,” Amos said. “Too good. Cut the slots right into the old check. That’s company concrete.”

He knelt down and put his hand on the board. “I’m going to write this down first,” he said, “so it’s done right.”

He took a little notebook out of his shirt pocket and wrote the date and the time, 6:12 a.m., and what he saw. Then he had me read it and sign under his name as a witness. I am a bookkeeper. I appreciated that. “All right,” Amos said. “Cash, get on the other end of that board.”