He bought twenty feet of four-inch plastic pipe and a collar coupling from the co-op in Mount Ayr. The man at the counter asked if he was tiling the late field again. James said he was finishing a job. He connected the old clay system to the new pipe on a Saturday morning, with Rick there to cut a neat pass through the toe of the embankment and no farther. The coupling seated. He checked it twice. The new pipe ran through the base of the embankment and opened into the road ditch on the county side, clear of the shoulder, where a man driving past would not see anything but a small clay-colored mouth in the grass if he knew to look. The connection took a morning. He did not hold a ceremony. He shoveled the spoil back, seeded the cut, and went to finish the forms on the machine shed.
The following spring, the northwest section began to drain in the second week of April. James walked it on a Tuesday after a rain that would have held, in any other year, into May. The low corner was dark, but it was not standing. By the end of the month, the section that had stood in water through April every year he could remember had dried to planting condition. He did not trust it the first dry day. He waited. He walked it again. He ran the soil probe in on the fifth of May and got the numbers he needed, the numbers he had been getting on the home field in the last week of April for most of his life. He planted corn on the eighth, three weeks earlier than he had ever planted that ground. The planter did not lug. The closing wheels did not pack a smear. He did not mention it to anyone at the co-op. The field drained. He planted. That was all that happened, and it was the first time in twenty years that all that happened had been enough.
In late May, after the corn was up, he went back to the barn loft. The rows in the northwest section were visible from the yard if he stood at the corner of the new shed, short and even, not the ragged late stand he was used to seeing in June. He took the transit level down from its nail, carried it out to the field, and set it up at the edge of the new pipe outlet. The morning was bright. The ditch had a little run in it from a shower two nights before, and the mouth of the plastic was doing what the clay mouth had been built to do. He took a reading. He took it again, because he wanted the number and not the hope of the number. Two inches of fall per one hundred feet. The same as the paper on the frame. The same as the 1896 soil survey. The same as the ledger entry from 1901, when the son of the man who had dug the ditches had noted that the north forty was finally draining on time.
James carried the transit level back to the loft and hung it from its nail on the south wall. He pressed the tape flat again over the note, though the tape did not need him. Elias Harker had solved the problem in 1896. He had solved it on a grade a man could still read, in tile a backhoe could still break clean, in a record a clerk could still find if someone asked. The county had buried the solution in 1961, under a road that needed to be higher, without asking what the fill was covering. James had spent twenty years fighting water that had nowhere left to go. The water had not been stubborn. It had been trapped. The field had not failed him. The exit had. And the exit, once opened, had remembered the work.