All stories › Science Fiction › An Inch a Week › Episode 3
The Home Quarter
Episode 3 of 3 of An Inch a Week by Jim Hadley · free to read
Fourteen thousand dollars of rain I paid for fell on my neighbor’s milo, and on Tuesday I told the field tech so.
Imani Swanson stood at my east fence with her tablet against her chest while I went through it. The seeding log on the week four bill. The wind. The ten minutes. The half mile. Then I walked her twenty rows into my own field, and the dirt was powder under our boots.
“Then the three gauges read,” I said. “They read an inch, and you bill me for a hundred sixty acres of it.”
“One oh one this week,” she said. She hadn’t looked at the tablet. She’d read it before I started talking.
“Did you know?”
“No.” She looked west across my gray field toward the house. “I’ve got thirty-some subscribers, Mr. Eckert. I read gauges on Tuesdays. I’ve never once sat at a west fence at six on a Thursday.”
“Somebody at the company knows.”
“Somebody at the company wrote this.” She turned the tablet around and showed me the contract, the same page I’d signed with my finger in May. “Company delivers one inch of precipitation per week, as measured at subscriber’s gauges.”
“I bought rain.”
“You bought an inch at the gauges.” She said it like she hated hearing herself. “That’s what it sells. The system sites the gauges where the inch reads. Not where the corn is.”
“Milo.”
“Milo.” She almost smiled. Then she looked out at Hugh’s quarter, green to the far fence, and the smile went.
“Can you refund it?”
“No. The gauges read.” She swallowed. “I can cancel you today. No penalty at the end of a cycle.”
That was the easy thing. Stop the bill, stop the drones, and let both fields go dry together. My milo would die anyway, only cheaper.
I looked west, past my house, across the section road. The home quarter lay out there in the morning, buffalo grass gone tan, the old windmill with its tail pointed east the way it pointed most mornings.
“In May you told me the contract goes by the parcel,” I said.
“It does.”
“I name the acres I own. The drones fly those. The gauges sit on those.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then take the milo off. Put the home quarter on.”
She looked at me, then west at the grass, then down at her tablet. I watched her work it in her head, the same way I had at the kitchen table. Wind west at three. Ten minutes. Half a mile.
“Flight line on the west fence of the home quarter,” she said slowly. “Cloud lets go a half mile east of that.”
“At the section road.”
“And the system sites the new gauges right there, by the road. Where the inch reads.” She looked up. “Same price, Mr. Eckert. A hundred sixty acres at eleven. You’ll pay seventeen sixty an inch to water buffalo grass.”
“I’ll pay seventeen sixty for an inch on the road,” I said. “My milo starts on the other side of it.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Then she typed. She had to type it twice, because her thumbs weren’t steady.
“Thursday, six,” she said. “Flight line home quarter, west boundary. Gauges move tomorrow.” She held out the tablet. “Sign here.”
I signed it with my finger.
Hugh was at his mailbox when I drove up his road. I didn’t make him come to me.
“Thursday it moves,” I said. “It’ll come down on my side now. You might get the tail of it. Might not.”
He looked at his milo a long time. “Two more rains,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’d have done the same.” He put out his hand, and I shook it. “Never was my rain anyhow.”
Thursday I sat on the tailgate by the section road at six in the morning. Jean sat beside me in her housecoat with a thermos.
The drones came down the far fence of the home quarter at two minutes past, small as swallows under the cloud. I looked at my watch. Jean looked at the sky.
At twelve past, it let go.
It came down on the road first. It came down on the hood and the tailgate and Jean’s thermos lid, big flat drops that knocked the dust up off the gravel. Then it walked east across my milo, row after row, and the rolled leaves opened like hands.
Jean put her face up into it.
I didn’t move. I had paid for every drop, and I meant to stand in it.
Next Tuesday, the new gauges by the road read one oh three. My house gauge read one and a tenth, the first full gauge at the house all summer.
Jean wrote it down in ink.