Part 6
Marcy kept her hand on the green card and didn’t put the car in gear.
“Dad died in February,” Russ said. “Cancer. Fourteen months of driving him to Billings. He left the hospital bills and a note at the bank I didn’t know about until the funeral.” He spoke to the envelope, not to her. “I sold the bottom ground. And I sold every horse on the place in one weekend to a trader out of Billings, because the trader would take them all and pay cash. Penny was eleven. She was the best thing Dad ever raised. He used to take her out to that tank every morning before he fed, whether she needed water or not, just to stand there with her.”
He looked up at the cut-steel letter on his mailbox.
“I never asked where they went. I didn’t want to know.” He let out a breath. “Then I’m sitting in the stands waiting on my steers, and they run a pen of culls through, and I’d know that face anywhere. I didn’t even need to see the brand.”
“So you wanted her home,” Marcy said.
“I wanted her home.” He met her eyes for the first time. “And I knew the minute she got to your place, she’d walk straight to that tank, and stand on it, and anybody driving by would see a horse with my dad’s brand standing over my dad’s water. Gus can see that corner from his road. You can believe both things, Marcy. I do.”
“You could have just told me,” she said.
“And you’d have done exactly what you’re doing.” He stepped back from the car. “Go on, now. You’ve got mail to run.”
He didn’t answer the letter. The ten days went by with no word from the Aldine place except a third envelope from Casper, this one addressed to her. She sorted it into her own route tray, carried it eleven miles, and put it in her own mailbox before she let herself open it. It said, in two pages, that the old stock-water right was lost through years of nonuse, and that any entry onto Aldine property would be treated as trespass.
Marcy read it standing in her driveway in uniform. Then she went into the house, called the postmaster, and asked for a day of annual leave.
On the first Thursday in October, at a quarter to seven in the morning, a substitute named Darla took Route 2 out of Cutler, and Marcy Keller stood at her north fence with a pipe wrench in her hand.
Cody had gone to the farm store the night before. He came out of the barn with a four-foot length of inch-and-a-half steel pipe over his shoulder, two couplings, a can of pipe dope, and a plug wrench in his back pocket. “I’m the one who cut it,” he’d said when she started to argue. “I know exactly what it needs.” Gus came too, in his pickup, because he was the witness, and because he said he hadn’t stood at a spring box in eleven years and wasn’t going to miss one now. He couldn’t walk the slope. He sat on his tailgate at the fence with his old field camera around his neck and a thermos between his knees.
Marcy and Cody climbed through the wires. They followed the line Cody had probed, up the long grassy slope in the cold, their breath showing, three hundred yards to the draw where the pond lay flat and gray under a skin of mist.
Russ’s truck was parked at the top of the draw. He was sitting on the tailgate with a coffee cup. Nobody else was with him.
“No sheriff?” Marcy said.
“Not yet.” He set the cup down. He had a manila envelope on the tailgate beside him, old and soft at the corners. He picked it up and held it out.
“Her papers,” he said. “Registered name and all. Dad’s handwriting on the back.” He didn’t lower it. “There’s another sheet in there. I’ll put in the trough, I’ll pay Del, and I’ll put it in writing that your place gets water from my pond as long as you’re on it. You sign the release, and she’s yours on paper too. Free and clear. That’s the last offer I’m going to make.”
Marcy looked at the envelope. She thought about the number on the back of the electric bill, and about Del’s pump that she’d be paying on until the end of next year, and about the hay. She thought about a day ten years from now when she might be too old to carry buckets uphill.
“You already sold her once, Russ,” she said. “I’m not helping you do it again.”
She walked past him to the spot Cody was pointing to, a rusted valve box lid half buried in the grass below the spring box. Cody pried the lid up. Under it, in a hole lined with old rocks, was the tee he’d put in five years ago. One arm ran to the pond. The other was sealed with a plug, and beyond it was a gap of bare dirt where a piece of the old line had been cut out.
“I’ll call Roy at the sheriff’s office,” Russ said behind her.
“Call him,” Marcy said, and knelt.
Cody set the plug wrench. It wouldn’t turn. He set his boot on the handle and leaned his whole weight on it, and it gave a sharp crack and spun loose. Water exploded out of the tee in a cold, hard sheet straight into his chest, soaking them both, spraying across the dirt. It was colder than any water Marcy had ever touched. Her hands went numb in seconds. Cody tried to start the coupling into the open fitting, and the force of the water knocked it out of his hand. He tried again. It flew out of his grip and rolled into the grass.
Behind them, boots went past at a walk. Russ climbed the draw to the old stone spring box, lifted the plank lid, and reached down inside it with his whole arm. The water at the tee dropped to a trickle, then stopped. Up the draw, Russ straightened from the spring box with his sleeve dripping and said nothing at all…
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