The Day the Water Came Home to Grandma’s Orchard

How the Shares Have Always Been Split

The old man from below Grandma’s spoke first. He had a voice like a rusty gate. “Son,” he said. “How many shares came with this place?”

Trace looked at him. “Six,” he said. “Six shares in the ditch company. The realtor said six.”

“That’s right,” the old man said. “Six. And Willie Pope down there has six. And the lateral carries twelve. So you get half. She gets half. Been that way since before either one of us was born.”

“Willie,” Trace said. “You mean the old lady.”

“I mean Mrs. Pope,” the old man said.

The cattleman from the bench didn’t say anything at all. He just stood there with his arms folded and looked at Trace the way you look at a calf that has gotten itself through a fence.

The church woman said, “Her trees were dying, Mr. Holloway. Four days. In this heat.”

Trace turned around and looked down the ditch toward Grandma’s orchard. From where we stood you could see the tops of the old apple trees, and you could see that they were brown at the edges. He looked at them for a long time.

“My hay is dying too,” he said. His voice went funny. “Did anybody think about that? I put everything I had into this place. Everything. I sold my house in Arvada. I cashed out my retirement. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve got forty acres of alfalfa and the first cutting came in short and the second one’s burning up.”

Nobody said anything.

“I read about it online,” he said. “Alfalfa. Everybody said it needs water. So I gave it water.”

“You gave it her water,” Amos said.

“I didn’t think of it like that.”

“I know you didn’t,” Amos said. And he didn’t say it mean. “But that’s what it was.”

Trace stood at the bottom of the bank in his new boots, and he looked at every one of us. Nobody looked away. Nobody laughed. Nobody said a thing to make him feel worse than he already did.

I think that was worse for him than yelling would have been. I think he would have known what to do with yelling.

He looked at me last. “You’re the granddaughter.”

“Yes,” I said.

“She brought me bread,” he said. “In April.”

“I know,” I said.

He put his hand over his eyes for a second. When he took it away, his face was red. “I didn’t know the water was hers,” he said. “I promise you I didn’t.”

“Then you know now,” I said. That was all I said. Grandma had told me not to say a word unless somebody asked, and he had, so I figured that much was allowed.

The Turnout

Amos stood up off the board. His knees cracked. He picked up his shovel. “Come up here,” he said to Trace.

Trace climbed the ditch bank. He slipped once in the loose dirt and Cash reached out without thinking and caught his arm. Trace looked at my boy for a second. “Thanks,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Cash said.

Amos walked him twenty feet down the lateral to an old concrete box I had walked past a hundred times without thinking about it. It had an iron slide gate on it, rusted shut, with weeds growing up through it. “You know what this is?” Amos asked.

Trace shook his head.

“This is your turnout,” Amos said. “The real one. Delphine’s husband put this box in in 1964. When it’s set right, it takes six shares out of this lateral and sends six shares on down. You don’t need to dam anything. You just need to open your gate.”

He knelt down and took a wire brush out of his back pocket and scrubbed at the rust on the gate stem. Then he handed the brush to Trace. “Go on,” he said.

Trace knelt down next to him in the dirt in his polo shirt and scrubbed.

It took the two of them twenty minutes. Amos sent Cash back to the truck for a can of oil and a pipe wrench. The old man stood on the bank and gave advice nobody asked for. The cattleman went and got a pair of fencing pliers out of his own truck and cut out the old weeds.

The church woman went home and came back with a thermos of coffee and a stack of paper cups.

When they finally got the gate to move, Amos showed Trace how to read the little measuring weir in the box, and how many inches of water on the staff meant his six shares.

“You set it at this mark,” Amos said, tapping it. “Not higher. If it’s a short year, everybody’s share goes down together. You don’t take more because you’re up top. Up top doesn’t mean first. Up top just means up top.”

“What about the rotation?” Trace asked. “The realtor said something about a rotation.”

“Calendar’s in your mailbox every April,” Amos said. “From the ditch company. It’s probably in the trash with the seed catalogs.”