He thought about that for a moment, about what it would cost him. He was not a man who sought quarrels. His orchard was small, his standing in the association was smaller, and Lars Halden was a man who remembered who had opposed him. But he thought, too, about eleven days of waiting in 1882, and six days of carrying buckets in 1884, and about the lower rows of his orchard that had never once, in ten years, received their water on time, and he thought about the simple fact that Selma Ivers had been right, in numbers, about his own life, and that a man who knows a thing is right and says nothing has made his own kind of choice.
"I will stand," he said.
The ditch association met again two weeks later, in the schoolhouse, in the evening, when the day's work was done. The room was fuller than it had been at the spring meeting, because word had traveled, as word always travels in a valley, that the schoolteacher had written something down and meant to present it, and the valley had come to hear what it was. Lars Halden chaired, as always, from the teacher's table, and his son Rolf sat beside him, twenty-four years old, a tall young man who managed his father's upper ranch and who had, until now, said very little at association meetings, listening more than he spoke.
Selma stood and read the proposal aloud, paragraph by paragraph, in the same clear, steady voice she had used for the figures, and the room listened in the same attentive silence. She explained the measured turns, and the holding pond, and the staggered releases, and she gave the numbers for each: the hours saved, the water saved, the days of waiting removed. She did not raise her voice. She did not plead. She presented, as a teacher presents a lesson, with the expectation that the facts, clearly stated, would do their own work.
When she had finished, Halden leaned back in his chair, and he looked at her for a long moment, and then he spoke, and his voice was warm, and reasonable, and entirely final.
"Miss Ivers," he said, "you have written a very neat paper. It is well ordered, and well argued, and I do not doubt that you believe every word of it. But water is not a lesson on a slate, Miss Ivers. It is not a sum to be worked and checked. It is a living thing, and it is learned by living with it, by working a ditch for twenty years, by knowing, in your hands, how a field drinks. What you have written here are numbers on paper, not real water. Real water does not run in measured turns. Real water floods, and soaks, and finds its own level, and any man who has farmed this valley knows that. I respect your industry, Miss Ivers, I truly do. But this association will not set aside the practice of twenty years for a schoolteacher's arithmetic."
He turned to the room then, and he put the matter to the association in the way he always put matters he wished to be settled: as a question that already contained its answer.
"Shall we adopt this proposal, or shall we continue with the schedule that has served us?"
The vote was not close. The upper ranchers voted against it, as one man. The middle fields divided, some for, some against, and the smallholders at the lower end, who would have benefited most, voted for it, but they were few, and their votes were quiet, and the proposal was refused. Halden rapped the table, and said, "The proposal is not adopted. The schedule stands," and the meeting began to break up, and the men began to talk about the weather again, as if a proposal had not just been made and refused in their hearing.
Selma gathered her papers, slowly, and her hands did not shake, though her face was pale. She had expected the refusal — she had told herself, coming in, that she expected it — but expectation had not softened it, and she stood at the teacher's table with her neat, numbered paragraphs in her arms, feeling the weight of a room that had listened, and understood, and chosen, anyway, to go on as before.
Eben Yates, who had stood beside her through the reading, as he had promised, waited until the room was nearly empty, and then he said, quietly, so that only she could hear him, "Miss Ivers, a refusal at a meeting is not the same as a refusal by the water. If you mean to prove this — truly prove it, in a way that no kind word and no vote can set aside — you will need two