He did not sleep much that night. The tile sat on the porch step, rinsed off, drying in the dark. He kept seeing the open bore. A broken system silted. This one had not silted. At first light he drove to the county extension office in Bedford. The woman at the desk knew him the way people in a small county know a man who has been asking the same drainage question for twenty years. She did not sigh. She pulled a bound soil survey from 1896, the paper thick and the binding cracked, and set it on the counter with both hands. She found the Harker quarter section without searching long. The under-drainage record was not a footnote. It was an entry, written as if the person who wrote it expected it to be read.
Systematic under-drainage installed 1893–1896, Harker quarter section. Tile laid on surveyed grade, two-inch fall per one hundred feet.
A diagram was attached to the entry. It showed the entire northwest section divided into a grid, laterals spaced at sixty-foot intervals, each one feeding into a main collector running toward the low corner of the field. The corner where water had always stood longest. The corner where, that week, a backhoe was sitting beside a half-dug foundation. The system was complete. It had been built over three years, finished in the fall of 1896, and registered with the land deed at the county courthouse. The name on the record was Elias Harker, James’s great-great-grandfather.
James stood at the counter and read the entry twice. He had known the name. It was on the old abstract, in the list of owners, a man who had come into the quarter when the county was still more grass than fence. He had not known the man had spent three years under this field. The woman at the desk let him look at the diagram as long as he wanted. She did not tell him it would solve his spring. She had heard too many drainage stories to promise a spring. She made him a copy of the page and the diagram and told him the original deed file would be at the courthouse if the easement had been recorded the way the survey said.