Boone did not ask me what we were going to do about his daddy. He did not have to. He knew we could not run two tractors all night, every night, for the rest of August.
And he knew, the way I knew, that this was not something a phone call was going to fix.
Thurman walked down from the south end and stood with him for a while by our tractor. They did not talk much.
Thurman had been Boone’s Sunday school teacher when he was nine, and taught him to drive a tractor on that same gravel road when he was eleven, and the two of them could stand quiet together better than most men can talk.
At 2:20 that afternoon, a pickup came down the section road from the north, slowed at our drive, and turned in.
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It was Orrin.
He drove up onto the levee slowly. I could see him through the windshield, sitting very straight with both hands on the wheel. He must have heard by then.
Ivy had told the mill, and the mill had told the county, and somewhere in there somebody had told Orrin exactly who had been out to our pond with diesel.
He stopped about forty feet from our tractor and got out. He was wearing his work shirt and his old gray cap.
He looked older than he had a week before. He stood by his truck door for a moment, like he was deciding whether to get back in.
Then he walked toward the tractor, where Thurman and Boone were standing.
I stayed up on the tractor. Roscoe stopped skimming and stood on the bank with the long pole in his hands.
Out at the south end, Thurman’s wheel kept throwing water, and nobody shut anything off.
Orrin stopped in front of his son. He did not look at me. He did not look at the dead fish.
He looked at Boone, and Boone looked right back at him, and neither of them said a word.
It was Thurman who spoke.
He did not raise his voice. He never did. He just took his cap off, held it at his side, and said, “Orrin, I’ve known you fifty-two years. I helped you rake up Pond Three last July. So I’m going to ask you one thing, and I want you to think about it before you answer.”
Orrin looked at him.
“How many ponds does a man need,” Thurman said, “before he can let his own boy keep one?”
Nobody moved. The tractor roared. The spray went up white behind us and came down on the water like rain.
Orrin opened his mouth. Then he closed it. He looked down at the levee, at the flat places in the grass where the aerators had sat, at the drag marks that ran north toward his own land.
Then he looked at the row of dead fish Roscoe had laid out on the bank.
Two hundred and fourteen of them, in rows of ten. I watched him count them. I watched his face change.