What the Creek Would Carry

The file on this one is thicker than most, and thinner where it matters, and I will lay it out in the order the paper came to me, which is not the order it happened.

It starts with a water docket. A county I will not name kept its stream adjudications in a bound book with a spine repaired twice, and on one page, in two different hands, two parties are entered against the same creek. The first entry is a man's, and his use is written as passage, meaning he needed the water moving, all of it, at its own pace, because the thing he had made died in still water. The second entry, four years later, is a woman's. The clerk wrote her use down as continuous, meaning she needed the water held, a head of it, pooled and patient, because the thing she had made ran on the weight of it. The clerk who entered the second claim drew a line connecting the two entries and wrote one word beside the line. The word is contested. He did not write anything else, because dockets do not editorialize.

Now the part the docket does not hold. The woman, by every account I could find at the edges of the paper, had carried her sentence a long time before she said it anywhere. A neighbor who was a girl then told me the woman used to walk the creek in the evenings for years before there was anything on it, not measuring, just walking. Then one autumn she was gone for a season, the neighbor said, and came back leading something, and the neighbor's family never used the word machine and never used the word animal, and I am a collector, so neither will I. What she made worked. The mill accounts, and I will call it a mill because the ledgers do, show four counties' worth of custom inside a decade. Nothing in any book says her sentence was anything but true. I want that entered plainly, the way the docket clerk would want it: nothing in the record impeaches her.

The man's trail is shorter and louder. He appears in the assessor's rolls with nothing, and then with a going concern, and the concern ran on the creek the way a lung runs on air. A boatwright's invoice survives, and a schedule of deliveries downstream that reads like the pulse of a healthy man. The girl who became the old neighbor said he had been away too, before it, a different year than the woman, a different direction home. And the boatwright's book, which his son kept, shows the man paying, a decade before any of this, for a single hull fitting for a boat that did not yet exist. Nothing in the record impeaches him either. That is the trouble. If either of them had been lying, the county could have sorted it in an afternoon, and this file would be one page long.

The creek could do one thing or the other. It could not do both. I have read the survey twice and walked the ground once, and there is no honest reading of that water that serves the pool and the passage at once.

Here is what the rest of the paper holds. A letter, on good stock, from a firm in the city, offering to purchase the creek's rights entire and lease the water back to both parties on a schedule, with terms described as reasonable and renewable. The letter is in the file because the woman kept it, and across the top of it, in her hand, is written: he sent one to both of us the same day. The minutes of a meeting at the grange hall, the following month, show the two claims presented one after the other, and then a motion, seconded, that the hall record its sense that the creek would not be sold to anybody who had never been wet in it. The motion carried. It is the only thing in the whole file the two of them are recorded as agreeing on.

The minutes continue for three more pages. The woman spoke, and the man spoke, and neighbors spoke, and the secretary wrote down the substance: that both things were needed, that both things were real, that the water was the water. Then the last page of the minutes ends in the middle of a motion. The next book of minutes has not been found. The docket's final entry on the creek is a transfer, undated as to its cause, recording that one of the two uses was withdrawn and the other confirmed, and the clerk who entered it did not note which party appeared before him, or whether both did, or what was said. I do not know how it was decided, or what it cost, or whether the one who withdrew was persuaded, or worn down, or paid, or simply finished, and I have sat with the three people old enough to remember their parents talking about it, and they disagree, and each of them was sure.

What I can tell you is what the ground told me. Both works stood for years before the docket closed the question, side by side on a creek that could not carry them both, and the county's paper, which records every fence-line quarrel and every strayed hog in that country, records no suit between these two. Whatever was done, they did it somewhere paper doesn't reach.

The last item in the file is late and small. A program from a grange supper, decades on, lists the two families providing the tables jointly. Somebody's granddaughter told me the two of them, old by then, sat at opposite ends and did not speak, and somebody else's grandson told me they sat together by the stove, and both of these people were at that supper, and I have their accounts on tape, and the tapes disagree about a thing the two witnesses watched with their own eyes.

The paper stops there, and so must I. What the creek would carry was never the question the county thought it was keeping minutes on. Two people said true things into the same water. The water did what water does. The rest of it happened between them, in the one place no clerk was ever going to be, and if you want to know how it should have gone, the argument is yours now, and I notice that country has not finished it in sixty years of suppers.

Collected by Nancy Foricourt.