The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

Grandma’s Headgate

Grandma’s headgate is an old wooden box set into the ditch bank right at the top of the orchard. It has a wooden board that slides up and down in two grooves, so you can open or shut it.

She had shut it when the water quit, so the mud wouldn’t dry out the grooves. That was the first thing Grandpa taught every grandchild.

The water got there at a quarter to seven. The sun was full up over the hills by then, warm on the back of my neck.

Grandma was standing at the headgate waiting for us. She had taken her slippers off and left them on the grass. “Grandma, your feet,” I said.

“Hush,” she said. “Cash, honey. Pull my board.”

Cash knelt and worked Grandma’s headgate board up out of the grooves. It was old and dark and soft at the edges. He stood up and held it against his chest like something that might break.

The water turned into the headgate and ran into the little orchard ditch under the first apple tree. It was muddy, and it smelled the way water smells in July, like clay and green and something cold. Grandma stepped down into the ditch in her bare feet. I started to say something. Then I didn’t.

She stood there in the running water in her faded red flowered housedress with her white hair pinned up in a bun, and the water ran over her feet and around her ankles, and she closed her eyes.

Nobody said a word. Ward took his cap off. Cash just stood there holding that old board.

I leaned on Grandpa’s shovel and watched her. I thought about how many Julys she had stood at that headgate. Sixty-some of them as a married woman. Twelve as a widow.

“Your grandpa used to do this,” she said, without opening her eyes. “First water every spring. He’d take his boots off and stand right here, and I’d tell him he’d catch his death, and he’d say a man ought to feel his water come home.”

She opened her eyes and they were wet, but she was smiling. “I never did it myself,” she said. “Not once. I always thought it was silly.”

“Is it?” I asked.

“No,” Grandma said. “It’s not silly at all.”

She started humming. It was “Shall We Gather at the River,” which is the one she always hummed when she hung out wash. I don’t think she knew she was doing it.

Setting the Water

We spent the next hour setting the water in the orchard. Grandpa had laid out the little furrows between the rows himself, and they still ran true after all those years.

Cash and I opened them one at a time with the shovel. Ward ran ahead and called out when the water reached the end of a row.

The ground was so dry it drank the water like it had been waiting for it. In places it cracked and popped as it soaked in. The leaves on the nearest tree did not lift yet. I knew they wouldn’t for a day.

Grandma sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the biggest tree, the old Jonathan, with her feet still muddy, and told Ward which row was which variety.

“That’s Rome Beauty. That one’s a Golden. That’s a Winesap, your great grandpa grafted that one himself.”

At nine o’clock, I heard a car on the county road. A silver car with Denver plates went slow past the orchard and turned in at Delphine’s old place. “That’s him,” Grandma said.

I set the shovel down. “I should go up there.”

“No,” Grandma said. “Amos is up there. Let Amos do it. That’s his job and he’s good at it.”

“Grandma.”

“You go if you want,” she said. “But you go stand and you don’t say a word unless somebody asks you. You hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I left Ward with her. Cash came with me. He was still carrying her headgate board, and I told him to lean it against the box. He did, and then he picked it back up again like he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

“Leave it, honey.”

He left it.