Part 6
Deb opened her mouth to tell him he didn’t have to go, then closed it, because he did.
She’d kept him here since March. She hadn’t asked him to stay. She had simply needed him, and never once let him take the two a.m. hose, so he could never say he’d carried his share and was free to go. She’d known it in July, reading Ty’s name through his pocket in the dark. She’d known it longer than that.
“Your dad’s canvas coat is in the hall closet,” she said. “It gets cold up there in October. Take it.”
He took it. He left at five on Tuesday morning with his welding hood on the dash. She stood in the driveway in her robe until his taillights crossed the cattle guard, then went inside and got ready for work, because a hundred and twenty-six boxes got cased at seven.
Elaine filed in October. The Denver firm answered with forty pages that Elaine said could have been six. In December, after Curt’s lawyers had spent some weeks with the 1979 instrument, Jace’s video, and the glossy card announcing the spring-fed pond in Curt’s own advertising, they called Elaine and asked to talk. The agreement took until after New Year’s. Curt acknowledged the reservation as a valid right belonging to Deb’s land. He would pay to cut out his cap and restore the line, and he would cover half of Elaine’s bill. The other half was Deb’s, and Jace’s checks.
Those came every two weeks, with a word on the memo line in his blocky capitals. LAWYER. HAY. LAWYER. In February, one said ROCK, and she put that one in the can.
The crew came the second week of March, once the frost was out of the ground: two men and a small excavator on the Selden side of the fence. Curt stood at the wire in a canvas coat with his hands in his pockets and watched them dig down to his own cap. When they’d cut it out and spliced in new pipe, he walked down the hundred and sixty feet to Deb’s tank with them and stood by while one of the men fitted a new valve to the old float arm. Then he looked at her across the tank and asked, plainly, whether he could come see the mare sometimes.
Deb had thought about what she’d say if he ever asked. “Sundays,” she said. “You come to the gate. You don’t bring a trailer.” She considered him. “And bring your own apples.”
He came the first Sunday after the line was open, with a paper sack of apples, and stood at the gate for an hour while the mare ate them one at a time out of his hand. Past him, up on the bench, Deb could see the lodge pond, a foot lower than it had been in the wedding pictures, with a gray band of dried mud around the edge and a new pump housing on the far bank. He didn’t mention it. Neither did she.
The water reached the tank at four that afternoon the line was opened. She heard it before she saw it, a thin, steady stream from the inlet, about three gallons a minute. By morning the tank was half full. By the next evening the float had risen, the valve had closed, and the overflow was running down the old trench to the apple trees, which didn’t yet know what to do with it.
That night she sent Jace twelve seconds of video: water running into the tank, the float rising. He answered from Gillette a little after eleven. Tell Pie. A minute later: Stone ordered? She looked at the can on top of the refrigerator and typed back, Next year. Both of us.
Five of the trees never woke up. In May the sixth sent up a cluster of red shoots from the base of its gray trunk, below the graft. Deb had heard Dennis talk enough to know what that meant. It was the rootstock coming back, not the tree he’d bought the place for, and whatever fruit it bore someday would be small and sour and nobody’s named variety. She cut it back to the three strongest shoots and hung his dented bucket on the stub again, where she’d found it, to keep the deer honest.
In April she took Ardith a pint jar of water from the tank. Ardith held it up to the window, then drank half of it straight from the jar before the aide could find a cup.
“That’s the top tank,” she said, setting it down. “Didn’t I tell you.”
Then she asked how Dennis was doing. Deb sat with her hands in her lap.
“He’s gone, Ardith,” she said. “Going on three years.”
Ardith turned that over for a while. “Well,” she said. “Then you’ll have to do the trees.”
In May, Deb’s alarm still went off at 5:40, though she no longer set the one for two. She walked up through the pasture with her travel mug and an apple in her jacket pocket. The upper gate stood open, as it had since March, with no wire on it and no reason for any. Pie was already at the tank. There was a layer over her ribs now that Deb could press a fingertip into, and the gray had kept spreading across her face. Spring water wasn’t going to make her young. Behind her, Flux and Slag were picking their way down out of the oak brush, and Rivet waited a polite distance back for his turn.
Pie drank slowly, her lower lip barely touching the water. When she lifted her head, the level had dropped below the float. The old valve opened with a small, dry tick, and the water began running in again.
Deb cut the apple in half with her pocketknife and held out the back half. The mare took it with her lips folded back, careful as ever. Then Deb walked down the hill to go case the mail, and left the gate standing open behind her.