The new rotation schedule was written out that same afternoon, on the schoolhouse table, in Alder's small, sewing hand, and it was signed by the association's members one by one as they came forward. Selma signed it as ditch recorder, her hand steady, and Ketchum signed it as witness, and Eben signed it with the blunt, careful signature of a man who does not write often but means what he writes. Halden signed it last. He did not speak as he signed. He only took the pen, wrote his name in the commissioner's place, and set the pen down, and the sound of it on the wood was very small in the big room, and very final.
Outside, the light was going gold over the valley, and the creek ran thin and clear past the schoolhouse field, and Selma walked home with the signed schedule folded in her satchel beside her notebooks, and she thought about the third notch from the bottom that morning, and about the two votes, and about the dry weeks that were coming, and she understood that winning a vote was not the same as winning a summer. The vote had given the valley a schedule. The summer would decide whether the valley kept it.
Eben walked with her as far as the lane to his orchard, and for a while neither of them spoke, because there are some victories that feel too fragile to talk about aloud, as if speaking might frighten them off. At last Eben said, "Two votes. That's a thin rope to hang a valley on."
"It's the rope we have," Selma said. "And it held today."
"It held," Eben agreed, "but ropes fray, Selma. The dry weeks will pull at it. The men who voted nay didn't change their minds because they lost. They only agreed to be bound, and being bound is not the same as believing."
"I know," she said. "I counted the nays as carefully as the ayes. Nineteen men who think I'm wrong. Nineteen men who will be watching the creek in August and waiting for it to prove them right."
"Then let them watch," Eben said. "Watching is what the schedule asks of them. They don't have to love it. They only have to follow it, and the creek will do the rest." He stopped at his gate, and he looked back toward the schoolhouse, where a lamp still burned in the window, and Lars Halden's broad shape moved behind it, putting the benches back against the walls the way he always did after a meeting, as if order in a room could stand in for order in a valley. "He stayed to lock up," Eben said quietly. "That's something. A man who meant to break a vote wouldn't bother locking the room it was taken in."
Selma thought about that all the way home, and it steadied her more than she expected. Halden had fought her to the end, and he had lost, and he was still putting the benches back. That was not surrender. It was duty, and duty, she was learning, was a sturdier thing than agreement, because duty did not depend on how a man felt when he woke up in the morning.
At the schoolhouse field she thought, too, about the farms at the end of the ditch, the small places that had gone dry every July for as long as she had kept her notebooks, and she thought about the women there who had carried water in buckets from the creek when the ditch failed, and about the children who had learned, too young, what it meant when a field went brown at the edges. The schedule would give those farms their turn, measured and certain, and for the first time since she had come to Cedar Valley, the water would not simply go to whoever stood nearest the headgate with the strongest gate. It would go where the measure said it should go, and that, she thought, was a kind of fairness the valley had never tried before, and fairness, like a new ditch, would have to be walked every day to be believed.
She stopped at the gauge stake on her way home, as she always did, and she measured the water once more before dark, and she wrote the number down, and under it she wrote a single line, not a number at all, but the first line of a new book she had not yet admitted she was keeping: *Today the valley chose to measure.*