The water rights attorney in Fresno, Señor Delgados son, said, Mrs. Mendoza, my father always spoke of your Rafael. He said the water was here before any agency was. Tell me what they did.
I told him about the water man and the padlock on the valve, the well that was never registered, the vines dead by August.
Listen to me, he said. Your husband dug that well and perfected his water right in 1976, before the registration rules the agency is citing ever existed. A right that old is grandfathered. It does not disappear because a clerk has no card for it. The document behind that loose stone is your proof, and it is older than their whole program.
The yellowed paper wrapped in oilcloth behind the stone where Rafael carved our initials was the 1976 water right, with the state seal, recorded and valid.
They told me I had no right to the water my husband pulled from the ground with his own hands, and the ground had been ours since 1976.
The attorney filed the old right with the agency, and a judge agreed it was grandfathered, and the padlock came off the valve. The vines were thirsty, but they were not dead. By harvest they came back.
The grandkids stomped grapes in the barrel by the well house again that fall. Twelve acres of Zinfandel, still alive, because Rafael carved more than our initials into that stone wall in 1976. He left the water right behind it, waiting for the day I would need to kneel down and find it.