Part 7
“He shut it at the box,” Cody said. “Go.”
They went. Cody threaded the coupling with shaking hands while Marcy held the new pipe steady with the wrench and the cold climbed into her wrists. He doped the threads and turned and turned, then set the second coupling on the old line’s cut end, which lay exactly where he’d left it five years ago. Neither of them looked up the draw. It took twenty minutes. When it was tight, Cody sat back on his heels, and only then did they look.
Russ was still standing at the spring box with his arm inside it, looking down at the pond, at his meadow, at the bench where his father used to keep his mares. He stood there long enough that Marcy started to get up.
Then he turned the valve back on.
The new pipe shuddered once under Marcy’s hands. Then it began to hum.
Russ walked back to his truck, got in, and drove up the two-track toward his house. He didn’t look back. The manila envelope was gone from the tailgate. Down at the fence, Gus lowered his camera and poured himself a cup of coffee.
It took the water most of the afternoon to find its way down. The old line was full of five years of air, and it had to push all of it out first.
Marcy sat on the rim of the tank in the sun with her wet jacket spread on the rose canes to dry. Gus had driven around by the county road, and Cody had carried a lawn chair up the hill for him. Cody himself lay flat in the dry grass with his cap over his face and fell asleep, the way he had at four years old after a long day at the county fair.
The old mare came up at noon. Nobody led her. She walked up the hill alone and stood at the edge of the tank beside the inlet pipe, her ears tipped toward it, and waited. Marcy wondered whether she could hear it coming through the ground. Gus said he wouldn’t bet against it.
At ten to three the inlet pipe coughed. It spat a gob of rust and a hiss of air, then a spurt of brown water, then air again. Cody sat up. The pipe coughed twice more and then began to run, thin and steady, no thicker than a pencil, clearing from brown to gold to nothing at all.
Penny stretched her neck over the rim, turned her head sideways, and caught the thin stream in her mouth before it ever reached the bottom of the tank.
The others came up the hill one at a time over the next hour. The mules first, then the pony, who stood on his hind legs to see over the rim. Rooster tried to bite the yearling and got kicked by Hazel for it. The black mare came last, slow on her bad foot. She stood beside Marcy, close enough to lean, and Marcy finally named her that afternoon. She named her Darla, after the substitute carrier.
A man from the state engineer’s district office came out in the middle of October. He measured the flow at the inlet with a bucket and a stopwatch, photographed the tank, the tee, and the overflow running down to the low corner, and wrote it all down. He didn’t tell her she’d won anything. He said the water was being used, and that it would be in his report. The letters from Casper stopped.
Russ didn’t speak to her for five weeks. Then, one cold Thursday in November, he was standing at his welded box when she pulled up, with the old manila envelope in his hand.
“No stamp,” Marcy said. “I can’t carry it.”
“I’m not asking you to carry it.” He handed it through the window. Inside were registration papers, a little brittle, for a grulla mare foaled May 9, 2001. On the back, in a heavy old-fashioned hand, someone had written: Stepped in the patch at the north tank. Left it.
Marcy read it twice. “You want to come see her?”
He came on a Sunday. He brought a curry comb with a wooden handle worn pale where a hand had held it, and he brushed the old mare in the barn aisle for an hour while she dozed. Halfway through, he stopped and stood with his palm flat on her shoulder, over the white A, and didn’t move for a while. He didn’t ask Marcy for anything. When he was done, he set the curry comb on the shelf above Penny’s stall instead of taking it home.
In the middle of May, the weekend Penny turned twenty-five, Marcy and Cody poured a concrete apron around the north side of the tank. A winter of hooves had churned the ground there to mud, and the old patch with its letters and its tiny print had begun to crack at the edges. Cody came straight from his shift on the county grader, still in his orange vest. In March Russ’s foreman had called to ask whether he’d come back for haying, and Cody had said no thanks, but he’d help them brand, and he had. They mixed six loads in a borrowed mixer and brought them up the hill in the wheelbarrow. Marcy had written Del his three hundred dollars that morning, the way she did on the fifteenth of every month, and she was trying not to think about the hay.
Cody screeded the concrete and floated it smooth while Marcy kept the herd back with a lariat and a lot of talking. At the low end of the corner, where the overflow ran out into new green, the frogs started up as the light went, faint at first and then all at once.
Marcy turned her head for one second to yell at the pony. When she turned back, Penny had walked through the gap behind her and stepped straight onto the wet concrete, down to the inlet, to drink.
Cody reached for the trowel.
“Leave it,” Marcy said.
The mare drank, lifted her dripping chin, and walked back off the apron the way she’d come. She left one clear print beside the old patch. It was broad and deep and a little turned out, the print of an old horse’s front foot, right next to the small, perfect hoofprint pressed into the concrete twenty-five years before.
Marcy knelt and wrote the date beside it with a sixteen-penny nail. Then she sat back on her heels and watched the overflow spill over the rim, run down across the edge of the new concrete, and begin, very slowly, to fill both prints.