In the fourth dry year, a widow in the San Pedro valley holds the only spring, and two neighbours bid against each other for its water. Before she will take their money, she writes down every order in which the three of them could have come down the road.
by Lloyd Shapley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The spring on Marta Ybarra's land gave thirty gallons a minute in a wet year and twenty in a dry one. This was the fourth dry year. Twenty gallons a minute, run down the old ditch, would carry three acres of chile from June to the first frost. It would not carry six. Split between two fields it would carry none: two half-watered fields make two dead crops, and the chile knows the difference before the farmer does.
Marta had no field of her own that could take it. The flood of the year Rafael died had cut the arroyo through her bottomland, and what was left below the house was gravel and salt cedar. She had the water. Below her, on either side of the arroyo, Wendell Pruitt and Tomás Arvizu each had three good acres and a dry well. The ditch forked at her fence. A board in the fork sent the water one way or the other.
On a Thursday in May the two of them were at her gate when she came back from Benson with the feed.
Wendell's truck had been there longest. The engine was cold and he had moved into the shade of the tamarisk with a thermos. Tomás had come after; his hood was still ticking. Neither man was talking to the other. They had been neighbours for thirty years and did not dislike each other. They were waiting for her, and that was all.
She parked, took the receipt from the feed store off the dash, and got out.
"Marta," said Wendell.
"Señora," said Tomás.
"You both came about the water."
They had both come about the water. Wendell had offered her fifteen hundred for the season on the Monday. Tomás had heard of it by Tuesday and offered two thousand. On Wednesday Wendell had said twenty-five hundred, and now it was Thursday.
"I'll go twenty-eight," Wendell said.
Tomás looked at the ground and said, "Three thousand."
Marta knew what three acres of Big Jim brought in a good year at the Willcox co-op, less seed, less the pickers, less the diesel. Thirty-six hundred. Rafael had kept the figure in the same notebook for twenty years and she had kept it since. Neither man would go past it. Each would go close to it. If she let them, she would have thirty-five hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and one of them would have a summer's work for a dollar, and the other would have nothing.
That was the market. No one could say it was wrong. Any other bargain, the loser could come to her afterwards and offer a little more than the winner was paying, and she would be a fool to refuse him.
She turned the feed receipt over, put it on the hood of her truck, and wrote the three names across the top of the back of it in pencil. Under them she wrote: P, A, Y. They had come in that order this morning, Wendell, then Tomás, then her. Two men with land and no water: nothing. Then her: thirty-six hundred. She put a mark under her own name.
"What's that?" said Wendell.
"Come back Saturday," she said.
On Friday Tomás's mother came up the road on foot, which she did not do anymore, and sat in the kitchen with a glass of water she did not drink.
"My husband's grandfather had that bottom before the Pruitts ever came out from Texas," she said. "Before the railroad. Before your Rafael's people."
"I know it, Doña Elena."
"First there, first right. That's the law of water. Everybody knows it."
Marta did not argue it. She said, "And me last."
"You married in."
"I married in."
When the old woman had gone, Marta took the receipt out of her apron and wrote A, P, Y. Arvizus, then Pruitts, then Ybarras, the way the county would tell it. Tomás's people with land and no water: nothing. The Pruitts, the same: nothing. Then Rafael's father buys the piece with the spring on it, and the whole valley's three acres of chile comes into being on the day he signs.
Another mark under her own name. Two.
She held the pencil a while. Doña Elena had said first, and the whole of her argument was in that one word.
Saturday was the day she had told them, but only Wendell came, in the morning, and he did not come about money. He came with a shovel, because the spring box had silted again and he knew it would have.
She watched him from the porch. He was sixty-eight and dug like a man who had been told by a doctor not to.
In the year of the flood it had been Wendell who came first, before the county, before the priest. The spring had been buried under four feet of gravel and a dead cottonwood. Rafael was in the hospital in Tucson and did not come out of it. Wendell and his boys dug the spring out in three days and ran a length of pipe from it to his own field while they were at it, and ran it for a summer, and then took the pipe back up without being asked. She had the water that year and no one to use it but him.
She went inside and wrote Y, P, A. The spring first. Then Wendell. Then Tomás. In this order the water sat there with nobody to put it on anything, and was worth nothing, and then Wendell came down the road with a shovel and it was worth thirty-six hundred. Tomás, coming after, found the thing already done.
She put the mark under Wendell's name. It was the first mark that was not hers.
When she came out he was knocking the mud off the shovel against the gatepost.
"Tomás coming?" he said.
"This afternoon."
"You going to tell me what you're doing?"
"I'm counting," she said.
Tomás came at four. He did not bring a shovel. He brought a sack of last year's dried chile from his cousin in Hatch, because there had been no chile of his own last year to bring.
He did not mention his mother's visit. He sat on the step and turned his hat in his hands.
"After the funeral," he said. "You remember I did the ditch for you."
She remembered. That was the second summer, after Wendell had taken his pipe back up. Nobody had arranged it. Tomás had come up one evening and cleared the headgate and walked the ditch to the fork and set the board to his side. He had grown corn that year. At the end of it he had left two sacks of meal on her porch and said nothing, and she had said nothing, and the arrangement had ended the way it began, without a word.
