Halden called the meeting to order with a rap of his knuckles on the table, and he did not waste time. The snowpack had been good, he said, and the creek was running strong, and there was no reason this year should be different from any other. He announced the schedule in his big, certain voice: the upper ranches would take their turns first, as always, each for three full days of flood, beginning on Monday; the middle fields would follow; the lower fields, including Yates's orchard, would take what remained when the upper turns were done, as they always had. It was, he said, a fair schedule, because it was the schedule the valley had always used, and the valley had survived on it.
Selma sat at the side of the room, in the chair she usually occupied during meetings, with her hands folded in her lap and her notebooks in a stack on the bench beside her. She had told herself, coming in, that she would listen, and take notes, and say nothing. She had told herself that the meeting was not her place, that she was the schoolteacher, not a landowner, not a member of the association, and that the men in the room had been farming this valley since before she arrived.
But then Halden said, "And if there is any other business," in the tone of a man who expected there to be none, and she heard her own voice, clear and steady and entirely disobedient to her morning's resolution, say, "Mr. Halden, I have some figures, if the association will hear them."
The room went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when someone has said something unexpected. Halden looked at her, and his expression was not angry so much as surprised, and then patient, the way a man is patient with a child who has interrupted a conversation among grown people.
"Miss Ivers," he said, "this is a meeting of the ditch association. But we are always glad to hear from the schoolteacher, if it is brief."
She stood, and her legs were steadier than she had expected, and she picked up the top notebook and opened it to the page she had marked with a ribbon. She did not look at the men. She looked at the numbers, because the numbers did not require her to be brave. They only required her to be accurate.
"In the spring of 1882," she said, "the creek ran at sixteen inches on the third of April, which is higher than it runs today. The upper ranches took their full three-day floods, as scheduled. The lower fields waited eleven days for their first turn. Two orchards on the lower ditch lost a third of their blossom in that wait." She turned a page. "In 1884, a drier spring, the creek ran at eleven inches. The upper turns took nine days between them. The lower ditch ran dry for six days in May, and the smallholders below the last gate watered by hand from the creek, carrying buckets, because the schedule gave them no turn at all until the upper fields were finished."
She could feel the room listening now, not warmly, but attentively, the way people listen when numbers are being read aloud and they are waiting to see where the numbers are going. She went on, turning pages, giving the figures for each of the six springs, the flow at the gauge, the days of waiting, the water that had run off the flooded upper fields and back into the creek at the lower end, measured by the simple fact that the gauge below the last upper field had risen, on flood days, by as much as it fell at the headgate — water that had been taken, and used for nothing, and returned.
"My figures show," she said, and here her voice did not shake at all, which surprised her, "that if the water were released in smaller turns, measured at the headgate, and rotated among all the fields in order, rather than flooded field by field from the top down, every field in the valley would receive its share three days sooner in a wet spring, and five days sooner in a dry one. The creek carries enough water for all of us. It does not carry enough water for all of us to flood at once."
She closed the notebook. The silence that followed was longer than the silence before, and it had a different quality to it, heavier, as if the room were deciding what to do with what it had just heard.