All stories › Science Fiction › An Inch a Week › Episode 1
Tuesday Gauges
Episode 1 of 3 of An Inch a Week by Jim Hadley · free to read
My old rain gauge had a drowned moth in it again. I tipped it over the porch rail and read the water before it ran out. One tenth of an inch, if that.
The company truck turned in off the section road at seven, same as every Tuesday. RAIN BY THE INCH was painted on the door under a little cloud. Imani Swanson climbed out with her tablet already lit.
“Morning, Mr. Eckert,” she said. “Let’s go read your inch.”
She was maybe twenty-five, ponytail out the back of her cap, boots too clean for August. We drove her truck along the north edge of my quarter, half a mile, to the east fence. Three steel gauges stood on posts there, each with a solar panel the size of a paperback.
She held the tablet near the first gauge and it chirped.
“One oh two.”
The second chirped. “Ninety-eight.” The third. “One even.”
Two of the company drones went over while she read, high and quiet, headed north to seed somebody else’s rain. They looked like hawks that had forgotten how to flap.
“That’s an inch on the nose,” she said. “A hundred sixty acres at eleven dollars an acre-inch. Seventeen hundred sixty.”
I looked past her at my milo. It stood knee-high and should have been waist-high. The leaves were rolling already, tight as cigarettes, and it was not yet eight.
“Look at it,” I said.
“I see it.” She did look, I’ll give her that. “Some fields take a while to answer.”
“It’s had since the second week of June to answer.”
“Nine weeks.” She scrolled. “Eight point three inches. Week four came up short.”
“I remember week four,” I said. “You flew at twenty to four in the afternoon and billed me five hundred twenty-eight dollars. I called your office and told them I’d been shorted.”
“A drone threw a fault that morning. We flew when we could.”
“My house gauge says a tenth this week.”
“Your house gauge isn’t on the contract.” She said it gently, the way you’d explain a phone to your grandfather. “The contract reads these three. The system sites them. Clean air, no tractor dust.”
“My dad used to say rain don’t know whose fence it’s over.”
She smiled. “Ours does. That’s kind of the whole product.”
She set up Thursday on the tablet. “Six in the morning. The drones can’t make a cloud, Mr. Eckert. They can only seed one that’s already there, and Thursday’s forecast to have one. Flight line on your west fence, because that’s upwind. The drones run the upwind side, the cloud takes about ten minutes to let go, and by then it’s drifted over your ground. Wind’s been west at three most mornings. Good steady seeding wind.”
I signed the glass with my finger. Seventeen hundred sixty dollars left the farm account before I lifted it.
Jean had the ledger open on the kitchen table when I came in. She kept the books in pencil, because she said ink made a bad year look permanent.
“Inch?”
“Inch,” I said.
She wrote it down. She’d ruled a column for the rain in May, the week we signed, and started it the second week of June. Nine lines in it now, and eight of them said the same thing. Beside the short one, smaller, she’d written House gauge .9. Milo perked up some.
“Fourteen thousand six hundred and eight,” she said. “Sid, that’s half the note.”
The note at the bank was thirty-one thousand, due the first of November. The milo was supposed to pay it.
It had been a fine plan in May.
“I know what it is.”
“Then tell me what we’re buying.” She turned the ledger toward me. “Because I’ve seen the field.”
I didn’t have an answer. I stood at the sink and looked west across the section road at the home quarter. My dad’s old pasture, a hundred sixty acres of buffalo grass, empty since we sold the cows.
“She offered to put that on too,” Jean said. “In May. The contract goes by the parcel, she said. You name any acres you own, the drones fly those, the gauges sit on those.”
“Nothing growing over there worth eleven dollars an inch.”
“That’s what you told her.”
“Maybe she’s right about the milo,” I said. “Maybe it’s slow to answer.”
Jean closed the ledger. “Go look at Hugh’s.”
Hugh Lindell’s quarter lay east of mine, on the far side of the fence where the gauges stood. I hadn’t driven his road in a month. I’d been too busy watching my own field die.
His milo stood waist-high and dark green, the heads coming on fat and even. I knelt and pushed two fingers into the dirt between his rows.
They came out wet to the second knuckle.
Hugh never signed with anybody. “I farmed dry fifty years, Sid,” he’d told me in May. “I’ll die dry. I’m not paying a company to argue with God.”
I stood up and looked back west across the fence. My last dozen rows along the gauges were green like his. Past them, my field went gray all the way to the house.
So whose inch was falling on Hugh’s milo?