been the plan. But standing in the eastern corn section one morning in late May, feeling the cool dark soil around the roots while the surface a few inches above was already dry and cracking in the early heat, she did feel something not pride exactly, not relief, but the specific quiet satisfaction of a calculation coming out at the value you had calculated.
It was the same feeling she got when a ledger balanced to the cent, except that this ledger had cost considerably more than bookkeeping. The field that had cost her everything she'd saved was growing. She stood up and looked at the horizon. The sky was clear and had been clear for 19 consecutive days.
The arroyo had been dry since the second week of May. Her well had dropped another eight inches since planting. The drought she'd been building toward was not a coming thing anymore. It was here. She walked back to the house and sat down at the table and opened the ledger to a clean page.
She wrote the date at the top. She wrote the current well depth. She wrote the arroyo status, dry since May 14, and the nineteen-day no-rain record and the estimate she'd been running on the neighboring field soil moisture based on what she saw when she walked the road. Then Rafael Ortega came down her lane. He was later than expected having been north on the long circuit that took him to the settlements above the pass and back.
He had new earthenware in the wagon and news she hadn't asked for. He told her about the ranches. Not the one spring Silas had mentioned. Multiple springs. A cooperative north of Mora that had been selling surplus water to neighboring properties for 12 years had stopped producing enough to sell in March.
Three ranchers he knew had already moved cattle east rather than watch them deteriorate. A settlement along Cienega Creek that had been reliable living memory had called a meeting about water sharing because the creek was down to a trickle. "What's the creek ordinarily running?" she asked. Rafael put his hands approximately three feet apart.
"Like that at this time of year." "And now?" He moved his hands to about eight inches. She looked at the window. The field was out there green and growing.
Buried water working quietly 300 times over through porous clay walls. In the valley, people were about to discover what she had been preparing for since April. What the numbers had told her was coming. What they had laughed at her for taking seriously. She thanked Rafael for the news and offered him water for his horses and dinner, both of which he accepted.
While he ate, she went back to the table and wrote one more line in the ledger. The drought had begun.
June arrived without rain and left the same way. The valley changed in increments at first the way a fire changes a room before anyone notices the smoke. A neighbor's corn stopped growing between waterings.
The communal stock tank east of the settlement dropped 4 in a week and nobody refilled it because nobody had the water to spare. The cottonwoods along the dry arroyo channel began dropping leaves early, which was a thing cottonwoods did when they were stressed but not yet dying. And people who had lived here long enough recognized the signal and got quieter about what it meant. Evie kept her head down and worked. Her mornings began before light because the well draw before sunrise was cooler and the evaporation loss during filling was lower.