His wife had died five years before, in the winter of 1881, of a fever that had taken her in a week, and he had kept the orchard going since then with his own hands and the help of his two grown children, who lived now in town and came out on Sundays. The orchard was not large — forty trees in four rows, apples and pears, planted by his father on the lower ground where the soil was deep and the frost settled late — and it was, by any honest measure, a good orchard that produced less than it should, because it was watered last and sometimes not at all. He had accepted that, the way he had accepted most things about the valley: as weather, as fate, as the way the water ran downhill and the men uphill took their share first.
Selma came to his house three days after the meeting, in the late afternoon, with a bundle of papers under her arm and a look on her face that he recognized, because he had seen it on his own face in the mirror on mornings when he had decided to do something difficult. She did not waste time on pleasantries, though she accepted the tea he offered, and she spread her papers on his kitchen table, beside his journal, and she said, "Mr. Yates, I have written the proposal. I would like you to read it, and tell me where it is wrong."
The proposal was written in her plain schoolteacher's hand, on ruled paper, in numbered paragraphs, and it was the clearest piece of writing Eben had ever seen that was not a deed or a bill of sale. It said, first, that the water of Cedar Valley creek should be shared by measured turns, not by flood: each field would receive a stated number of hours at a stated flow, measured at its own headgate with a simple gauge board, and the turns would rotate through the valley in order, so that no field waited more than three days for its turn in any season. It said, second, that a small holding pond should be dug on the lowest ground, to catch the water that ran at night, when no one was irrigating, and to hold it for release in the morning, so that the night flow, which now ran past the valley unused, would be put to work. It said, third, that the releases should be staggered — the upper fields in the morning, the middle fields at midday, the lower fields in the evening — so that the creek was never asked to serve all its fields at once, and the water that one field did not absorb would be available to the next, rather than running off the end of a flooded field and back into the creek, wasted.
Eben read it twice, slowly, and then he opened his journal to 1882, and then to 1884, and then to the dry year of 1880, when he had first planted the lower rows, and he compared her numbers to his own, entry by entry, the way a man compares two accounts of the same debt. In every case that mattered, they agreed. Where her creek gauge had read low, his blossom had dropped. Where her notebook recorded a late turn, his journal recorded a short crop. Where she proposed a measured turn of six hours, his journal showed that his trees had borne well on less water than that, in the years when the water had come early enough to matter.
"It is not wrong," he said at last, and his voice was quiet, because he was a quiet man and because the thing he was saying felt larger than his voice. "It is not wrong in any place I can find. My journal says the same thing yours says, Miss Ivers. Only yours says it in numbers, and mine says it in apples."
She looked at him then, and he saw, for the first time, how tired she was — not the tiredness of a day's work, but the tiredness of a person who has carried a true thing alone for a long time and has only just found someone willing to help carry it.
"Then will you stand with me when I present it?" she asked. "Not to speak for me. Only to stand where the room can see that I am not the only person whose books say this."