第10章 A Kilometre of Turning

She took the Saturday. She told Boone she was going to walk the drain, and he said she should take a tractor, and she said the tractor would be four hundred pounds over every tile line on the place, and he said that in his experience the tile lines had all been dead since before he was born, and she said that was an opinion formed without data, and he said that was the third time this week she had said some version of that, and she said, "Then come and watch me be wrong." He came and watched her be wrong, which took about eleven minutes. They went down at seven with a probe rod, a spade, two five-gallon buckets, a hand auger with a cracked flight, and a length of pipe Corrine had cut that morning for the purpose, and they worked south along the main in the company of a wind that came across the quarter from the west and put everything in it moving in the same direction, water included. The ground was the fourth-wettest it had been all spring, and it took a set of boots the way good boot-season ground takes them, ankle deep by the fourth row, and by the eighth row a man walking behind her could see the prints coming out of her treads and could not tell which were going and which were coming back, which is the test for ground that is going to hold a machine and which Boone passed without being told what it was. At ninety yards the riser was there, exactly where the 2019 map said it was, and it was still running full, and Corrine wrote down the time and the level and the appearance of the water in the tee, which was the third thing she had written down in her whole life about this field and the first one in seven years. Boone stood over the notebook and read it upside down and said, "You write down what you see." "Somebody has to." "Nobody in this family has ever written anything down." He said it lightly, in the voice of a man making an observation about a town rather than about himself. "Your grandmother kept a book of seed. Mom keeps a book of what the sows do. My father's book is the tool inventory, and my grandfather's was never anybody's because he didn't have one, and that is how a farm like this runs itself for four generations. Somebody always remembers, and then that person dies, and then the next one starts a book, and it takes forty years to find out that the thing everybody remembered was never written down by anybody at all." Corrine wrote that down too, and dated it, and knew perfectly well that she had written down a thing to be polite and would probably never use it. At a hundred and ten yards, in a place where the fall was less than it should have been, they found a dip. "Here," Corrine said. They dug. Two feet down and half a yard along, and there it was, a length of the six-inch tile that had gone to gravel, the whole barrel gone soft, the walls no thicker than a shingle at the crown, and the water moving through it at about the speed of a man walking. She put her hand flat over it and felt the flow, and put her hand on the intact tile an inch away and felt nothing. "It would take me eleven years to replace that," said Boone. "It would take you eleven years and nine thousand dollars." Corrine was already looking ahead. "What is it, twenty yards of bad?" "Between twenty and thirty." "Then it's a Saturday and a Tuesday and a man with a trencher, and I'd guess you own a trencher." She sat back on her heels. "That's not the whole problem." "No. That's the part you can see." Boone wiped his face with his wrist. "There's a box at the creek. Dad put it in 1981 with the county crew because the old one was cracked, and it's a two-by-three concrete structure with a stop gate on it, and the gate's been open as long as I've been alive because Dad never trusted water to come up that far." He squinted south. "And there's forty feet of tile between the box and the creek bed, and when Dad did it he ran it into the creek good because a box discharges into a creek and a creek goes downhill." "And?" "And in 1998 it backed up." Neither of them said anything for a moment. The wind came across the quarter. Down at the creek line, a mile south, a crow got up off a fence post and went off over the Roegner place. "In 1998," Corrine said, "the hollow had water in it in the third week of August. I put that in my own report. I have been looking at that sentence for seven years." "You wrote it up in 2019." "I put the water in the report in 2019, and I had walked it in 2017, and in 2019 I put in the year that it happened, which means I knew in 2019 that a year like that had happened, and a good part of what it meant was that the 1974 entry in the tile record said obstruction located and removed." She sat down on the spade handle. "There's an outfall that doesn't reach the creek. There's thirty yards of gravel I can put my hand on, and there's a forty-foot run that somebody thought went somewhere. In 2019 I had all three facts in my file and I classified the field on the standing water instead of on the drainage. That's not a mistake a beginner makes. That's a mistake a person makes in a week and a half in a year when the district has four sections and a schedule." "You want me to say Eldon put you on it." "I want it to stop being about Eldon," Corrine said. "I have spent five years having a conversation with a dead man about a schedule." Boone stood up and shoved the spade into the ground and leaned on it. "Sis," he said. "You can write whatever you want on your file. That field is thirty-one acres of pond in a normal year. Every year. Your grade book can't take that back. And if it comes down to a lawsuit over a drainage card from 1974, we lose, because we can't prove a thing about a tile run under a creek bed that nobody has laid eyes at since before Mom was back from the hospital with you." "I know we can't prove it," Corrine said. "That's why I want to find the pipe before somebody else finds it and takes it out of the ground." He looked at her then, and for once there was nothing in it but the question. "What are you saying." "I'm saying I want to know whether the pipe's there," she said. "That's the whole thing. That's not a theory and it's not a lawsuit. It's a spade and a Saturday and a man with a trencher, and then I know. And when I know, whatever I put in the letter is going to be true, and it's going to be true about the paper I signed and not just about the pipe, and that's the only place I've got." ---