第16章 The Hearing, Part Two

The nineteenth of August fell on a Wednesday and the room was fuller than the twelfth had been and Corrine arrived at five o'clock because Ottilie Nesbit had asked her to be early, which was a sentence that took her a full second to parse the first time she heard it and about four minutes to be alarmed by the second. Ottilie Nesbit, planning director, forty-four, county employee, twenty-one years, no farming in her own background and none in her maiden name and one brother two counties west who had made a great deal of money out of a very small amount of ground. "I've read your report," she said, "and I've read four opinions that contradict it, and I've read the 1974 card. I'm putting all of it in the record and I'm telling you now so that nothing that happens tonight is a surprise to either of us." She had her coat over her arm and a folder under it. "I have to tell you that I have been instructed by two commissioners, by your employer, and by at least one person who is not on this commission but is very interested in it, to consider your recusal as a question rather than a formality." "I know." "Do you know what it does if I rule that it isn't a formality?" "It means the district's review is out and the field goes back to standing water in the record." "It means the field goes back to standing water in the record and the commission decides on a gravel application with a 2019 classification in its file and no contrary evidence of any kind." Nesbit held her eye. "And it means that I am the person who threw it away, on the record, in a room, with a hundred and twenty people in it, and that the person who gave it to me is named Ambrose and lives two miles from here." "What's your ruling." "My ruling is that a resident who recuses herself from an agency review and speaks as a resident is the oldest procedure in the world and I have declined to rule against it, and my ruling is going to cost me either one commissioner or my job and I have already told my husband which one I would rather have." She opened the folder. "But I want two things from you tonight and one of them is not a favor." "Name them." "I want you to describe the method. I want it on the record, in plain words, so that a person with a high school diploma and an interest can follow it, and so that nobody can later say that a soil scientist did something inscrutable to a township. Can you do that?" "Yes." "The second thing is harder." Nesbit's voice went flat. "I want you to tell them what it costs. Not the number on the form. What a family is made to do, over a period of years, to hold thirty-one acres that a piece of paper says aren't worth holding. Because that is the part of this hearing that is actually about anything, and nobody else at this table is going to say it, including me." "They'll throw me out of the room." "They'll throw you out of the room in about four minutes and then you can come back in for the vote," the planning director said, "and I will have made a note in the file that the interruption was prejudicial, which will at least give somebody else something to complain about next year." The recessed matter came up at nine forty. Phelan did the professional thing and put four photographs on the easel, and one of them was the one Corrine had taken on the second of July with a survey tape in the frame and a date written on a scrap of paper and held in her teeth, which had been reproduced in the applicant's own packet without a caption, because it was the photograph of a new open culvert, and it was honest, and it belonged to somebody else. Then Corrine Ambrose explained hydric soils to a room of a hundred and twenty people in Fetterling for fifty-one minutes. She started with water, and how you can tell whether a soil holds water by looking at the color of the dirt, and how the color has a name that you can learn, and she said the word gray three times in the first ten minutes and made people say it back to her, and by the fifth minute somebody in the third row was holding up a fistful of the dirt sample she had brought in a coffee can and asking whether this was the gray one. She explained the crown. She explained the tile, and the fall of the ground, and what a fall of ground is, and why half an inch in twenty feet is the difference between a field and a pond, and she drew it on the flip chart with the district's ruler, and she made the ruler stay down at one side because the room was too warm and everyone was too tired to argue about it. And then she said what it cost, and she said it without notes. She said a family had bought ground in 1963 that they could not afford, and worked it for thirty years, and lost three crops in the decade before they owned it. She said a woman had walked out into that field every week of every summer of her life and read the water, and had marked a high-water mark with a stake in 1949, twice, in June and September, and had known where the crown had to go before there was any money for it. She said a man had carried three feet of fill onto the north edge with a mule team and a scraper, one bucket at a time, over two winters, and had gone to a schoolhouse for two hundred and ten dollars from a home economics fund because the tile could not wait, and that he had never liked that part of it and had never let anybody in the family hear about it. She said the district had written down the fix in 1974 and had stopped looking, and that a tree had gone over and a grade had been laid flat by a man doing what he was told, and that a field had spent forty-five years with a bar in a pipe under a lane while the paperwork said it had been clear. She said her own name was at the bottom of page eleven, and that she had written it in nine days in 2019, and that she had known in 2019 that a year like 1998 had happened, and that she had classified the field on the water instead of on the drain, and that she would have caught it if anyone had asked her one question in the fourth week of August, and nobody had, and she had not written down that nobody had. The room was completely quiet. "A twenty-acre field that will grow corn and beans and alfalfa and drain in four hours in the worst week of the worst year," she said, "is worth something. I don't know what. I have looked at every comparable sale in this county for three days and the closest one is from 2019 and it was on land with no road and no house and a creek that took the good soil off it in 1984. I will not stand up here and tell you a number, because I do not have one, and because the only people who have one are the two sides of this hearing and they are not the same number." Somebody in the back said, "Whose side is that." "Mine," Corrine said. "I'm a resident of this township and I'm the person who wrote the paper. That's all I've got tonight." The chair ruled the interruption prejudicial, in the note in the file, exactly as she had said she would. The vote was three to two to approve the conditional use on the north field, subject to eleven conditions and one more, and the one more was Condition Twelve, which Ottilie Nesbit read into the record herself, in the flat voice of a woman who has written the sentence she intends to be held to. That the applicant shall file with this commission, within ninety days of the date hereof, a drain age report prepared by a certified soil scientist, describing the condition of all subsurface drainage structures serving the parcel; and shall report to the commission in writing before any earth-moving within the undeveloped portion of the parcel, and shall not commence earth-moving within three hundred feet of the standing water line of the adjacent low ground lying within Section Eight, until such time as the tile main serving said low ground has been exposed, photographed, sounded and certified as clear. Darryl Phelan did not look up from his table. Boone Ambrose looked up. ---