water arrived last in every season and sometimes, in a dry year, did not arrive in time to matter. It was not a large field — perhaps six acres, sloping gently toward the creek — and it was bordered on one side by the ditch and on the other by a row of old apple trees that had been planted by Eben's father and that bore, Eben said, in the years when the water came early, and sulked, in the years when it came late.
"This is the field," Eben said, stopping at the lower corner, where a wooden stake marked the turn of the ditch. "It takes water last. It always has. If your rotation can make this field green on time, Miss Ivers, no man in the valley will be able to say the water was in your favor. The water is never in this field's favor."
Selma looked at the field, and at the ditch, and at the creek beyond it, and she thought about the terms she had written, and about whether they were fair — not fair to her, but fair to the trial, because a trial that favored her would prove nothing, and she had no interest in proving nothing beautifully. She chose the trial plot then, with Eben's agreement: the lower half of the field, nearest the creek, would be worked by rotation, watered in measured turns from a small holding pond they would dig at the ditch's end, with the releases staggered so that the water came in the evening, when the sun was low and the evaporation least. The upper rows of the same orchard, on the same soil, under the same sky, would be worked by flood, as always, taking their turn when the schedule gave it. The same trees, the same weather, the only difference the way the water was given — and the county surveyor, measuring both, week by week, would say which way had served the ground better.
Eben nodded, slowly, the way he nodded at things he had already decided, and he said, "Then the field is yours for the season, Miss Ivers. Not as a gift. As a loan, with the terms written down, so that no one can say afterward that it was charity, or that it was rigged. I will sign beside you."
She thanked him, and her voice was steadier than she felt, because she understood what he was risking alongside her: his standing in the association, such as it was, and his neighborliness with men who had known him for years, and the quiet of his life, which he valued. He was risking those things for a schoolteacher's numbers, and for a lower field that had never once been watered on time, and she did not take that lightly.
They walked back to his house together, and she spread her draft on his kitchen table, beside his orchard journal, and together they went over the terms, line by line, the way people go over a deed: the trial would run one full season, from the first irrigation in May to the last picking in October; the measuring would be done weekly by the county surveyor, with a gauge board at each plot's headgate and a record kept in duplicate, one copy for the surveyor and one for the association; the stake would be her wages for the summer term, held in trust by the surveyor until the season's end; if the trial field, worked by rotation, used less water and yielded as much or more than the flood-worked rows, the association would adopt the rotation for the whole valley the following spring; if it did not, her wages would be forfeit, and she would bring no more figures to the association, and the schedule would stand as it had always stood.
"It is a hard bargain," Eben said, when they had finished reading.
"It is meant to be," Selma said. "A bargain that costs nothing proves nothing. Halden will not sign a trial he expects to lose, and he will not sign one that costs him nothing to refuse. He will sign this one because he believes he cannot lose it."
Eben looked at her for a long moment, and then he smiled, a small, dry smile that she had not seen on his face before, and he said, "You have a gambler's understanding of men, Miss Ivers, for a schoolteacher."