The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

The Board on the Bank

By the time Cash and I walked up the ditch bank to the corner of Delphine’s old field, there were more people there than I expected.

Amos was still sitting on the board, exactly where we had left him, with his shovel across his knees and his hat pushed back.

Standing on the ditch bank near him were three people. The old man who had the place below Grandma’s, eighty if he was a day. A cattleman who ran cows on the bench above the main ditch. And a woman I knew from church, Delphine’s niece, who still kept chickens on a few acres across the road.

Nobody had called them. They had just seen the water come down and walked up to see why.

The man from Denver was standing in the middle of his alfalfa field, about fifty yards out, looking down at the ground.

I had not seen Trace Holloway up close before. He was fifty-two that summer, I found out later. He was a big man going soft around the middle, in a polo shirt and new work boots that had not been worked in yet.

He stood in his field looking at the wet ground going dry, and then he looked up at the ditch bank and saw all of us, and his shoulders came up.

He walked toward us slow. Not angry yet. Confused. Like a man who has come home and found his furniture moved.

He got to the edge of the field and stopped at the bottom of the ditch bank. He looked at the board. He looked at Amos sitting on it. “Is that my board?” he said.

“It’s a board,” Amos said. “It was in the company’s lateral.”

Trace looked at the closed-off cut. He looked down the lateral, where the water was running bank-full toward Grandma’s. “You took it out,” he said.

“Yes, sir. At 6:12 this morning. I wrote it down.”

“You can’t just come on my land and…”

“I’m not on your land,” Amos said. Not loud. “I’m on the ditch bank. The ditch company has a right of way on both banks of this lateral, and it has since 1891. It’s in your deed. Probably on page three.”

Trace opened his mouth and closed it.