The woman on the phone was named Patricia Alderman, and she worked for the State Department of Ecology in Olympia. “Mrs. Belcher,” she said, “do you understand what your husband actually owned? He did not only plant forty acres of apples. He owned the spring.” I sat down on an overturned bucket in the shed. She told me she would drive to Wenatchee herself the next morning, and that I was not to sign anything, not to talk to the engineer, and not even to offer him coffee. I promised, and I sat in the dust and the smell of old sprays for a long time.
She arrived at seven in a muddy state pickup, with a roll of maps under her arm and a thermos of tea. We spread the maps across the hood of my truck, out in the orchard, with stones on the corners to hold them down. Line seven of the old survey, she explained, reserved to the family of Harold forever the water right of the Belcher spring, with a priority date of 1893. In a dry valley such a right comes before every other right on the river. The grandfather of Harold had filed it. Harold had inherited it, and never said a word.
“Here is the trouble for the state,” she said, tapping the map with a pencil. The bypass had been designed to draw its drainage and its construction water from the Columbia View canal, and that canal ran on water from the very same spring. It served two hundred families. “For forty years the state has been using your water on a handshake, and nobody in Olympia ever checked who held the paper. You hold the paper, Mrs. Belcher. Your husband kept it in a spray ledger.” I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. It was so exactly like Harold.
The quiet things a good man keeps in his desk are sometimes the loudest things he ever says.
The engineer came back on Friday with a lawyer from the office of the Attorney General. The look on his face while Ms. Alderman laid out the survey was the look of a man who has bitten into an apple and found half a worm. I did not enjoy it as much as I expected. I only asked him if he would like another apple. He did not want one. His lawyer asked to speak to me privately, and for the first time in the whole affair, somebody used the words “fair market value” in a sentence with my name in it.
It took three weeks of letters and two long meetings in a conference room in Wenatchee with terrible coffee. A young lawyer from the legal aid clinic, Ana Ruiz, took my case for nothing once she heard it, and she knew more about water law than every man across the table. By the end of November the state had moved the bypass six hundred feet to the east, onto the old gravel pit and the dry ridge, where there was not a single tree. The change, I was told, saved them eleven million dollars in water costs.
They still needed a narrow strip along the road for a ditch and an easement for the pipe that would carry canal water. For that strip, and for a lease of a share of the spring, the state agreed to pay one million nine hundred thousand dollars. I did not say a word when they slid the contract across the table. I put on my glasses and read every page twice, the way Harold always did. Ana squeezed my elbow underneath the table. Forty one thousand dollars had turned into a number that made the young engineer cough into his fist.
Then I did what Harold would have done. I called Miguel and Tomas, my two hired men, who had worked for us for fourteen and eleven years, and I took them to lunch at the Mexican restaurant on Wenatchee Avenue. I told them that the orchard would stand, that their wages would go up, and that each of them would receive a deed to five acres of his own. Miguel took off his hat and held it in both hands. Tomas, who never cries, looked at his plate for a very long time.
The orchard that year was the best it has ever been, though I will take no credit for it. The Honeycrisps hung on the branches like red lanterns in the October fog. We sold at the roadside stand under a hand painted sign that said PICKED BY HAND SINCE 1971. One Saturday a man from the Department of Transportation stopped and bought a full bushel. He said nothing about the bypass. He paid in cash and dropped a ten dollar bill in the tip jar. I used it toward a new ladder.
In the spring I planted a new row along the east fence, forty young trees in a straight line, with my own hands and a borrowed shovel. Ana and her children came to help, and so did half of the church choir. At the end of the row went a special tree with a small brass tag, a new variety the extension office had bred, a cross between a Gala and a Fuji. They asked me if I wished to name it. I thought about it for exactly one second. I named it Harold.
Now when the state engineer drives past on the bypass, which curves politely around my land as if it were bowing, I sometimes see him slow down and look. I stand on the porch with my coffee and wave. Last week a young surveyor knocked and asked if I had ever thought of selling. I told him I had a ledger in the shed that said otherwise. Harold never bragged about much, but on that one point I believe he would have bragged at last, loudly, with an apple in his hand.