Then he walked to his wagon, and he drove away, and Rolf stood on the steps with his small book in his hand, watching the dust settle, and thinking about the middle section, and the basin, and the water lying quiet in it, and about how strange it was that the hardest thing he had done all season was not digging, or measuring, or speaking in front of the association. The hardest thing had been telling his father the truth, plainly, without making it into a weapon, and letting his father decide what to do with it. And as he stood there, Selma came out of the schoolhouse, and she did not thank him, which he was glad of, because thanks would have made it into something between them, and it was not between them. It was between him and his father, and him and the field, and him and the numbers he had written down. She only nodded to him, once, the way one person nods to another when they have both stood in the same hard place and come out the other side, and Rolf nodded back, and then she walked away toward her house, with her notebooks under her arm, and Rolf walked toward his, with his small book in his hand, and above them the evening sky opened wide over the valley, and the creek ran on below, measured and unmeasured, waiting, as it always had, for the valley to decide what it would do with the truth it had been given — and for the first time that season, Rolf believed the valley might actually decide it.
On his way home, Rolf stopped by the middle section, as he did every night now, and he stood by the basin in the moonlight and listened to the water settling. The basin was full from the day's turn, and the ground below it was damp, and the trees stood dark and still against the sky, holding their fruit. He thought about his father, and about the promise made in front of witnesses, and about how a promise is itself a kind of measure: a line drawn, not in a book, but in a room full of people, that a man can be held to afterward. He did not know what his father would do when the season was done and the vote came. But he knew that he had done what he could do — he had measured, he had written, and he had spoken — and that the rest, like water, would go where the ground allowed it to go.
The morning of the vote, Selma Ivers woke before the light and went down to the creek with her notebooks, the way she had gone every morning for six years, and she measured the water before she measured anything else about the day. The gauge stake stood where it had always stood, driven into the bank below the schoolhouse field, and the water came up to the third notch from the bottom, which was low for the season but not yet frightening. She wrote the number down in the newest notebook, in the small, plain hand she had taught herself to keep steady even when her hands were not, and then she stood a moment with the pencil in her mouth and watched the creek run.
It ran the way it had run all summer: thin, clear, and honest. It did not care who owned the land it passed. It only went where the ground let it go, and lately, on Eben Yates's lower field, it had gone where Selma's numbers told it to go, and the field had answered in green.
She had not slept well. She had lain awake listening to the wind in the cottonwoods and rehearsing everything Lars Halden might say, and everything she might say back, and she had finally gotten up and made tea and read through Ivo Ketchum's report a third time, by lamplight, the way a person reads a letter they are afraid to misunderstand. The report was not long. Ketchum was not a long-winded man. It said, in his careful surveyor's hand, that the trial field had used less water than the flood-irrigated fields beside it and had produced more, that the holding pond had held through the summer storm, that the staggered releases had kept the ditch full at the lower end where it usually ran dry by July. It said these things in numbers, and numbers, Selma had learned, were the only things in Cedar Valley that did not raise their voices.