Then she closed the notebook, and walked on toward home, with the creek running beside her in the dusk, and the signed schedule in her satchel, and the whole dry end of summer still to come.
The dry weeks came the way Eben Yates had known they would come: not all at once, like a storm, but day by day, like a man growing older, so that you did not notice the change until one morning you looked at the creek and realized it was thinner than it had been the week before, and the week before that, and you could not say exactly when the thinning had begun, only that it had, and that it would go on.
By the second week of August the sky over Cedar Valley was a hard, polished blue, without a cloud in it large enough to cast a shadow, and the heat sat on the orchard from morning until night, and the creek ran low and clear over its stones, and every man in the valley knew, without being told, that this was the test. Not the vote. The vote had been words on paper, signed in a schoolhouse with a lamp burning. This was water, or the lack of it, and water had never once cared what a room full of men had voted for.
Eben walked his orchard every morning before the heat settled, the way he had walked it for ten years, and he read the trees the way other men read newspapers. The apple trees on the upper rows were holding well, their leaves still dark and supple, and the peach trees on the lower ground, near the holding pond, were heavy with fruit that was beginning to color. He stopped at each tree and touched the soil at its base, and the soil was damp where the rotation had brought water in its turn, and dry where it had not yet come, and the pattern of damp and dry across his ground matched the schedule Selma had written, hour for hour, almost exactly. That was the thing that struck him, morning after morning: not that the system worked in some grand, miraculous way, but that it worked the way a good tool works, quietly, and without asking to be admired.
He kept his orchard journal as he always had, in the evenings, at the kitchen table, writing down what the day had given and what it had taken. Ten years of entries stood behind him on the shelf, and he had learned, over those ten years, that a journal tells the truth about a season in a way memory never does, because memory forgives the bad weeks and flatters the good ones, while a journal only writes down what happened. This August he wrote down the hours the water came, and the hours it did not, and the state of the fruit, and the color of the leaves, and on the fourteenth day of the dry spell he wrote a line he had not written in any August he could remember: *No tree lost. Fruit swelling. Water enough, shared.*
It was not plenty. He was honest about that in the journal, because a journal that lies is worse than no journal at all. It was enough, and enough, in a dry August, was a kind of wealth he had not expected to feel again.
The valley held together in the first week, and Eben watched it hold with a wariness he could not quite set aside, because he had seen valleys come apart before, and he knew that the coming apart usually started small: a gate left open a little too long, a man taking an extra hour because his field looked thirstier than his neighbor's, a quiet arrangement between two friends that left a third man dry. He walked the ditch line twice a day, once in the morning and once at dusk, not because the schedule asked him to — the schedule asked only that each man keep his own gate — but because he had appointed himself, without telling anyone, the valley's unofficial witness, and he wanted to see with his own eyes what the rotation was doing.