The Ditch That Drowned My Corn
The developer smiled at me across a fence wire with brown water standing up to my boot tops, and he said I would sell soon enough.
His name was Trent Garrity. He was about fifty, clean white pickup, clean boots, a ball cap with the name of his land company stitched on it. He had pulled up on the gravel road that Thursday morning in the second week of June and walked out to the fence like a man visiting a lake cabin he was thinking of buying.
I was standing in my own cornfield. Or what had been my cornfield. The water lay between the rows as flat and brown as coffee with cream, and the little stalks, ankle high when I planted them in May, stuck up out of it with their tips going yellow. Twenty-two acres of them. The ones in the low corner had been under since Tuesday night.
“Mr. Teague,” he said. “Sorry about the weather.”
“It wasn’t the weather, Mr. Garrity.”
“Rain’s rain.”
“It rained an inch and a half Tuesday night. In 1982 it rained three inches in one night and the water never got past the second fence post.”
He looked at the post. I have a post at the corner of that field, a cedar post my father set in 1951, and on it are three rings of white paint with a year written under each one in my father’s square hand, and then mine. 1958. 1982. 2008. The water that morning stood a hand’s width above the 2008 ring. It had already dropped since Wednesday, which tells you where it had been, and all it had done was rain an inch and a half.
Trent Garrity read the post and then he looked back at me, and he smiled. It was not a mean smile, exactly. It was the smile of a man who has done his arithmetic and is sorry for your answer.
“My offer’s still good,” he said. “$5,200 an acre for the bottom ground. That’s fifty-eight acres, a little over $301,000. Nobody else is going to give you that for ground that holds water. A bank won’t loan on it. You know that.”
“Ground like mine sold on County Road 450 for $9,400 an acre in March.”
“Ground that drains,” he said gently. “Yours doesn’t. Not anymore, anyhow.” He let that sit a second. “You’ll sell, Mr. Teague. Soon enough. A man your age doesn’t want to keep drowning crops.”
Then he tipped his cap and went back to his truck, and I stood there in the water and watched the dust come up behind his tires.
I did not shout. I have thought since about what a younger version of me would have done, and it would have ended in a fistfight at a fence line and my name in the sheriff’s log. I am seventy years old. My wife is in the ground. I stood in the water and thought, all right. All right, Mr. Garrity.