第15章 A Man With a Backhoe and a Written Reason

Verne Stiltz had come out of the north quarter in a truck with a county seal on the door and had been the district's field man for twenty-six years and was now, at fifty-four, the county's land use and tile program administrator, which is a title invented by a county in a hurry and which means that he was the man who knew where every culvert in the township was because he had put most of them in. He had known Levon Tarbell, and he had known Ona Lee, and he had been twenty-three in 1974 and on that crew, and he had been the one holding the other end of the board that the fifteen-year-old held. He said so in the first four minutes, in the middle of a paragraph about the county's budget, and then he did not say anything about it again for eleven miles. "Sit in," he said to Corrine. "No, put the folder down, you're not selling me anything, I don't buy anything. I came because Loretta Ambrose phoned the office and said my name out loud in a sentence with the word lane in it, which is the only way I answer the telephone. In twenty-six years, mind. Nobody else in this county has ever got my telephone that way." "Verne, I need the paperwork on the 1974 inspection." "There isn't any." He said it immediately, without pleasure, as a man emptying a pocket. "There's a card in a binder in a cabinet in a basement in this county, because I put it there, and I can get you a photocopy of the card, and the card is what I wrote at the time. If you want the photographs, there aren't any, because they hadn't invented that yet and nobody in this county photographed a ditch in 1974 unless it did something interesting." "What does the card say?" "It says: lane culvert two barrels 8 in, both roots, cut and cleared, tile verified out 40 ft to box at creek, outfall good, EBW." He drove for a while. "EBW was me. I'd been out of school eleven months." "Then the elm—" "Was not the elm." Stiltz said it with some satisfaction. "The elm was the story your father told afterward, and it was a good story and it did the job, and it was wrong. The elm was fine in 1974. There wasn't an elm in that swale until about 1985, and I know the year because I set the one out of the county nursery in the spring of 1985 to replace a pear tree that died, and I have been quietly furious about that tree for forty-one years." The truck went along the lane and then out onto the county road, and Stiltz drove with one hand and looked out at the field. "So what plugged it," Corrine said. "Ground." He said it the way a man says the name of a common enemy. "The tile run from the box at the creek was laid in 1981 on a grade that came out of the box downhill and then flattened out over forty feet because the man who laid it was told to hit the creek bed and hit the creek bank instead, and he did what he was told and he wrote down forty feet because forty feet was the number on the ditch tape. So you've got six inches of tile running level for forty feet through silt, and silt will take a root or a worm or a fence post off the top of it and put a film across the barrel in about nine years. That is what I would have told you in 2019, and I would have told you in 2019 for free, and nobody asked me, because that paper had your name on it and your name on it meant somebody had done the job and everybody went home." "Then you knew in 2019." "I suspected in 2019. I knew in 2021, when I mapped it, because we had a funding year and I put a crew on the whole township's outfalls." He turned onto the blacktop and slowed for a stop sign that was not there. "And I said something about it at a meeting in 2021 and the person I said it to wrote it down, and the person who wrote it down asked me whether I'd ever physically looked at the run, and I said I had looked at the box and I had sounded the ground, and I have not got down on my hands and knees in that creek bed since about 1990." "I cut it open on the second of July." "I know that. Loretta told me on the third." Stiltz turned his head. "So now we've got one of us who's been wrong and one who's been late. Congratulations, you have a full staff." They went back down the lane and stopped at the turn and he got out and stood in the ditch above the lane where the new culvert was, and looked down the swale toward the creek, four hundred yards off and down in a wood. "It's still in there," he said. "Your dad's box is still there, and if the run's still there it's under about nine inches of leaf mold at the creek end, and there's a place where somebody cut a bank a long time ago and it never grew back. I'll get you a crew of two from the district and a machine and we'll have it out and photographed in three weeks." He crouched and put his finger into the soil at the ditch edge. "But I'll tell you what I want written in your report, and I'd like it to be in your words, because I've got four years to go before they give me a gold watch." "What's that." "That the condition was a maintenance failure in a structure installed by the district's own program in 1981 and neglected afterward," Stiltz said. "And that a condition of the ground which was present on this parcel for forty-five years was the direct cause of the drainage restriction published in 2019. And that the district's 2019 review, for which the district is responsible, recorded the removal of the obstruction at the lane in 1974 and recorded nothing afterward." "That's not an opinion," he said. "That's a fact and it's yours to write down, and it's going to cost the county some money and it's going to cost somebody a career, and I'd rather it was a woman with a certification number than a man with four years to go." He did not say whose career, and Corrine did not ask, and they both knew. "I want to ask you one more thing and then I'll let you go," he said. "When you write it, are you going to write the date on the 1981 install. Because if you write the date, somebody is going to go and find out whose crew it was, and everybody who was in that program in 1981 knows whose crew it was, including me, including your father, and everybody else will find out by subtraction in about four minutes." He put his hands on his knees. "And if you do write the date, you had better have written down the 1974 date first, because a person who gives you one date and not the other is a person who is managing you, and a person who gives you both dates at once in the same paragraph is a person who has decided to be in the open." "I'd write both dates." "Then you'll be all right," said Verne Stiltz, "and I'll be all right, and the only person in this county who won't be all right is a man who paid nine hundred and fifty dollars in August for a piece of paper that says nothing." He got back in the truck. "Which is fair. That's what you pay for in this business. You pay for somebody else to say the sentence you needed said first, and then you find out it was the wrong sentence." Corrine wrote it in the notebook in the truck with the engine running and the windows up, and when she got to the second sentence she stopped and asked him a question she had not planned to ask. "Verne. Why didn't you come and see the field yourself before the twelfth of May?" Stiltz looked out at thirty-one acres of standing water and a levee built with a mule team. "Because then it would have been found," he said, "and once it was found somebody would have had to fix it, and fixing it costs eleven thousand dollars, and in the four years I've been in that office the district has been shut down twice for eight months at a time by a board that thinks tile is a word from a foreign language." He pulled his collar up. "I've been the man who knows where it's plugged for forty years and I've been comfortable, and comfortable is the whole of it, and I'd rather say that out loud in your truck than have somebody else find it." ---