Chapter 18 The Addendum

Stiltz's crew had the run out of the creek bed on the fourth of September, and it took them two and a half days because they had to hand dig the last eleven feet, and when it came up it came up in three pieces and went into the bed of the truck in the order it had been laid, which is the only order anybody has ever been able to give a thing that has been in the ground for forty-five years. It was six-inch tile. Two of the three pieces had gone completely to gravel, laid flat on a grade that came out of the box and did not drop toward the creek at all, so that the creek bank was standing over the pipe like a wall. "Forty feet," Stiltz said, with a tape in the gravel and a man holding the other end. "Forty-one and a half. And he wrote forty on the card, and he wrote outfall good, and he was standing right here when he wrote it." He got up out of the cut and wiped his face on his sleeve. "The whole thing sat in a silt pocket on a flat because he was told to hit the creek and he hit the bank. There is no blame in that. There is a twenty-year-old with a trench box and a foreman standing over him saying get it to the water, and he got it to the water, and the water was four foot higher and to the left." Boone came down the bank to look and stood at the top of the cut for a long time without going in, and Corrine, who had spent a summer in a soil pit when she was twenty-two, understood exactly what it cost a man to look at a pipe he had paid four hundred dollars a foot to lay and had written a card about. He said nothing at all about it. Then he went back up the bank and got the camera out of his truck and photographed the three pieces in the order they came out, with a ruler in the frame and a date on a scrap of paper, which is what anybody in this trade would have done, and which he did without being asked and without mentioning that he was doing it. They laid six hundred feet of new tile on a fall of a quarter inch to the foot in nine days, a district crew with a trencher borrowed from the neighbouring county, and the water came off the Hollow on the thirteenth of September in about three hours and forty minutes, which Corrine timed with a stopwatch and a rod from the levee to the box, standing in the dry, in August-level August, watching a field drain. Nobody filmed it. She had thought about filming it and had decided not to, on grounds she could not have defended to anybody, and afterward she was glad, because the thing on the video would have been the thing that made the story, and the thing on the video would have been a woman standing in a field holding a stopwatch while her family's ground emptied itself. Loretta came down to see it and stood at the top of the slope with her hand on the rail of the old ladder her husband had nailed to the levee in 1988, and did not go down, and watched the whole thing from up there with the sound off, so that Corrine could hear her breathing and had to keep looking at the rod instead of at her mother. Boone went down. He walked the whole field afterward with his hands behind his back like a man inspecting a building he had contracted to build and had never been satisfied with, and he stopped in eleven different places for no reason Corrine could see, and at the end of it he said one sentence, to nobody: "Forty-five years and it was a ditch tape." The addendum ran to nineteen pages. It went in on the twenty-eighth of September with her certification number under her signature and a copy to the commission, a copy to the district's board, a copy to the county recorder to be recorded against the parcel number, and a copy to Corby Ambrose's attorney in the state capital, who had by that point stopped asking her questions and started asking her for things. And then, on the eleventh page, in a paragraph that nobody had asked her for, she wrote the sentence that Eldon Duplantis had told her to go and find, in the form she had been carrying around since the twelfth of May without knowing she was carrying it. The district's review of drainage structures on this parcel in 1974 recorded the location of an obstruction at the lane, the removal of that obstruction, and the verification of the outfall. The review did not record, and could not have recorded, the condition of the subsurface run between the structure at the lane and the receiving water, that run having been installed in 1981 by the district's own program under a different supervisor, and the district having no record of inspection of that run between the date of installation and the date of this addendum. The 1974 record is therefore accurate as to the structure inspected and is not evidence of the condition of the drainage of the 31.4-acre parcel as a whole at any time subsequent to 1981. She read it four times on the Tuesday night, and the fourth time she noticed that it did not accuse anybody and it did not defend anybody, and that it said out loud in a government document the thing her father had carried in his pocket for forty years, which is that there was a bar in the pipe and nobody had looked. On the Wednesday she took it to the office on Third Street and Eldon Duplantis read all nineteen pages on her sofa with his glasses down his nose, and at the end he gave it back and said, "This is the best work this district has produced in my lifetime and I am going to tell you three things about it and you are only going to enjoy the first one." "Go on." "One. It's correct. Two. It's correct in a way that will cost the county money and a man's job, and you have written the sentence that lets a man decide what to do about it, and you have made him have to decide." He put the pages down on his knee. "Three. You've put your family in a permanent record. Your names, the field, the 2019 report, the addendum, all of it, and thirty years from now a person doing what you did will find both documents and read both, and the second one will explain the first one, and that is the only inheritance any of us actually gets to hand anybody." "Stiltz has a gold watch in four years." "Stiltz has a gold watch and a retirement and a story about the summer he went and looked," Eldon Duplantis said. "You have a certification number. Both of those are better than what the rest of us have." He got up and opened the door for her. "Go and do the other thing. You've still got a farmer to find, and you haven't told one person in this county a single word about him, and on the fourth of October there is going to be a public sale on this parcel, and if his name is not on that list by Thursday, then you did the whole of it for nothing." ---