Page 84 of Devoted

"I'm counting."

"Good," Lauren said, and drove.

He got to the home place at dark with the folder on the seat beside him.

The kitchen windows were lit and Old Eli's truck was gone from the shop and the works sat humming a mile west with the lights strung out along the seam the way they'd been strung his whole grown life. He let himself in at the mudroom door the way he had since he was four.

His father was at the table with his reading glasses on and a letter in front of him. His mother was at the counter with the percolator, in the good sweater, at nine o'clock at night. She hadn't been sitting down.

"Sit down," Clay said, without looking up.

He sat. He'd had it riding in that truck nine days and hadn't carried it through this door once, and he'd told himself he was waiting on the state to write him first. He'd been waiting on nothing.

"A man from the state telephoned the office Thursday." His father took the glasses off and folded them. "Asked me how many gallons a day come up on the west line, and what's under the north pond, and whether we'd surveyed the shallow water before we drilled." He set the glasses on the letter. "He had a complaint number. He would not read me the name that was on it."

"It's mine."

His mother quit pouring. She didn't turn around.

"Say that again."

"I filed it in Midland Tuesday week. My name's on it, my address, my numbers." Owen put the folder on the table and opened it and turned it so it faced his father. "Everything they've got, you've got. I'd rather you had it from me tonight than off a telephone."

"You'd rather." Clay didn't touch it. "Talk."

So he talked. Her well, two hundred feet, sweet fifty years. The pump running four minutes before it caught, and one minute in January. The weighted line down her casing every week since the second of March, and the tape going further into the dark each time, six feet in five weeks. His own two wells on the same days, the same line, not a hair.

"Your two are shallower than hers."

"One is. One's deeper."

"And the spring's been dry."

"It's been dry before. It's never taken six feet off a well in five weeks."

Clay pulled it an inch toward him with one finger and turned a page. "Where'd you get gallons a day?"

"Jett."

That stopped him. "Jett gave you gauge numbers off my place?"

"I asked him. Nobody ever has." Owen kept on before his father could get in front of it. "It's near double what it was in October, and they pushed the north pond out a hundred yards in February because there was more coming up than there was room for. That's not a secret, Daddy. Any man on that road with eyes has watched the trucks run all night since Thanksgiving."

"And the last page?"

"Brody read it."

"Brody." Clay sat back. "Burchall's man."

"Burchall's crews drilled your west line. Brody put his own report on a desk in Midland with his name under it two weeks ago and he'll likely be out of a job by the Fourth of July." Owen looked at his father across the table. "He's read water eight years. He says a well that deep takes the salt out from underneath the sweet, and the sweet comes down behind it to fill the room. That's her six feet. It's moving east across four sections, and it doesn't stop while the trucks run."

His mother set the pot down on the trivet and stayed at the counter with her back to the room.

"Old casing," Clay said.

"Sir?"

"Mick Bateman drilled that well himself with a borrowed rig the year I got married, and he cased it as deep as he could pay for, which wasn't deep." His father said it patient, the way he said everything he'd already decided. "You've got a fifty-year-old hole in the ground in the second dry spring running. It fails, or it silts, or it takes on the salt off some other man's leavings from before you were born. I've seen four go the same way on this road."