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Tailgate at Six
Episode 2 of 3 of An Inch a Week by Jim Hadley · free to read
I went out Thursday at six to see whose inch it was.
I parked the pickup on the field road at my west fence, by the section road, and dropped the tailgate. The cloud was in, low and gray and flat on the bottom. A cottonwood leaf skittered east along the culvert.
At one minute past six I heard the drones before I saw them. Six of them came down the line of my west fence from the north, high under the cloud, spaced like fence posts.
They passed over my head and kept going south. Nothing fell. Nothing happened at all.
I looked at my watch. I was sixty-four years old, and I sat on a tailgate timing a cloud like a boy counting after lightning.
The cloud drifted. You could only tell it moved by watching one ragged spot on its belly slide past the grain elevator on the horizon.
At eleven minutes past six, the bottom fell out of it. A gray curtain came down a half mile east of me. It came down right on my east fence, on the three steel gauges, and across Hugh’s whole quarter.
Where I sat, I didn’t get a drop. My hat stayed dry. The dust on the hood stayed dust.
I drove the field road east with the window down. For most of the half mile there was nothing, then the road went dark under my tires a few rows short of the fence. By the gauges it was pouring. Past them, Hugh’s milo was shining like somebody had polished it.
Hugh was standing in his yard in a slicker with a coffee cup, watching it come down like it was a parade.
“Sid,” he said. “Get in here out of it.”
“I’ve been out of it all summer.”
He looked at me, then at the gauges on my fence, then back at me. Hugh was seventy-six and had never once been slow.
“Thursday rain,” he said. “Nine weeks of it. Six in the morning, regular as church. I figured it was your company.”
“It is my company.”
“I figured it was falling on you too.”
“It’s falling on my gauges.” I pointed back at my field, gray, half a mile of it. “That’s all it’s falling on.”
He set his cup on the porch rail and didn’t pick it back up. “I didn’t ask for it, Sid.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“I didn’t put those posts there.” He pushed the slicker hood back. “Like your daddy always said. Rain don’t know whose fence it’s over.”
It was the first time all summer I’d wanted to hit a man with something.
“Your heads look good,” I said instead.
“Two more rains and they’ll fill.” He said it low, like he knew what it cost to say. “You going to cancel?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“If it comes to money, I could put something toward it.”
I didn’t answer that. I didn’t know how to take money from a man for rain I’d sent him by mistake, or how to keep paying for rain I’d never get.
Jean had the coffee on and the ledger out when I got back. I told her what I’d seen. She didn’t say anything until I was done, and then she turned back five lines.
“Week four,” she said.
The short week. Next to the five hundred twenty-eight dollars was her pencil note from that Tuesday. House gauge .9. Milo perked up some.
“I wrote that because you were so mad,” she said. “You said they shorted us, and the house gauge was nearly full.”
I went and got the paper bill for week four out of the drawer. Every bill printed a seeding log at the bottom. Time, wind, flight line. I’d never read one.
Flight 3:40 p.m. Wind E 3. Flight line east boundary.
“The wind was out of the east that afternoon,” I said. “So the upwind fence was the east fence. They flew over Hugh’s side of my field.”
“And the rain came down here.”
“Half a mile west. On the house. On the west rows.” I said the rest out loud so I’d believe it. “Wind at three miles an hour goes a mile in twenty minutes. Half a mile in ten. Ten minutes is how long she says the cloud takes to let go.”
“And our field is half a mile across,” Jean said.
“All the other weeks, the wind’s west. They fly the west fence. Ten minutes later the cloud’s over the east fence, right where the gauges are, and it lets go there and on Hugh.”
Jean looked at the column. Eight inches in her pencil, and one short week.
“So the gauges aren’t lying,” she said.
“No. They’re just standing where the rain lands.”
She put the pencil down. Neither of us said anything for a while. Out the window the cloud was still emptying itself over the east fence, on the far side of a field that hadn’t had a decent drink since spring.
I’d paid fourteen thousand dollars to water Hugh Lindell’s milo.