The second release came a week later, and by then two of the neighboring farmers had walked out to the lower field in the evening, pretending to be passing by, and had stood at the fence and looked at the pond and the trial field without saying much, and Eben had pretended not to notice them noticing, because he knew that a thing has to be looked at in private before it can be believed in public. One of them, an old man named Wiley who farmed the ground above the creek, had even asked, gruffly, how much water the pond held, and Selma had told him the number, and Wiley had grunted, and walked away, and Eben had thought that a grunt, from Wiley, was very nearly a compliment.
The storm came on a Thursday night, three weeks later, when the pond had already been used twice for the staggered release, and the trial field was green, and the whole valley was watching the sky the way people watch a thing they cannot control. Eben had gone to bed early, tired from a day in the orchard, and he woke to the sound of rain on the roof, hard and sudden, the kind of rain that comes down in sheets and turns a ditch into a river in an hour. He lay in the dark and listened, and he thought about the pond, and about the low lip on the downhill side, and about the clay bottom, and about the water that was already in it, and he knew, the way a man who has farmed a valley for twenty years knows such things, that the pond was about to be tested by something bigger than a bucket.
He got up and dressed in the dark, and took a lantern and a shovel, and walked out into the rain to the lower field, and he found Selma already there, standing in the mud at the edge of the pond with her skirts plastered to her legs and her hair coming down in wet strands, watching the water rise. The pond was full, and the ditch was running hard, and the rain was coming down on the surface of the pond in a thousand small rings, and the low lip on the downhill side was holding, but only just, and Eben could see, by the light of the lantern, that the water was beginning to eat at the lip in one place, a small dark nick where the flow was strongest.
"We have to raise the lip," Selma said, without turning around, as if she had known he would come. "Not the whole lip. Just the place where it is cutting. And we have to open the release a little, to let some of the water out the way we planned, before it decides to let itself out."
Eben did not argue. He set the lantern on a stone where it would not blow out, and he took his shovel, and he began to cut sod from the bank above the pond, thick squares of grass and root, and Selma carried them, one at a time, and laid them on the lip where the water was cutting, pressing each one down with her hands and her boots, and Eben tamped them with the back of the shovel, and the rain kept coming, and the water kept rising, and for an hour they worked in the dark and the wet, building the lip up a hand's breadth at a time, while the pond pushed against their work the way water always pushes, patiently, without anger, but without stopping either.
At midnight the boy Nico came, barefoot in the mud, carrying a lantern of his own, and behind him came two more of the schoolchildren, and then Eben's neighbor from up the creek, a man who had said nothing kind about the pond when it was dug, and who now stood in the rain with a shovel over his shoulder and said, "I saw the light. Thought you might need hands." And then there were six of them, and then eight, working in the rain, carrying sod and stone, opening the release gate a finger's width at a time, watching the water level the way Selma told them to watch it, with a stick she had marked with notches and driven into the bank, so that anyone could see, by the light of a lantern, whether the water was rising or falling.