第4章 The Man With the Tape Measure

The truck came up the lane on the ninth of April, gray and brand new, with a company name on the door in the plain orange-and-black that belongs to a company that has never had to ask anybody twice about a font. Darryl Phelan got out with a folding rule in his hip pocket and a boot he had not yet broken in, and he shook Boone's hand for a length of time that had to do some work it was not built for. "Ottilie says you're the one does the numbers." "She does numbers," Boone said. "I'm the one who's been out here since six." "I'll take either," said Phelan. He was somewhere past fifty, with the sunburned neck of somebody who has driven a great deal and thought about it, and he had the manner of a man who is genuinely interested in your answers and would be perfectly willing to leave without one. He walked the Hollow with Corrine for two hours and a quarter. He measured it himself. He put a peg in the north end and a peg in the south end and ran a string, and when the string came out twenty-two inches high above the standing water he said, "There's a crown on this." "There's a crown on it because a man built a crown on it," Corrine said. "There's a levee on the north edge. Three feet of fill in 1949. My grandfather's grandfather carried it up with a scraper and a mule team one bucket at a time." Phelan looked up the levee for a while. "Who put it in?" "Mules. That's how it got put in." "How many acres under it, do you figure?" "Twenty-two, maybe twenty-five. Depends how far out you take the water line, and in a year like this it's got another four." "Then on a good year I've got twenty-five acres at twenty-two inches, and I can put a two-cell battery plant on it and make it in nine years, maybe twelve if the clay does what I think it's going to do." He rolled the tape back into the case. "Mrs. Ambrose is asking two-eighty flat across the whole thirty-one." "That's for the crop ground too." "I'm buying the crop ground." "She said she wouldn't sign that." "She said that on the ninth, and I've been up here since half six this morning with the good truck." He smiled, and it was a decent smile, and it was the smile of a person who has learned that being pleasant for a full quarter hour is cheaper than being pleasant for a full quarter hour at two-eighty. "Ms. Ambrose. You and me. I don't need the deed today, I need to know where it's going. Because if it goes to gravel, I can go to my lenders this afternoon with a district soil scientist standing on the parcel telling them the ag value is low. And if it goes to a farmer, I have to tell them there's thirty-one acres of pond on the back of it and they will price it like pond." Corrine took the field bag off her shoulder and set it down at the levee, and took out the notebook, and did not open it. "You know what my classification says." "Class five, non-prime, hydric soils throughout, restricted use. Page eleven of a document dated March 2019 with your name at the bottom of the signature block." Phelan said it the way a man reads a plate number. "I've got it. My people have had it since February. That's the reason we're all sitting in this field instead of somebody else's field." "Then you have your answer." "I have my confirmation." He took his hat off and put it back on. "The trouble with a paper is that it can be changed. And a paper that changes hands, in the middle of a year, for money — the lenders get nervous about a man who can move the number. They read that as a man who knew the number could move, and that he moved it on the way in." "I didn't move it." "You were twenty-nine years old," Phelan said. "Everybody was twenty-nine years old. That's not an accusation, it's a fact about the business. What I need is for the lady who signed it to stand up in Dunnage Center on a Tuesday night and tell a room full of neighbors that the number is still the number, and that she's the one who says so, and that nobody bought the paper." Corrine looked at him for a moment. He was not a bad man. She had met a great many men who were not bad men, in rooms where somebody else was deciding something. "I'll write the letter," she said. "It doesn't say what you want it to say." "I know." "It says the classification stands and I'll defend it at the hearing." "Then write that," said Phelan, "and you've got my check for the crop land this afternoon, and I've got four other parcels I've looked at, and at least one of them hasn't got a mother in it." He went back up the slope past her and past the truck and past the man at the truck bed, and the two of them stood there listening to it go up the lane without either of them saying anything for about ninety seconds. "She'll hold," Boone said finally. "She'll hold till they're standing in the driveway with the certified check." "She didn't say she'd hold," Corrine said. "She said two-eighty and she said no twice and then she said the number's hers. That's a third thing." Corrine picked up the field bag. "Go do your ditching. You've got a Saturday." "It's Wednesday." "You've got a Saturday," she said, and went out to the truck, and the light on the north quarter was coming up off the water in the Hollow the way it always had in April, low and long and yellow, lying down flat along the furrows as if it had been laid there by somebody careful. She waited until the gray truck was off the county road before she opened her notebook, and what she wrote down was not about the crown or the battery plant. It was one line, in the shorthand she had used since school for the things she was not yet willing to think about in full. Riser running full. Outlet gate open. Therefore the restriction is between them. Write down where before you walk out there and decide. Then she drove back up into Dunnage Center and parked at the district office, which was two rooms over the courthouse annex and smelled of copier toner and wet boots, and she sat down at her own desk with the tile record for section eight open on the monitor, and she looked at the installation date, which was 1949, and at the later entries, which were repairs, and at the one line in 1974 that said MAIN OUT, CULVERT AT LANE TUR[N] PLUGGED, and at the 1998 entry, which was the wettest year on record, and which said only what it said. The office had emptied out at five and the radiators had started doing their clicking all over the building, the way they did from the first week of March, and she sat there long past the hour she was supposed to be leaving because the alternative was to go up to Third Street and put the question to a woman of eighty-three and hear a no. ---