She packed the notebooks into her satchel — all six years of them, though the newest one was the one that mattered most — and she packed Ketchum's report, and the wager terms with Halden's signature on them, and Eben's orchard journal, which Eben had pressed into her hands the evening before with a gruffness that did not quite hide his pride. "If they want a second witness," he had said, "let them have ten years of one." She had thanked him, and he had looked away, the way he always did when he was pleased, and she had walked home thinking that a man who kept a journal for ten years about trees understood something about patience that most of the valley had forgotten.
The meeting was to be held in the schoolhouse, because the schoolhouse was the only room in the valley big enough to hold the ditch association and neutral enough that no one could claim it belonged to his side. When Selma arrived, the desks had been pushed to the walls and the benches set in rows, and the room already smelled of dust and lamp oil and the sweat of men who had come in from the fields. Eben was there, sitting near the front with his hands folded, and Ketchum was there, standing by the window with his measuring rod leaning against the wall beside him like a rifle a soldier has set down but not forgotten. Rolf Halden was there too, sitting a little apart from the other young men, his hat in his hands, and when he saw Selma he nodded once, a short, serious nod, and she nodded back.
Lars Halden arrived last, as he always did, and the room quieted the way a room quiets when the man who runs it walks in. He was fifty-five, broad through the shoulders from a lifetime of ditch work, with a beard gone mostly gray and eyes that had spent so long looking at water that they seemed to hold some of its color. He carried no papers. He never carried papers. He carried authority the way other men carried tools, as something that belonged in his hands, and he took his place at the front of the room and looked out over the association, and for a moment Selma felt the old, familiar shrinking in her chest, the feeling she had felt at the spring meeting when she had first spoken up with her numbers and he had looked at her the way a man looks at a child who has interrupted the grown-ups' talk.
She had not shrunk then, in the end. She did not shrink now.
"Well," Halden said, "we're here to decide a thing." His voice filled the room without effort. "Some of you want to change the way this valley has watered itself since before most of you were born. Some of you think a schoolteacher's notebooks know more than the ditches your fathers dug. I aim to hear it all out, and then we'll vote, and whatever the vote says, we'll live with it. That's the association's way, and it will stay the association's way as long as I'm commissioner."
It was a fair opening, and Selma knew it was fair because Halden, for all his stubbornness, had never once cheated at the association's own rules. He had fought her with the rules. He had demanded a second measurer, and the second measurer had confirmed her. He had attacked her notebooks, and the headgate notches and Eben's journal had answered him. He had not lied about the numbers. He had only refused, for a long time, to believe what they meant. There was a difference, and Selma had come to respect the difference, even when it stood in her way.
The association's secretary, a thin man named Alder who kept the minutes in a hand so small it looked like sewing, read the motion aloud. It was written in plain language, the way Selma had written it, because she had insisted that no farmer should have to hire a lawyer to understand when his water would come. The motion said that beginning with the next watering, the valley would follow a rotation schedule: each farm would take water in its turn, measured at the headgate, for a set number of hours, and the holding pond on the lower field would be kept full as a reserve for the farms at the end of the ditch. It said the schedule would be kept by the ditch recorder, and that any member could see the record at any time. It said nothing about blame. It said nothing about the past. It only said what would happen next, and when.