Hollis's laugh stopped. "Creek?"
The creek that waters our north pasture, Clara said. "It runs a trickle now. Up past the boundary, on your ground, there's a ditch and a dam of fresh timber turning it aside."
Hollis spread his hands wide, the picture of an innocent man. "Mrs. Ward, that creek's wandered its own way for years. My men dug a drainage ditch, that's all. A man improves his own ground, that's his right."
Hollis went on, warming to his theme, about the ditches his own father had dug and the improvements a man made to his ground when he had the sense to make them. He spoke of the dry year as if it were a thief that had visited everyone equally, and of his own lower fields as if they had greened themselves. Elias listened, and he heard the shape of the lie: it was not one lie but several, laid over each other, and each one had a little truth in it, which was what made it hard to answer. Clara did not try to answer all of them. She asked one question. "When did your men dig it, Mr. Hollis?" Hollis blinked. "This autumn. September, maybe." "September," Clara said. "And the timber is green, cut within the month. September's timber would be seasoned by now, wouldn't it?" Hollis had no answer for that either, and his mouth worked for a moment before he found his bluster again.
A drainage ditch runs water away from a field, Clara said, and her voice stayed polite and level, the way a schoolteacher's stays level when a boy lies about his sums. "This ditch runs water toward your lower fields. And the dam is new. The timber is green pine, cut within the month, sap still in it. The earth hasn't grassed over. A ditch that old would have grass on it by now."
Elias watched Hollis's face. The red deepened, and not from the cold.
Now see here, Hollis said, and his voice went blustering and big, the way a man's voice goes when he is used to being the largest thing in the room. "You come onto my land with a book and a pencil and tell me about my own creek? I've run cattle here thirty years, girl. I don't take lectures from a bride of a week."
I'm not lecturing, Clara said. "I'm telling you what I saw. And I'm telling you that we intend to have our water back."
Hollis laughed again, but it was thinner this time. "Neighbors should get along, Ward. You ought to teach your wife that."
Elias felt the old heat rise in him, the heat that had always answered insults before thought could catch up. But this time something else rose with it, steadier and stranger: pride, not in himself, but in her. She had not raised her voice. She had not flinched. She had laid out facts the way other people laid out cards, and Hollis had no answer for them except noise.
My wife speaks for this ranch when she's right, Elias said, and his own voice surprised him with its quietness. "And she's right."
Hollis stared at him, and for a moment the bluster went out of the man like air out of a punctured tire. Then he recovered, and his smile came back, meaner than before.
Then prove it to the county, if you can, he said.
We will, Clara said.
They rode home in silence for a long while, the wind pushing at their backs, the sky pressing lower. Elias kept turning the morning over in his mind: the way she had stood on Hollis's porch and not given an inch, the way she had used politeness like a fence post, driven straight and true. He thought about his own temper, which had always been a fire he banked but never mastered, and about the fights it had cost him over the years — not many, but each one expensive. Clara had fought without fire at all, and she had won the morning without throwing a single punch.
You held your ground better than I would have, he said at last.
Clara glanced at him. "How would you have held it?"
I'd have hit him, Elias said. "And then I'd have had a lawsuit and no water."
She laughed then, a real laugh, startled out of her, and the sound of it in the cold air did something to his chest he did not have a name for yet.
They rode on, and after a while Clara spoke, not of Hollis but of what came next. "The deed names the creek," she said. "Your father's deed. And the county keeps a record of watercourses. If we ask the surveyor to walk the line, his map will show what the ditch did." Elias looked at her, and he understood something that had not occurred to him before: Clara fought the way she kept books — patiently, on paper, line by line, until the paper said what the truth said. It was a slower kind of fighting than his own, and it did not feel like fighting at all, which was why Hollis had not recognized it until it was too late. "You'd make a poor brawler," Elias said. "And you'd make a poor bookkeeper," she answered, and they rode the rest of the way home in a silence that felt, for once, like agreement.
The map stays in my coat, she said, patting it. "And the creek stays in his ditch. For now."