Chapter 19: Water

Ward came to the headgate at two o'clock with the co-op treasurer in his passenger seat, because I had called her first.

By then I had sixteen men standing along the ditch bank.

The foreman had brought them in two trucks.

Nobody had asked him to.

"Abby," Ward said, getting out. "I'm sorry about the inconvenience. It's a matter of board review. Entirely routine."

"Is it?"

I held up the yellow notice.

"It says the board suspended my water. It has your signature on it, and one line for a second signature, and the line is empty."

"The treasurer and I discussed it by phone."

I looked at the treasurer.

She was seventy-one, a retired schoolteacher in a lavender cardigan, and she had gone gray around the mouth.

"Did you?" I said.

"We did not," she said, in the voice she had used on thirty years of fourth graders. "Ward, I never saw that notice. I would not have signed it."

"Now, ma'am..."

"Two signatures, Ward. Those are the by-laws. You wrote them."

Nobody on the ditch bank breathed.

An old cowhand at the end of the line took a pair of bolt cutters off his shoulder.

"Shall I?" he said to me.

"Please."

The chain parted with a hard snap, and the headgate wheel turned in his hands.

Water came down the dry ditch, brown at first, then clear, and ran past Ward's polished boots.

He looked at the water.

Then he looked at his crew, who were looking at him.

"This isn't finished," he said, quietly.

"It never is with you," I said.

He drove away.

That night I put Lottie to bed in the bunk house with Kit, and walked back across the yard in the dark.

The horses were drinking at the trough.

I could hear them from the porch.

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