He stopped.
The farm woman was standing beside the pump.
He climbed out.
“You’re using that old well?”
“Yes.”
“That thing barely makes twenty gallons a minute.”
“Closer to eighteen.”
He laughed.
“That won’t irrigate five acres.”
“I’m not irrigating corn.”
The smile disappeared from his face.
He looked toward the pond.
“How deep is that?”
“Depends where you stand.”
“How many crawfish did you stock?”
The farm woman wiped grease from her fingers.
“You were right about one thing.”
“What?”
“I spent my own money.”
She walked away.
The local farmer remained beside the fence longer than he intended.
That evening, he drove past again.
This time he did not stop.
In September, the first serious problem appeared.
Birds.
Egrets discovered the pond.
Then herons.
One morning the farm woman counted nearly thirty birds spread along the shallows.
She ran toward them waving her hat.
They lifted into the air in a white cloud.
The next morning they returned.
She tried lines.
Flags.
Noise.
Moving scare devices.
Nothing worked for long.
For the first time, fear began overtaking excitement.
Predators could destroy a young population before harvest.
She contacted an extension office.
She spoke with older crawfish producers farther south.
She changed habitat depth in the most exposed sections.
She added cover.
She adjusted when water entered certain areas.
The birds never disappeared.
But losses slowed.
Then came the second problem.
The pump failed.
Not partially.
Completely.
A bearing seized during the hottest week of September.
The farm woman discovered it at dawn.
She tried restarting it.
Nothing.
By afternoon, temperature climbed above ninety.
The nearest repair shop said replacement parts would take four days.
Four days could erase months of work.
She drove to three farms looking for a compatible pump.
None had one.
Then she remembered an abandoned rice operation twenty miles south.
A man there had offered her old irrigation equipment earlier in the year.
She drove there before sunset.
The pump was larger than she needed.
It had been sitting beneath a shed for nearly a decade.
The owner wanted six hundred dollars.
She had less than four hundred available.
She offered three hundred and a future share of the first harvest.
The owner stared at her.
“You don’t even know if you’ll have a harvest.”
“That’s why it’s called a share.”
He smiled.
“Half a sack.”
“Quarter.”
“One third.”
“Deal.”
They loaded the pump after dark.
The farm woman installed it with her mother and two relatives working beneath truck headlights.
At 2:17 in the morning, water began moving again.
Her mother sat on an overturned bucket.
“Please tell me farming eventually gets easier.”
The farm woman watched water pour into the channel.