Part 4
“Penny,” Marcy said again, and both of the mare’s ears came forward and stayed there.
The mare took one step toward her, then another, until her muzzle was almost touching Marcy’s cap. She breathed out through her nose. Marcy stood very still. Up close, in the low early sun, she could see the left shoulder where the summer coat had come in short and fine, and the patch of white hairs Paula had called an old freeze brand. In this light Marcy could read it: a capital letter sitting on a curve.
She had looked at that shape six days a week for nineteen years, cut out of steel plate on top of a mailbox.
Cody came up the hill at nine with his coffee and found his mother on her knees in the roses with a shovel and a garden trowel and half of the north corner piled on a tarp. He didn’t ask. He went back for the pick and the wheelbarrow.
It took them all of Sunday. What came up was a round concrete stock tank about eight feet across and three deep, packed solid with fine gray silt, rose roots, and the skeletons of tumbleweeds that had blown in and stayed. Water had stood in it for years and left pale rings on the wall, one above another. On the uphill side, a steel pipe about an inch and a half across came through the wall near the bottom. On the downhill side, a second pipe left at the rim and ran off toward the low end of the corner, toward the ground where the frogs used to be.
Cody got the long steel probe from the shop and started following the uphill pipe, driving the probe down every few steps and listening for the clank. It ran almost straight north, under the corner fence and into Aldine ground. He followed it as far as he could see the line it was taking, up the long grassy slope toward the draw where Russ had built his new pond.
Then he stopped probing.
Marcy watched him stand there with the bar in his hands. He stood that way for a long time, and when he came back down the hill, he didn’t look at her. He sat on the edge of the tank they’d dug out and turned his cap around in his hands.
“Fall of 2020,” he said. “Right after they shipped calves. I was twenty-one, working for Russ that summer. They were digging the pond in the draw, and Russ had me and the Haskell kid uncover a pipe up by the spring box. He said it was an old dead line from his dad’s time. He had us put a tee in it, run the spring to the pond, and plug the other side. Then he had us cut out a piece of the old line next to the plug, so nobody could just pull it.” He looked at his hands. “He said it was so a cow wouldn’t step on it and bust it.”
“Was there water in it?”
He didn’t answer right away. “It ran when we cut it. He said it was just what was sitting in the pipe.” Cody swallowed. “It ran the whole time I ate my lunch, Mom. I went back to the truck, ate a sandwich, came back, and it was still running.”
Marcy didn’t say anything. She thought about every spring she had sat on the porch steps waiting for the frogs and decided it was a bad year. She thought about the rose thicket going gray one leaf at a time. She looked at her son, who was twenty-six and had been twenty-one, and she sat down on the rim of the tank next to him and put her shoulder against his, because she didn’t trust herself with anything else yet.
On Monday after the route she drove to Gus Lindqvist’s with photos on her phone. He studied them at his kitchen table through a magnifying glass he kept for stamps. Then he got up, without saying anything, and went to the back bedroom. He came back with a coffee can full of small, water-stained field notebooks held together with rubber bands.
“Every one I ever kept,” he said. “My wife wanted me to burn them when I retired, and I told her a man doesn’t burn thirty-five years of other people’s arguments, he just puts them in a can where they can’t hurt anybody.”
He found it in a book from 1979, in pencil gone silver. Aldine, Arlo. Stock water. Spring in the draw on the upper section, pipeline to a tank at the north end of the lower place. Gus tapped the line with his fingernail.
“Water out here goes with the land it gets used on,” he said. “Always has. Arlo put that tank on the lower place on purpose, because that’s where he kept his mares, and when he got sick and Russ had to sell the bottom ground after the funeral, the tank went with the ground and the water went with the tank. Arlo told me so himself at the café, the year before he passed, with his oxygen bottle in the booth beside him like a third person. Said whoever had horses on the bottom got the first drink.”
“Can Russ just cap it?”
“He can do whatever he wants with a shovel. Whether it holds up is something else.” Gus took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes for a while before he went on. “A right that sits unused year after year, five years running, a lawyer can stand up in front of a judge and argue you’ve quit it. He’d have to prove it, and you’d have arguments back. But I wouldn’t want to find out which way that goes. When did Cody say they cut it?”
“Right after shipping. October of 2020.”
Gus didn’t need to count it. Neither did she.
“Five years this October,” she said. And then, before she could stop herself: “He wanted to come get her the last week of September.”
Gus looked at her over the magnifying glass. He didn’t say anything to that. He asked, in a different voice, “Where’s Russ been filling that truck he brings you?”
“The hydrant by his shop.”
“His shop runs off that pond. Put the line in himself in ’21. I watched him do it from the road.” Gus set down the glasses. “And the pond runs off Arlo’s spring.”
Marcy sat at his kitchen table and laid it out in her head the way she’d sort a case of mail. The old girl drinking at the barn from the very first load, after eight weeks of refusing it. Russ in the shade of the barn, watching her drink with that face. The way the mare had quit walking to the north corner the week the truck started coming. A man who’d hauled four thousand gallons a week, uphill, for free, to keep an old mare drinking at a barn instead of standing on top of a buried tank where anyone driving the county road could see her. A man who wanted her gone by the last week of September. And thick envelopes from Casper she’d put in his box with her own hand.
“I wondered about that corner when the frogs quit,” Gus said. “I’m sorry I only wondered.”
On Tuesday she ran the route like any other Tuesday. She was home at ten past four. The water truck was already at her barn, the hose running into the tank, the old mare drinking at the far end with her eyes half closed. Russ lifted a hand to her, the way he had every Tuesday since July…
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