It was the boldest thing Rolf had ever said to his father, and he felt it land the way a person feels a stone land in water: with a ripple that goes further than the thrower intended. For a moment he thought his father might strike him, or turn his horse and ride away and not speak to him for a month. His father did neither. He stood by the basin, looking at the water, and Rolf saw, in his father's face, something he had never seen there before: not anger, but the beginning of a question. The question was whether a man who had been right about water for thirty years could be wrong about it now, and what it would cost him to find out.
"You will come to the association meeting," his father said finally. "And you will say what you have said to me. In front of them. If you are wrong, you will be wrong where everyone can see it. If you are right —" He stopped, and he did not finish the sentence, and Rolf understood, with a sudden clarity, that his father could not finish it, because finishing it would mean saying aloud what would happen if the schoolteacher was right, and what that would mean for everything he had built his standing on.
"I will come," Rolf said. "I will say it. And I will bring my book."
The meeting was held in the schoolhouse, because the association had no hall of its own, and there was a plain justice in that which Rolf did not point out but felt all the same: that the valley would decide its water in the room where its children learned their numbers. Selma sat near the front, with her notebooks tied with twine on her lap, and she did not look at Rolf when he came in, which Rolf was grateful for, because he did not want anyone to think this had been arranged between them. It had not been. That was the whole point, and also the hardest part to prove.
His father sat at the front table, in the commissioner's place, with his hands flat on the wood, and when the meeting came to order, he did something Rolf had not expected: he introduced his own son himself, in a voice that gave nothing away.
"My son has something to say about water," Lars Halden said. "He has measured it. Let him speak."
Rolf stood. He had never spoken in front of the association before, and his mouth was dry, and his hands were shaking the way Selma's had shaken after the second measure, and he understood, suddenly and completely, why she had shaken: not from fear, but from the strain of holding a truth still long enough for other people to look at it.
He spoke simply. He told them about the middle section, and the basin, and the turns, and the water used, and the fruit held, and the gopher, and the hot wind, and he read from his small book, date by date, without skipping the bad days. He did not praise Selma. He did not attack his father. He said, at the end, only this: "I did not set out to prove anyone right. I set out to find what was wrong with her field, because my father sent me to. What I found was that her field was not the thing that was wrong. Our way of using water was. And I would rather be the son who says so than the son who knows it and keeps quiet."
The room was silent. Then Eben Yates, from the back, said, "That is an honest book," and one of the older men, who had farmed beside Rolf's father for years, said, "Let the boy finish," though Rolf had finished, and then another man said, "Read the gopher part again," and Rolf did, and someone laughed, not unkindly, and the tension in the room broke the way tension breaks in a valley: not all at once, but in small releases, man by man, until the room was no longer a courtroom but a gathering of neighbors again.
His father did not speak during any of it. He sat with his hands flat on the table, looking at his son, and Rolf could not read his face, and did not try. He had said what he came to say. What his father did with it was his father's to decide, and Rolf had learned, from a season of writing things down, that you cannot measure another man's pride the way you measure water. You can only give him the numbers, and wait, and hope that the numbers are patient enough to outlast the pride.