Chapter 17 The Reason He Wanted It

The young man with the two hundred thousand dollars was twenty-six years old and had a backhoe and a written reason, and his name was Corby Ambrose, and he was Boon's and Corrine's first cousin on their father's side, and he had not set foot in the township since he was nineteen. He drove up on the twenty-eighth of August in a truck with a out-of-state plate and a bed full of drain tile, and he came out of it shaking hands with everybody including Ida Roegner, who had known his grandmother, and he stood in the lane for a long time looking up at the elm. "Seventy-nine acres up on the Torkelson place," he said. "Bought it in March. It's the wettest ground anybody could own and I got it for a number because the man was eighty-one and wanted out. I've got a subscription on another eighty acres with two neighbors, and if those close, I've got a hundred and fifty-nine acres inside three miles, and I've got a lagoon permit application going in on the Torkelson ground in the spring because that's the county that issues them and this county doesn't have one, and I did the math on the whole thing with a spreadsheet that my wife thinks is for work." He turned around and looked at the water in the Hollow. "But I don't need the Hollow," he said. "I've got the wet ground already, which is the point, because wet ground is where you drain to. You don't buy dry ground to install drainage. You buy the thing that runs water to it." He grinned at Corrine. "I bought the Torkelson place because of what I know about that field, and the only thing I know about that field is what a district soil scientist wrote down in the spring of 2019 when she was twenty-nine years old, and I read it, and I bought ninety acres off it." Corrine stood very still. "You read the 2019 report." "I read all four. The 2019 one, the 1998 tile card, and the soil survey, and then I had a boring done on the Torkelson ground in April which cost me nine hundred dollars and told me exactly what I'd been reading." Corby Ambrose shut the truck door. "That's the whole reason I'm standing in this lane, and I'd rather say that out loud in front of all of you than have it come out later as though I'd done something clever. Somebody wrote down that your low field ponds, and a man who drains ground for a living read it and understood it meant that the water in this township has to go somewhere, and the somewhere is mine." "So you want the Hollow," Corrine said, "for the ditch that goes through it." "I want the Hollow for four months of the year when it can't be farmed, and I want to run my main through your lane culvert and down the run under the creek bed that your man with the trencher opened up in July." He said it without any apology whatsoever, which Corrine respected more than she was able to say so. "I don't need to own it forever. I need to own it for a season. And if I own it for a season, I have to own it under a paper that says what I'm allowed to do to it, and that paper has to be written by somebody who is not in my family and does not work for me." He looked at Boone. "Cousin, I've got your debt. Not to collect on. I've got it because you called me in February and told me what you owed out loud, on the phone, which no Ambrose has ever done, and I have been thinking about it since February." He took the truck keys out of his hand and looked at them. "The combine's got four years on it and it's a good combine. The credit card money is the part that's killing you and it's the part that's stupid and it is not debt, it's a hole you dug with a part number on it, and I will take it at forty cents and I'd have taken it at thirty in March if you had asked." Boon's jaw was working. "And the line of credit," Corby said. "That one's real and it's got a collateral schedule with the shop on it and I'm not the man for it. What I'd do is this. I take the combine, I take the line of credit, and you come work the Torkelson ground for me for two seasons, and I take the line off your name and I carry it on mine, and you get a draw and a place to live and the ground gets drained." "And the field." "The field stays in your mother's name and I get a ninety-nine-year easement over thirty-one acres for the tile, and the crop ground north of the lane stays in your mother's name and is farmed by you, and I get a one-year option at a formula price with a floor, which I will write down, and the formula is soil class and tile spacing and I will pay the same formula for the same ground next year as I do this year, so you can't be robbed and I can't be cheated." Corby put the keys in his pocket. "And your sister signs the paper that says the tile is where I say it is and that putting it in there won't wreck the Hollow, and if that's not true then I don't put it in, because I've got the boring and I'd rather not pay to learn." They stood around in the lane. Out at the field the water was down four inches and the riser was still running full, and there was a light in the bottom of the sky that had been there all afternoon without making anything brighter. "There's a hitch in it," Corrine said. "There's always a hitch in it." "The hitch is the 1974 inspection report. It is in the county file in the district's own handwriting and it says the outfall was verified, and if it is wrong, and it is wrong, because a man who laid forty feet of tile on a flat grade and wrote down forty feet because that was the number on the ditch tape said outfall good and did not know what he was looking at—" She stopped. "If that report is in the file of the sale, a buyer in 2030 will read it and it will say the district certified a drainage structure on this parcel that did not work, and that is not a small thing to have in a chain." Corby Ambrose nodded slowly. "So unamend it." "Unamend what?" "The report. You can't take a card out of a basement drawer and you can't get a district to reissue a 1974 inspection without making a federal fuss." He took his hand off the truck door. "You add to it. You write an addendum in 2026 that says, this structure was cleared in 1974, this structure was subsequently compromised by a grade defect in the 1981 district outfall, the district has located and exposed the run, the condition is remediated, here are the photographs, and I want the addendum filed with the commission and recorded against the parcel number so it runs with the land." He looked at Corrine. "You can't hide it and you can't move it. You can only add to it. Everything else is a lie that somebody finds in thirty years and then you've got a problem that isn't about a ditch." Corrine Ambrose stood in a lane in a township in a county in a state she had deliberately not put a name to, and looked at a man who had spent two hundred thousand dollars of his own money buying the worst ground in three counties because of a sentence she had written in nine days when she was twenty-nine years old. "That's correct," she said. "It's also the only reason I'm here," Corby said. "I don't want your field. I want your field's water. And when that is written down, and signed, and on a piece of paper with an addendum on it, then the water is mine for four months and the field is yours for eight, and I have never in my life had a better arrangement with anybody, and I am not going to insult you by pretending I came up here for the family." He put out his hand, and Corrine shook it, and then Boone Ambrose, who had not said anything for eleven minutes, walked out into the lane and shook it too, and afterward he went down to the hog house and stayed in there a long time with a sow who did not care about a single thing he had to say. ---