第5章 What the Old Man Remembered

Eldon Duplantis lived in a house the color of a filing cabinet on Third Street in Dunnage Center, and he had been running the conservation district for thirty-one years and had retired from a building he no longer had keys to, and he kept his opinions in a drawer and could produce any of them on request. He was eighty-one. He had hired Corrine in 2016, taught her the auger method, and fired her in 2021 for a thing she still had not entirely forgiven, and the two of them had spent the five years since in a peace that functioned like a peace. She told him the whole thing over coffee, from the form with the penciled acreage to the man in the new truck. He listened the way he had always listened, which was with his eyes on the middle distance and his hands flat on the table, and he did not interrupt once, which from Eldon Duplantis was a considerable performance. Finally he said, "Page eleven." "Page eleven." "Give me your book." She took it out of the bag. He turned to page eleven and put his glasses up and read it standing up, which he did not need to do and which she understood to be part of the ceremony. He got to the bottom of the signature block, and read it again, and then he turned back up the page with one finger. "Here," he said. "Restricted use. And here. Hydric soils throughout. And here it says, and I want you to hear the word, delineation." He looked up. "Did you delineate that yourself?" "Eldon, I did the whole section." "You delineated the low areas on the Hollow with what?" "With the county's aerial. The 2017 flight. And I ground-truthed it in August, and the standing water was exactly where the imagery said it was, because in August of 2017 the Hollow had water in it in the third week of the month, which is not supposed to happen, and I walked it with a probe and a tape and I wrote down where the water ended." "So the water you saw was real water." He set the book down. "The question is what the water was doing in August." "It hadn't drained since June." "Then the delineation is right and the acre is what I called it, and the man's got his number and the number's got your name on it, and there's no door in that wall." Eldon Duplantis folded his hands. "What you want me to tell you is that I should have caught something in 2017 and I did not." "I want to know what you'd have caught." "Time. You did it in a week and a half. You were twenty-nine and I had you on four sections and the Gilbertson file, and if you want to lay it on somebody, lay it on the fact that a twenty-nine-year-old is faster than a sixty-one-year-old and you did not leave me a gap in the schedule to argue with you about." He said it without heat. "Now. You asked me one thing and you asked it sideways. Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?" "I'm thinking the tile main is full." "You're thinking it's full because somebody shut it." "I'm thinking it's full and I can't find out why from the top of the slope." Corrine turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. "And if I can find out why, then I'm going to have an opinion about 1949 fill on the north edge and about what the crown does to a field that sits under water eight days a year, and I will have to decide whether that opinion is worth putting in a report with my name on it." Eldon Duplantis looked at her for a long moment, and something moved at the corner of his mouth that in a warmer man would have been pride. "That," he said, "is the first sentence you've said to me in five years that I don't want to argue with." "There's a man in that field with a new truck who says the paper is what makes the sale cheap. He's not lying. It's what makes the sale cheap." "Then the question isn't whether the paper's honest. The paper's honest. I put my hand on it and you'd put yours." Eldon sat back. "The question is what you'd have to add to it to make a man afraid to change it. And I don't know the answer to that, and I've been in this business fifty-eight years, which is long enough to know that when I don't know the answer, the correct action is to go and look at the ground." He got up, went to the kitchen, and came back with a box file of the district's old records, which he had brought into the living room in 2019 when his wife died and had not opened since. "There is one thing in there you should see," he said, "and then I'm going to make you take it away and stop asking me about it." He put a folder on the table. Inside were about sixty index cards, the district's drainage survey cards from the years when the district had employed four men and had money, and a card at the bottom of the stack from the summer of 1974 with three letters in the top right corner and a line of typing that had been typed on a typewriter with a missing e. "Read the top line," he said. Corrine read it. It said: LOW AREA SEC 8 T6N R4W, INSP. LANE CULV. OBST. LOC. AND REM. FREEBOARD RESTORED. OUTFALL VERIFIED. "That's what Ida Roegner's paper says." "It is. Word for word." Eldon took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt, which he did when he was about to say something he had been carrying for a while. "I wrote it. I was in the office that August with a summer helper and a truck I was paying for out of my own pocket, and I was twenty-eight years old and I had never inspected a drainage structure in my life, and I did the honest, ignorant, young thing, which was to go and find out where the water was going and fix it and write down what I found." "You wrote outfall verified." "I wrote outfall verified," Eldon Duplantis said, "because a card with a hole in it is a card nobody can use, and because I was told the run was good, and because the word on the form was the word on the form. And it is also true that I did not walk down to the creek on that trip, and that I could have, and that if I had, I would have had to ask a man who had laid it six years before why it was flat." The two of them sat with that for a while. "You've never said this to anybody." "There is nobody to say it to. I retired in 2010. I have had a district office and two cards and a swimming pool and a woman who died in 2019, and there has not been one single day since the summer of 1974 on which I did not know exactly what that line meant, and not one single day on which it cost me anything, because nobody ever asked." He put the glasses back on. "And then in May of this year a young woman stood up in a room with two hundred people in it and said that she had classified a field on the water instead of on the drain. And I sat in row six and listened to that, and after it I drove home and I got this out." He squared the folder on his knee. "So here's the thing I would like you to think about, and then I'll let it go. That line was written by me at twenty-eight and it is now in a cabinet in a basement and it is the only thing in this county that has ever mattered to me and I never told a soul." He looked at her. "You are not going to get the chance I didn't get. You are going to get asked, because you stood up. And when you're asked, you are going to have a choice, and if you're half the person I was at twenty-eight you will write outfall verified, because it's the word on the form and the card is no good with a hole in it and there is a young man who needs his card to be usable." "I'm not going to do that." "I know you're not. I've known it since about eleven o'clock tonight." Eldon Duplantis stood up and picked up the folder and held it out to her. "Take it out of my house. It's no use to me and it's a liability to me, and the only way a thing like that stops being a secret is for it to become a document." Corrine did not take it. "You keep it," she said. "When I find out whether that run reaches the creek, you'll bring it down yourself and we'll write one addendum with both cards in it and both names on it, yours and mine, in the order they happened." "That is going to cost me." "It's going to cost both of us," Corrine said, "and it is going to be in the record, and in twenty years somebody is going to read it and think: those two knew. And that is the best thing that can possibly be said about either of us." He stood in the middle of his own living room with the folder in his hand and an expression on his face that Corrine had not seen on it before, and then he went and put it in the drawer in the kitchen, where he kept his opinions, and shut it. She got up to go and he followed her to the door with his hand on the frame, the way he had done at every office door he had ever stood in. "Corrine." "I'm not doing anything with this until I know." "I know you're not. I'm going to say the other thing and you're going to do what you do with it." He waited until she turned around. "Your grandmother Ona Lee walked down into that field every week of every summer of her life and read the water the way some women read a calendar. I met her twice. Both times in the field. Both times she was looking at a place where I'd already been standing for five minutes, and both times she told me something I hadn't seen." "What did she tell you?" "Second time, she told me there was a culvert under the north lane at the turn, and that it had a bar in it, and that if it were ever cleared it would take the water off her low ground in about four hours." He nodded once. "I never went and looked. I had reasons. You know the kind I had." "I'm going to look." "I'd have been forty-six if I'd gone in 1974," Eldon Duplantis said, "and I had a girl at home who was about your age then, and I decided the field was not my business. So go and look, and when you have looked, you do with it what a person does, and not what a district does." ---