When he had gone she wrote Y, A, P. The spring, then Tomás, then Wendell. The same as the last, turned round. In this order it was Tomás who made the water worth something, and Wendell who came too late.
A mark under Tomás's name.
She looked at the receipt. Four lines written and two to go, and she could already see what the last two would say, but she wrote them anyway, because it was the only way she knew to be sure she had not left one out.
P, Y, A. Wendell's land, then her water: the crop. Tomás after: nothing to add.
That one was the Monday. Wendell had come up to her at the post office in Benson with his hat in one hand and a seed catalogue in the other, and had shown her the page, a variety out of Las Cruces that would stand the heat, as if the catalogue were part of the offer. Fifteen hundred. She had said she would think about it. He had said that was all he asked. The bargain had been as good as made. Tomás's two thousand had come in after, by telephone, in a voice that apologised for itself, and it had not grown one pepper. All it had done was lift the price.
Mark under her own name. Three.
Tomás, her, then Wendell. The same week, if it had been Tomás who asked on the Monday.
She could not write that one at the table. She took the receipt and walked down to the fork in the last of the light and stood at the board. From there she could see both places at once: Wendell's house with the television going blue in the window, and on the other side, a little lower, the Arvizu well house with its roof half off, the pump inside it rusted to the pipe since the year the water table went down past it. Two fields, one each side, the same pale colour. Nothing to choose between them from here. It was only a matter of which of the two had telephoned first, and that was a matter of who had been in the feed store on the Saturday before and heard that she might let the water go.
She wrote A, Y, P against the gatepost, pressing hard so the pencil would take on the soft paper.
Four.
She sat back. Six orders; there were no others. Three people can come down a road in six ways and only six, and she had now written every one of them. Four marks under Ybarra. One under Pruitt. One under Arvizu.
Four sixths of thirty-six hundred is twenty-four hundred. One sixth is six hundred.
She checked it the other way, because Rafael had taught her always to check a figure a second way before believing it. Twenty-four hundred and six hundred and six hundred. Thirty-six hundred. Nothing left over, nothing short.
She checked it a third way, which was to ask whether the two men were any different from each other in what they brought. They were not. Three acres each, the same soil, the same distance from the fork. Wendell was a better farmer and Tomás a more careful one, and it came out the same in the end; she had watched them both for thirty years. If the figure had given one of them more, the figure would have been wrong.
It did not. She put the pencil down.
On Sunday both trucks were at her gate by nine. Doña Elena was in the cab of Tomás's, with the window rolled down.
Wendell said, "I'll go thirty-one."
"No more bids," Marta said.
She took a quarter out of the pocket of her apron.
"The water goes to whichever field the coin says. It makes no difference which. You're the same to me, the two of you; you've always been the same. Whoever gets the water grows the crop, the same as if he'd bought it. In October, when it's sold, I take two-thirds of what it clears."
"And the rest?" said Wendell.
"The rest is split. Half to the one who grew it. Half to the other."
A cow somewhere across the arroyo was calling for a calf.
"The other one," said Tomás. "The one who doesn't get the water."
"Yes."
"Gets paid."
"Six hundred dollars, if it's a year like the ones Rafael wrote down."
"For what?"
She did not answer. Wendell was looking at her the way he had looked at the silted spring box, as a job he could see the whole of but not yet the reason for.
"You'd be leaving money on the table," he said at last. "I'd have gone to thirty-three. He'd have gone to thirty-four. You know that."
"I know it."
"Then why?"
She held up the quarter. "Call it."
Wendell looked at Tomás. Tomás looked at the cab of his truck, where his mother had her mouth shut in a way that meant she would talk about this for a year. He said, "Heads."
It came down tails. Wendell let his breath out. Tomás put his hat back on.
Marta walked down to the fork with both men behind her and lifted the board out of its slot and set it on the Pruitt side. The water turned. It went brown along the dry bed for a yard or two, then clear. They stood and watched it go down towards Wendell's field until it was out of sight in the salt cedar.
The chile went to Willcox in the third week of October and cleared thirty-eight hundred and forty, because the late rain had come in September and fattened the pods. Wendell brought her the money in a bank envelope, all of it, and stood in the kitchen while she counted it out on the oilcloth.
Twenty-five hundred and sixty. Twelve eighty left. Six hundred and forty for Wendell, which he folded into his shirt pocket without looking at it. Six hundred and forty in a second envelope.
"I'll take it down to him," Wendell said.
"I'll take it."
She drove down the Arvizu side in the afternoon. Tomás was in his yard with the hood of the truck up. His three acres beside the house were bare and pale, as they had been all summer. He wiped his hands before he took the envelope, and opened it, and counted the bills with his thumb.
"This is his," he said.
"It's yours."
"I didn't do anything."
She took the feed receipt out of her apron. It was soft now from the pocket and the pencil had smudged, but the six lines were still there and the marks under the names. She gave it to him, and he held it the way he had held the envelope, not knowing which way up it went.
"You came down the road," she said.
He read it for a long time. Then he folded it once, and put it in the envelope with the money, and put the envelope inside the band of his hat, where his father had kept the water tickets when the Arvizus still had water, and put the hat on.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Kalendās Octōbrēs (30 September 2026), ā Lloydō Shapleiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Lloyd Shapley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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