What it was doing, in that first week, was working. The lower farms, the small places at the end of the ditch that had gone brown every July for as long as Eben had lived in the valley, stayed green. The women there did not carry buckets from the creek. The children there did not learn, that summer, what it meant to watch a field die at the edges. Eben saw a boy of about ten standing in a lower field one evening, barefoot in the damp earth where the water had run that day, and the boy was grinning at nothing in particular, the way children grin when the world has given them something they did not expect, and Eben thought that the boy would not remember this August as the summer the valley voted, but as the summer the water came, and that was as it should be.
In the second week, the test sharpened. A man named Garratt, who farmed a broad piece of upper ground and had voted nay at the meeting, opened his headgate out of turn on a Tuesday night, when the schedule said the water belonged to the lower farms. Eben found it in the morning, the gate raised and the water running strong into Garratt's rows, and the ditch below running thin, and he stood there a long time with his hands on his hips, looking at the water going where it was not supposed to go, and he felt the old anger rise in him, the anger of a man who has watched the strong take from the weak and called it the way of the world.
He did not go for Garratt with a shout. He had learned, over a summer of watching Selma fight, that shouting at a man only gives him something to shout back at, and that the schedule had been written precisely so that no one man would have to shout at another. He closed the gate himself, carefully, the way a man closes a door he intends to keep closed, and he walked to Garratt's house, and he knocked, and when Garratt came out, wiping his hands on his trousers, Eben said, very quietly, "Your turn is Thursday, Garratt. Today's water belongs below."
Garratt looked at him, and then at the ditch, and then at his own rows, green and satisfied, and something crossed his face that Eben recognized, because he had seen it on his own face in harder years: the look of a man who knows he has taken something and is deciding whether to be ashamed of it or to defend it.
"My ground was dry," Garratt said.
"Everybody's ground is dry," Eben said. "That's why there's a schedule. If you take Tuesday, the lower farms don't get Tuesday, and then they take Thursday, and then nobody has anything but a quarrel. That's the old way, Garratt. We voted it out."
Garratt was quiet a moment. Then he said, "I voted against it."
"I know you did," Eben said. "And you signed it anyway. That's what the association means."
Garratt looked down the ditch toward the lower farms, where the water was already running again, thin but steady, now that the gate was closed, and he nodded once, short and ungraceful, and he said, "Thursday, then," and he went back inside, and Eben walked home thinking that a schedule kept by one man's quiet word at another man's door was worth more than a schedule kept by a hundred speeches, because it meant the valley was learning to hold itself.
That was the worst of it, in the end. One gate, opened out of turn, closed again without a fight. Eben had braced himself for worse — for a night raid on the headgate, for a meeting called to repeal the vote, for Halden himself riding out to declare the schedule a failure — and none of it came. The valley grumbled, the way valleys always grumble in a dry August, but it grumbled while following the schedule, and that, Eben thought, was the difference between a valley that argues and a valley that breaks. A valley that argues still eats together at the end of the day.
He thought, too, about the previous dry year, because the dry weeks forced the comparison on him whether he wanted it or not. The year before, there had been no schedule, and the creek had run low, and the big ranches at the top of the ditch had taken what they wanted, when they wanted it, and the water had never reached the lower farms at all. He remembered the small field at the very end of the ditch, belonging to a widow at the very end of the ditch, whose beans had crisped in the rows and whose children had gone to live with kin in the next valley by September, and he remembered standing at his own gate that August and watching the water run past his orchard toward the big places, and feeling ashamed of his own green trees, because green trees bought with another family's water did not