Eben walked her home that evening, along the ditch bank, past the pond, which lay still in the evening light, and past the trial field, green against the dusty gold of the comparison strip, and he said very little, because Eben was not a man of many words after a long day, but what he said, he said slowly, and it stayed with her. "My wife," he said, "used to say that a valley believes what it can see with its own eyes, and nothing else. Today the valley saw it. Not all of it, and not all at once, but enough of it. Halden saw it too, whatever he says about methods. A man does not ask for a second measure of a thing he believes to be false. He asks for it to be forgotten." Selma nodded, and they walked on in silence, and the pond reflected the evening sky, and the ditch ran clear between the pond and the field, and Selma thought about August, and about the second measurer, and about the vote that would come after the harvest, and she knew that the road ahead was still long, and that Halden would fight every step of it, and that the second measure might yet bring a surprise she could not foresee. But she also knew, as she turned toward home with her notebooks under her arm, that the morning had changed something that could not be unchanged: the water had been measured in the open, before witnesses, and it had said, in figures anyone could read, that less could be more, and that a field could be greener for being watered slowly, and that a schoolteacher's notebooks, kept faithfully for six years, were not figures on paper. They were water, remembered truly, and set down in time to be used.
Ivo Ketchum had been measuring water in Cedar Valley for eleven years, and he had learned two things about the work that no instrument could teach him. The first was that a man who measures honestly will always, sooner or later, be accused of measuring for somebody. The second was that the accusation usually comes from the man whose water the numbers have just taken away.
He stood at the headgate on Eben Yates's lower field on a Tuesday morning in high summer, with his rod in his hand and his field book open on a plank laid across two sawhorses, and he watched Lars Halden's second measurer walk the ditch line the way a man walks a fence he intends to find fault with. The man had come down from the county seat on Halden's money, carrying his own rod and his own chain and a face that said he had already been told what he was supposed to find. Ketchum did not resent him for it.
"Take your time," Ketchum said. "The water is not going anywhere. That is rather the point."
The second measurer did not answer at first. He set his rod in the ditch at the first station, where Ketchum's own mark was cut into the bank, and he read the depth, and he wrote it down, and he moved on to the second station without looking at Ketchum's book. Ketchum watched him go, station by station, and felt the familiar tightness in his chest that came whenever his work was about to be judged. It was not fear; he had checked his figures three times. It was the knowledge that numbers, once spoken aloud in a valley like this, stopped belonging to the man who measured them and started belonging to everybody who wanted them to mean something else.
Selma Ivers stood at the edge of the field with her hands clasped in front of her, watching the way she had watched the first measuring: still, attentive, saying nothing. She had her gauge notebooks under one arm, tied with twine the way she always tied them, and Ketchum could see the wear on the covers from six years of being carried to the creek and back. Beside her stood Eben Yates, his hat in his hands, his eyes on his orchard trees rather than on the men in the ditch, as if he could not bear to watch and could not bear to look away.
Halden himself stood apart, up by the headgate post, with his arms crossed and his jaw set. He had demanded this second measure at the last association meeting, in front of everyone, and he had demanded it in a voice that suggested he was doing the valley a favor by doubting its own surveyor. Ketchum had agreed, because there was nothing else an honest measurer could do, and because he had known, even then, that Halden's real quarrel was not with the measuring at all.