He drove to the county seat that afternoon and pulled the deed file. The clerk brought the box. The drainage easement was still recorded, still attached to the deed, still legally on the land. Someone in 1896 had surveyed every lateral, measured every grade, and committed the whole system to the county record so it could not be lost by accident or forgotten by the next owner. It had been forgotten anyway. Not lost. Forgotten. The paper had done its job. The people had not gone back to the paper.
Elias Harker had spent three years digging the bottomland by hand, and with whatever horse-drawn equipment was available in southern Iowa in 1893. James tried, driving home, to picture the work, and found he could picture the hours better than the tools. A man and a team, a ditching plow if he had been able to borrow one, a spade when the plow would not hold the grade. Three years was not a weekend project and not a hired crew that came and left. Three years was a decision made in the winter and kept in the summer, when the corn on the high ground needed him and the ditch in the low ground still had to be cut to the mark. He had measured the grade himself. He had laid every tile to a two-inch fall per one hundred feet, the slope at which clay tile drains without silting and moves water without scouring. Too flat and the joints fill. Too steep and the water cuts the joints out. Two inches in a hundred feet was the narrow road between those failures. He had built a system designed to drain the northwest section by May. The survey said so. The diagram said so. The fact that the tiles were still open, a century later, said the grade had been real.
There was a barn loft on the Harker place that nobody went into except to store things and retrieve them. Old seed sacks. A roll of wire. A crate of canning jars his mother had stopped using and nobody had thrown away. On the south wall, hanging from a nail by a leather strap, was a transit level, a surveying instrument, wooden body, brass fittings, the kind used to measure grade before aluminum existed, before electronic levels. James had walked past it since he was a boy. His father had called it the old level and told him not to knock it down when he was throwing bales. He had never asked what it had been set to. He climbed up that evening and lifted it down. The brass was dull. The vial was intact. Taped to the frame, under two layers of yellowed cloth tape, was a small piece of paper written in a careful, close hand.
Keep level set at two-inch fall per one hundred feet.