My grandson drove up from Nashville that night, breathing hard when he called, and asked me, Grandma, do you know what Grandpa did in 1970. I said I did not. He said, he put the spring under the state. He protected it forever. These people cannot touch it.
The carving inside the springhouse lintel, under our initials, was a registry number and the word STATE. In 1970, when Clarence built the stone springhouse, he had done something quiet and far-sighted. He placed the spring and its aquifer under a state conservation designation, a protected water source, recorded and permanent, with that registry number carved where only family would ever look.
The bottling company man told me they had bought the land all around me and would drill wells and pump my spring dry whether I sold or not. But a spring under state conservation protection is not something a company drills around and sucks dry for profit. The designation restricts the very pumping he bragged about.
He told me they would have that water one way or another. Clarence had given it to the state fifty-four years ago, so that no one ever could.
My grandson, who works for the state, brought the registry number to the right office. The protection was real, recorded, and still in force. The companys drilling plans ran straight into a state-protected watershed, and their lawyers went quiet.
The springhouse door is still unlocked, the way Clarence always kept it, and the neighbors still come with their jugs in the summer for cold, sweet water that never stops, even in drought.
Clarence carved our initials and a date on that lintel in 1970, and I looked at them for fifty years and never looked closer. He was a man who did not say much. He just quietly made sure that the best thing on our land would belong to everybody and nobody, forever, and then he carved the proof over the door and let me find it when I needed it.