The ditch association was the valley's real government, though no one called it that. It was the body of men — and it was, in 1886, entirely men — who owned land along the creek and the ditches, and who met each spring to decide who would get water, and when, and for how long. The commissioner who chaired it was Lars Halden, fifty-five years old, a big man with a big voice and a bigger ranch in the upper valley, who had held the office for nine years and who ran the meetings the way he ran his ranch: firmly, quickly, and with very little patience for discussion once he had made up his mind. His method was flood irrigation, the old way: open the headgate wide, let the water run deep across a field until it stood in sheets, then close it and move on to the next field. It was the way his father had done it, and the way the valley had always done it, and it favored, as Selma's notebooks showed with embarrassing clarity, the ranches that lay highest and closest to the headgate — which is to say, it favored Lars Halden and the other big ranches of the upper valley, and left the lower fields, and the smallholders, and the orchard at the valley's foot, waiting for whatever water was left when the big fields had finished drinking.
She had watched this happen for six springs now, and each year she had written the numbers down, and each year the numbers had told the same story. This spring, for the first time, she had done something more than write them down. She had spent the winter evenings at her kitchen table, by lamplight, turning six years of daily readings into tables: the creek's flow in a wet spring and a dry one, the days each field had waited for its turn, the water lost to evaporation when a field stood flooded under a hot sun, the water that ran off the lower end of a flooded field and back into the creek, wasted, when a smaller, slower release would have soaked in where it was needed. The tables were not elegant. They were written in her plain schoolteacher's hand, with ruled lines and careful sums, and they said, in numbers rather than in words, that Cedar Valley was not short of water so much as it was wasteful with it, and that a different way of sharing it — measured turns, smaller releases, a holding pond to catch the night flow — would give every field its fair share, including the ones that had always waited longest.
She had not shown the tables to anyone yet. She had told herself, all winter, that they were a private exercise, a way of passing the long evenings. But that morning, standing at the gauge post with the water rising at her ankles, she had known that she was lying to herself. The tables were not private. They were a question she had been asking the creek for six years, and the creek had answered her, and now the question belonged to the valley, whether the valley wanted it or not.
The pupils were sent home at eleven, with their slates and their dinner pails, and the men began to arrive soon after, stamping the mud from their boots on the schoolhouse step. There were perhaps twenty of them, ranchers and orchardists and smallholders, men she knew by sight and by their children's names, men whose sons and daughters she had taught to read. They arranged themselves on the school benches, too big for the desks, their hats in their hands, and Lars Halden took his place at the teacher's table as if it were his own, which, for the purposes of the meeting, it was.
Eben Yates came in last, quietly, as he usually did. He was forty-five, a widowed orchardist who kept the orchard at the lower end of the valley, below the last ditch, where the water arrived last and sometimes did not arrive at all. Selma knew him the way she knew all the valley's parents: he had sent his children to her school, and he had come to the schoolhouse on winter evenings to mend the stove pipe and the roof, asking nothing in return. He kept, she had heard, a journal of his orchard, ten years of notes about which trees bore and which ones failed, and how much water each row had received. He sat at the back, near the stove, and nodded to her once, a small, respectful nod, and she nodded back.