feel like a blessing. He had not spoken about it then. No one had. That was the old way: everyone saw it, and no one said it, and the widow left, and the valley went on, and called it weather.
This August was different, and the difference was not that the sky was kinder — the sky was, if anything, harder — but that the water was shared, and sharing, Eben was learning, was not a feeling. It was a schedule, kept.
In the days after Garratt's gate, Eben found himself doing something he had not done in years: he began to visit the lower farms, not on business, but to look. He told himself he was checking the ditch, and he was, but he was also checking something else, something he did not have a name for until Selma named it for him one evening when she walked the ditch line beside him, her notebook under her arm, her skirts brushing the dry grass.
"You want to see it hold," she said, when he admitted, awkwardly, that he had been down to the lower farms three times that week. "That's not spying, Eben. That's what a witness does. You watched the trial field all summer. Now you're watching the valley."
"I watched the trial field because it was mine to lose," he said.
"And now the valley is yours to lose," she said, "because you lent it your field, and your name, and your journal. That's what lending means. You don't get to stop caring once the papers are signed."
They walked together to the holding pond, and the pond lay low but steady, its surface darkening with the evening, and Selma knelt and measured it with a marked stick, and wrote the number down, and Eben thought about how strange it was that a woman kneeling in the dust with a stick could look, to him, more like authority than any commissioner he had ever known. Not because she was loud. She was never loud. Because she wrote things down, and then she did what she had written.
"Do you think it will hold?" he asked her, and he meant the schedule, and the valley, and the dry weeks, all at once.
"I think it has held so far," she said, "which is all any honest person can say about a thing in the middle of it. The rest is August, and August hasn't finished with us yet."
August had not finished. In the middle of the second week, a young farmer from the middle farms came to Eben's door in the evening, hat in his hands, and asked, plainly and without shame, for an extra hour of water out of turn, because his beans were curling and his children were frightened and he did not know what else to do. Eben knew the man. He was a good farmer, a quiet one, the kind who voted the way his father had voted and then lived with it either way. Eben sat him down at the kitchen table and poured him coffee, and he did not say yes and he did not say no, and instead he opened his orchard journal to the page for the previous dry year, and he showed the man the entry for the August when the big ranches had taken everything, and the entry for the September when the widow at the end of the ditch had left, and he said, "If I give you an hour out of turn, I take it from someone below you. That's not a judgment on your beans. That's arithmetic. The schedule is the only thing standing between your beans and that widow's field."
The young farmer looked at the journal a long time, and then he said, "Then I'll take my turn, and I'll pray for rain like everyone else," and he went home, and Eben sat at the table after he had gone, with the coffee gone cold, and he thought about how close the valley always was to breaking, and how the breaking never announced itself with trumpets, but with a single reasonable request, made by a good man, at a kitchen table, in a dry week.