Part 7
The line came back into service the second week of February, once the ground thawed enough to dig. A contractor out of Boise spent three days on it with a mini excavator and a camera on a cable. There was nothing to watch, really. A man in Carhartt bibs pulled the cap on the Ashby side, ran the camera down the pipe, cut out eleven feet of corroded line near the section corner and spliced in new. Then Walt and Laurel walked down to the concrete collar with a pipe wrench and a can of penetrating oil and spent forty minutes talking the valve wheel into turning.
The water came down the hill at the speed of a garden hose left on low, about four gallons a minute, into the tank Laurel and Bea’s grandson had spent two weekends scrubbing out and patching with hydraulic cement. By morning the tank held a few inches. By the next evening it was brimming and running out the overflow, and it never stopped running out the overflow, not through the cold snap in March or the long, hot August that followed.
Laurel ran a two-inch line from the tank down to the east pasture troughs along the grade Walt flagged for her, and she sold the poly tote back to the guy in Mountain Home for half what she’d paid. The well still stuttered in August. She quit needing it for anything but the house. Her bank balance didn’t change much. What changed was that she stopped doing arithmetic at the kitchen table at midnight.
The men who’d laughed at Kimball’s in June found other things to talk about. In April, Dutch Ferris turned up at her gate one Saturday with a roll of barbed wire he claimed he had extra of, and Ray Kimball came behind him with his nephew and a post-hole auger. Nobody mentioned anything. They stretched the north side by two o’clock, and Laurel fed them chili on the tailgate, and Dutch said it needed more cumin, and she told him to bring his own next time.
Garrett nodded to her at the feed store now. She nodded back. Once, in June, she saw his white truck stopped on the county road below the west hill at a little past five, engine running. It sat there a minute. Then it drove on.
The willows in the draw came back in May, not all of them, but enough. Green came up out of the gray roots in a line so sharp it looked like someone had painted it there with a single stroke.
In late October, the year after the Gaines lot, Laurel walked up the west hill to find Maggie. She did it most evenings now. Partly it was habit, and partly it was the only ten minutes in her day that didn’t belong to a chore or a bill or a horse that needed something.
The mare stood beside the tank in the last flat gold light. She was twenty-five. Her back still sagged and the gray had spread past her eyes, but there was a layer over her ribs now that Laurel could press a thumb into, and she’d held it all summer. The water came through the inlet in a thin, steady thread and spilled over the overflow lip into the cheatgrass and down toward the draw. Maggie put her muzzle in it and drank, unhurried, the way old horses drink once they’ve stopped worrying where the next drink is coming from.
Behind her the others came up the hill, the way they did every evening now, single file along a trail they’d worn into the rock over eight months, in nearly the same order every time. Banjo near the front, because Banjo was always near the front. Smoke and Biscuit shoving at each other. Dottie, who still pinned her ears at Tess on alternate days. Eighteen of them, one after another, coming up out of the shadow of the bench into the light.
Laurel stood back with her hands in her jacket pockets and let them gather around the tank. She checked the time on her phone without meaning to. It was twelve minutes past five.