What actually happened, in the middle section, was this: the trees took less water, and held their fruit longer, and the ground between the rows stayed damp two days after a turn, where the flood sections dried to dust in one. He wrote it down. He wrote it down on the days when it was true, and he did not write it down on the days when it was not, because there were days when it was not — a hot wind one week that dried everything equally, a gopher that cut a small channel and stole a turn's water before Rolf found it. He wrote those down too. A record that only records the good days, he had learned from watching Selma, is not a record. It is an advertisement.
It was the gopher week that decided him, in a way. He had found the cut channel in the morning, and he had mended it, and he had stood there with mud on his boots thinking about how easy it would have been, in his father's way, to blame the water, or the season, or the schoolteacher's ideas. Instead he had blamed the gopher, which was the truth, and fixed it, which was the work, and the section had recovered by the end of the week. That, more than any number, was what Selma's way had given him: a way of meeting a problem that did not require finding someone to be angry at.
He should have known his father would find out. A valley is not a place where a man digs a basin and divides a field in secret, not when his father's hired men eat at his father's table and his father's friends ride past his father's upper field every day on their way to somewhere else. Rolf had not hidden it, exactly. He had simply not announced it. And in a valley, those two things are different for about a week, and then they are the same.
His father came on a Thursday, in the late afternoon, riding up the track with his shoulders set the way Rolf had known since childhood meant a reckoning. He did not dismount at the house. He rode straight to the middle section, and he sat his horse there, looking at the basin and the divided turns, and he did not speak for a long time. Rolf stood beside the basin with his small book in his hand, and he waited, because there was nothing else to do, and because he had learned, from Selma of all people, that waiting is sometimes the most honest thing a person can do.
"Explain this," Lars Halden said at last.
Rolf explained it. He explained it the way he had written it: the turns, the basin, the water used, the fruit held, the ground damp for two days, the gopher, the hot wind, all of it, without leaving out the days when it had not worked. He did not mention Selma's name until he had finished the numbers, and that was deliberate too, because he wanted his father to hear the field before he heard the argument.
His father listened. Rolf had expected interruption, and anger, and the reasonable tone that was worse than anger. What he got was silence, and then a question he had not expected.
"Did she put you up to this?"
"No," Rolf said. "She did not know. I went to look at her field because you sent me to find what was wrong with it. I found something else. I wrote it down. That is all."
"And you believed what you wrote more than what your father taught you."
"I believed what I measured," Rolf said. "Father, I measured it myself. With Ketchum's rod, and then with my own. The middle section took less water and held its fruit. That is not her word against yours. That is the field's word against both of us."
His father dismounted then, slowly, the way an older man dismounts when he does not want anyone to see that his knees hurt, and he walked to the edge of the basin, and he looked down into the water lying there, quiet and brown and unremarkable.
"You are my son," he said. "And this is my ranch. And you have taken a schoolteacher's idea and dug it into my ground without asking me."
"I am your son," Rolf said. "And that is why I am telling you, instead of letting you hear it from someone else. I did not ask because I knew what you would say. And I knew what you would say because you said it to her, in front of the whole association, before you had measured anything yourself."