One of the men laughed a little, not because it was funny, but because that is what men do when they do not know what else to do. Another one looked at his boots.
Ferris went on. “Some folks plan, and some folks figure somebody else will bail them out. I dug that pond with my own money. I’ll be darned if I’m going to give it away.”
I stood behind that van with my Bible in one hand and my keys in the other, and I felt my face go hot from my collar to my hair.
He had not named us. He did not need to. Everybody in that parking lot knew whose cows were drinking at the Lindahl pond, and everybody knew which cousin had come asking.
I walked to our truck and sat in it and waited for Gage.
When he got in, I told him what I had heard. He listened all the way through. Then he started the truck.
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“He’s not wrong that he dug it,” Gage said.
“He’s wrong to say that about us in a church parking lot.”
“Yes,” Gage said. “He’s wrong about that.”
And that was all he would say about it, then or later. Gage is not a talker.
He grew up with Ferris, eight years younger, tagging behind him to every ballgame and every branding. Some of that never leaves a man, even when it should.
I thought about calling someone. I want to be honest about that.
I thought about calling Ferris’s mother, or the pastor, or Ferris himself, and telling him exactly what I thought of a man who would charge his own cousin and then brag about it.
But the water was his to sell, cruel or not. There was no law broken and nobody to report him to.
There was only a choice about what kind of neighbor I was going to be, and I did not like any of the answers I came up with that week.
So I said nothing out loud. I said plenty to the dishwater, every night, scrubbing a skillet until it shone.
Gage would come in and see me at the sink and go back out to the shop.
August went by like that. Every morning I drove our cows down the lane and across the road to Ferris’s gate, and every evening I brought them home. Ferris was hardly ever there. He was out baling.
He had the best hay crop on the bottom that year, because of that spring and the low ground along the river. The upland hay burned up.
His did not. By the end of August he had round bales lined up in rows all over that river field, waiting to be hauled.
Hay was bringing a crazy price that fall because of the drought. Everybody knew Ferris was sitting on a fortune in that field.
He knew it too. He drove past those rows slowly, the way a man drives past a new house he has built.
His mother, Oleta, lived alone in the old home place on a little rise in the middle of that bottom.
A white farmhouse with a deep front porch, built by Ferris’s grandfather. Ferris lives on his own place two miles up the hill.
Oleta was eighty-four. She had been a widow for eleven years. She still kept a garden, still canned her own beans, still drove herself to church on Sunday in a sedan older than my marriage. Two cats lived with her and bossed her around.