Chapter 13 The Number on the Fourth Line

What happened next happened fast and happened in public, which was the part nobody had planned for. The report went into the planning office's file on a Monday and by Wednesday the county had four requests for it and by the following Tuesday the district's office had eleven. Phelan sent a letter that was three paragraphs long and entirely courteous and ended with the phrase reasonable agronomic basis. The commission's attorney sent Corrine a letter that was one paragraph long and entirely not. A man from the soil and water district in the county east of them called her office and asked, before she had said anything at all, whether she had "gone out and reclassified a parcel." "I reclassified the delineation of hydric soils in a parcel," Corrine said. "The classification didn't change. The classification is a capability rating derived from a soil survey and a slope factor and it hasn't changed." "They're saying the classification changed." "They're saying the ground changed, and I did not change the ground. A man removed a blocked culvert on a lane with a trencher and photographed it." She heard the man's breath go out through his teeth. "Do you want to see the photographs?" He did want to see the photographs. He drove fifty miles to look at nine pictures of a ditch, and afterward he drove home without being any friendlier, and told a story at two stops on the way back that was the shape of a scandal and none of the particulars. That was the fifth of August. The commission set the recessed matter for the nineteenth of August, which was twenty-four days and gave the applicant time to do whatever a person does with three weeks, which is to obtain more opinions. He obtained four. The first said the 2026 removal had been the removal of an obstruction that had created the standing water and could not properly be read as evidence that the water did not exist. The second said the delineation was fine and the field was a wet field, which was true, and which was not the same as non-prime, which was the part that mattered. The third said nothing at all and billed nine hundred and fifty dollars. The fourth was a letter from a company in which the county held a retirement account, which brought up a subject nobody had wanted. The first two were signed by the same man, who had put eleven drainage systems in the county since 2011 and who had every reason to believe what he believed, which was that a pond is a pond and a ditch is a ditch and no report in America is going to make water go anywhere it does not want to go. The fourth letter was four paragraphs long and contained the sentence: the county's interest in the applicant entity is held through a retirement account which participates in a pooled fund that holds a position in the applicant's parent company, and the board is advised to consider the appearance of the matter as well as its substance. Ottilie Nesbit had sent that one to the county attorney with a note that said, in her flat way, I am putting this in the file rather than in the wastebasket, and I would like the county to know that I put it in the file. Corrine read all four of them in her office with the window open in a building where the radiators had not yet clicked back on, and she did the thing she was trained to do with any body of evidence, which was to take it apart and ask what it was made of. And when she had done that, sitting there at half past eight in the evening, she came to the conclusion that she had been thinking about the wrong part of the problem since the twelfth of May, and that the wrong part was the tile. The tile was real and the culvert was real and the twenty acres were real. What was not real was any expectation that any of it was going to matter to anybody, because Corrine had done something in the last two months that she had not admitted to doing, which was to go on being a person from the place. She had written the report in the format she used in 2019 because the format was the format. But the sixth paragraph was not neutral. It said a condition had been located and removed by the parties to this proceeding, and the parties to this proceeding were her mother and her brother and herself, and any reader of the county file would see the surnames on the page and see the parcel and put two and two together, and what they would put together was the reason a soil scientist had a report on a parcel in the first place. She had not been careless. She had been careful in the direction that she had been pointing. Eldon Duplantis sat in the same building two floors up on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for the swim team, and she caught him at the door of the pool on the fifteenth, an old man in a windbreaker holding a stopwatch like a weapon. "How's the report," he said. "It's honest." "That's the first thing anybody's said about a report out of that office since about 1979." He looked at her over the top of the glasses. "Is it." "It's honest and it names my family on it, and there isn't a way to take my name off it without changing what a field does, and so anybody who wants it to be a scandal is going to be able to have one." She held his eye. "I did that on purpose, and I've been sitting in my office for two weeks deciding whether it's the right thing, and I wanted somebody who knew me before to tell me." "I'll tell you what I think," Eldon Duplantis said. "I think a good report has one author and a bad report has two. Yours has two." He put the stopwatch in his pocket. "And I think the question you should be asking isn't who reads it. It's who you've made it harder for. And I'll tell who you've made it harder for. You've made it harder for the man who's got the trucks and the lawyers, and he deserved it, and he'll be back, because people always come back. What you haven't found out yet is whether you've made it harder for the farmer who would be the one to do anything with the twenty acres, and I don't know who that is, and neither do you, and that's the same error you made in 2019, only bigger, because 2019 you got wrong about a season of water and this you may have got wrong about a whole county." "That farmer has to come with two hundred thousand dollars of his own money," Corrine said. "Nobody in this county has two hundred thousand dollars of his own money." "Then he isn't the farmer you were writing about," said Eldon Duplantis, "and you'd do well to notice that a thing nobody in the county can afford to do is the same as a thing nobody in the county will do, and I have watched the soil science of two states be used to say things about the future of a township by people who were never going to be in the township." He went down to the pool. Corrine stood in the corridor by the door for a minute, and then she went back down to her own two rooms and sat at her desk and wrote one line in the third column of the list she had made in the truck on the night of the twelfth of May. Not known: who, if anybody, would farm twenty acres of the Hollow. And under it, because it was the honest thing and because the third column had been lying to her by omission for eleven weeks, she wrote a second line. Not known: whether the number I would want is the number that keeps the field. ---