Thirty acres of his bottomland, the northwest section, the lowest ground on the place, flooded every spring without exception. Not dramatically. Persistently. The water did not come roaring out of the creek and tear fence. It seeped. It rose in the grass. It silvered the low corner on a March afternoon and was still there, duller and colder, when he walked the same line in the third week of April. By the time the surface had dried enough to take the weight of a planter, the calendar read June. His neighbors were laying corn rows while James Harker watched water standing in his low field. Some years he got soybeans in late and called it a crop. Some years he mowed the weeds in July and told himself the ground had rested. He had stopped writing the northwest section into his early planting plans. He wrote it in pencil, at the bottom of the notebook, after the good fields.
He had hired drainage contractors three times in twenty years. Three different outfits. Three different trucks in the lane, three different men walking the low ground with a probe and a confident way of talking about fall and outlet. Each of them laid modern plastic tile at standard depth, the depth the manuals liked, the depth that worked on ground that already wanted to let water go. The first job, in the early eighties, had looked like salvation for one spring. The water left the middle of the field in April. James planted on the twelfth of May and stood at the end of the row longer than he needed to, just to see the soil take the seed without sucking at the press wheels. The next March the corner was silver again. The contractor came back, walked the outlet, said the main was fine, and suggested the laterals had silted. They had not silted. They had never been the whole answer.
The second outfit, five years later, laid a new main closer to the ditch and tied the old plastic into it. That one bought him two decent springs and a third that was only late by a week. Then the pattern returned. The third contractor, a younger man out of Creston who talked about laser grade and brought a machine that looked like it could not fail, put in a tighter grid and told James the problem had been spacing. James paid him. The field drained in May for one year. By the second year the low corner was holding water through the end of April again, the same patient, insulting water, the kind that did not flood a basement or take out a bridge and so never made the paper. Each improvement worked for a season or two before the field returned to its old pattern. He had stopped expecting the ground to drain when other ground drained. He had started calling the northwest section the late field, which was a kinder name than the one he used in the cab of the tractor when he was alone.
He was building a new machine shed that September morning because the old one had run out of room. The planter had spent the winter half in the weather. A neighbor had offered to pour the pad if James had the hole ready. Rick Delaney had the backhoe. They had picked the corner because it was close enough to the lane to be useful and far enough from the bins that a load of corn would not have to thread between buildings. Nobody had said the word drainage. They were digging a foundation, not a cure.