"My father cut the first of those," Eben said, "the year he built this gate. And every man who kept this gate after him cut his own, when the water stood at its highest in the spring, and at its lowest in the late summer. It was how they remembered. Before there were books, there were posts."
Selma stepped up beside him, and she opened one of her notebooks — not the newest, but one from the middle years, its pages soft with handling — and she laid it open on the plank beside Ketchum's field book, and she began to read, in her clear schoolteacher's voice, the spring high-water entries for six years, one after another, giving the dates and the depths as she had written them.
Ketchum watched Halden's face as she read. He watched the second measurer, who had taken out his own rod again and was holding it against the post, measuring the height of each cut, and nodding, almost against his will, as each of Selma's numbers matched a cut in the wood.
The first year matched. The second matched. The third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth — each spring high-water mark in Selma's book stood at the same height as a knife cut in a post she had never claimed to have made, cut by men who had been dead or gone before she ever came to the valley.
"That post was here before I arrived," Selma said, quietly, when she had finished. "I did not cut those marks, Mr. Halden. I only learned to read them. And then I wrote down what I read, year after year, so that the next person would not have to guess."
Halden stared at the post. For a moment — a single, unguarded moment — Ketchum saw something cross the commissioner's face that was not anger and not calculation. It looked, to Ketchum's surprise, almost like grief: the look of a man who has just understood that the thing he has been fighting is not a person at all, but a fact, and that facts do not get tired, and do not get bought, and do not go away because a powerful man wishes they would.
But the moment passed. Halden was a man who had held his position for a long time, and long-held positions do not surrender to a single morning's evidence.
"A post can be cut by anyone, at any time," he said. "And a journal can be written to match a post, after the fact, by a person who has seen the post."
It was weaker than his first attack, and everyone standing there knew it, including, Ketchum thought, Halden himself. But it was enough to keep the doubt alive, and doubt, in a valley, is often all a man needs to keep things as they are for one more season.
Eben Yates, who had been silent while Selma read, now went back to his house without a word, and came out again carrying a book Ketchum had never seen: a thick, battered volume, its leather cover cracked, its pages stained with the sap and soil of ten years of orchard work.
"This is my orchard journal," Eben said, and he laid it on the plank beside Selma's notebook. "Ten years. Every spring I wrote how many trees bore, and how much water the field took, and what the fruit weighed at picking. I did not write it for anyone. I wrote it because an orchardman who does not write down what he did will do the same wrong thing twice."
He opened it to the years that matched Selma's notebooks, and he began to read — not in a schoolteacher's voice, but in a farmer's voice, slow and plain — the yields for each year, and the water each year had taken, and Ketchum, who had a surveyor's ear for patterns, heard what Eben was showing them before Eben had finished the second year: that the years Selma's notebooks called wet were the years Eben's journal called fruitful, and the years she called dry were the years his trees had borne little, and that the two records, kept by two different people for two different reasons, rose and fell together like two lines drawn by the same hand.
"No one told me what to write," Eben said. "And no one told her. We kept our books apart, for our own reasons, and they agree. That is not fabrication, Mr. Halden. That is the valley, telling the same story twice."