She hit the boundary at a quarter to one, the shovel banging loose in the bed the whole eight miles of gravel. Gideon's truck was already nosed up to the fence on his side of the line. He was already down in the cut, standing in the dry channel where the water used to run.
She parked, pulled the shovel out of the bed, and went to the edge of the bank.
The nail sat high in the cypress over both of them, swallowed nearly to the head, the iron gone to a dark red seam under the bark. The creek crawled past it far below, a thread of water in the cracked mud, sunk so far under the mark that the water and the iron belonged to two different years.
She looked at it once and climbed down into the cut.
"Beam first," she said. "Then the pins."
"Channel first." He said it without turning. "Or we mill a beam to hang over a plug of mud."
He was right. She hated that he was right, and she set the blade to the silt instead of answering.
The mud had packed itself down eleven years into something nearer brick than dirt. The shovel skipped off the top the first three tries. She put her boot on the shoulder of the blade and drove it and felt the crust break away in a slab.
Gideon worked the far side. He moved slow and certain, weighing the heft of a thing before he laid a hand on it. She wanted to be annoyed by it. Mostly it just made the work go.
They cleared down to the base of the gate. She got both hands on the crossbeam and her fingers went straight into the soft of it. Wet rot, black and stringy, the wood coming apart like bread left in a bowl.
"Gone," she said.
"Gone," he agreed.
She reached for the winch and hauled the chain. It came four inches and stopped dead against the seized drum. She hauled again, harder, and got nothing but the same four inches back.
He crouched at the lower hinge and set the flat of a bar against a pin. She braced the plate for him. Nobody had said whose hands went where. He pushed, she held, the pin turned a quarter and stuck.
She was leaning into the plate to meet him before she'd decided to, ready for the shift of his weight the second it came, steadying the gate for him like she'd steadied a hundred gates at his side. She caught herself doing it and stopped. Eleven years gone, and some part of her had kept the count while the rest of her worked at forgetting.
"You going to hold that all day," he said, "or you want it turned."
"Turn it."
He turned it. The pin came free in his palm, red-black and worn thin down the shank. He held it out flat so she could see the metal that used to be there.
"Eleven years," he said.
"Nobody's fault it sat," she said, and heard how fast it came, and dug her thumb hard into the base of her fingers.
The corner of his mouth ticked and went flat again.
"Didn't say it was."
She told herself it was only that two sets of hands beat one. Efficiency. Nothing in it but the job going quicker with somebody on the far side who knew a gate. That was all it was.
They stepped back and looked at what they had. A cleared channel. A rotted beam. Two pins out and a winch that would need pulling and freeing before a thing on that gate ever swung again.
"I'll mill the beam," he said. "Old dimensions. Got the timber for it."
"I'll get pins turned in town." She wiped her hands down her jeans. "We put numbers to paper before the board sits again, or none of it registers."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow's fine."
She climbed the bank. Behind her she heard him gathering tools without hurry, the same as he did everything. She got in the truck and pointed it north up the gravel toward Larkspur, and somewhere in the first mile the warmth she'd left back in the channel came at her again, and she made herself think about pins and timber the rest of the way to the county line.
Efficiency. You worked ground with a man who knew ground, the ground got worked. It meant nothing that her hands had known where his hands would go.
She had a second reason for town, and the pins would have to wait their turn. The board wanted a plan and a co-op sheet, and a co-op sheet meant every name on the spring. She had her own and she had Antler Creek. She didn't have the little places up the draw. The county kept the record. She'd go get the record.
The county office breathed its cold on her the second she came in off the street. After hours in the channel it went straight through her wet shirt, and the sweat turned to a cold line down her spine before the door had swung shut behind her.
She'd left her hat on the truck seat. Her fingers curled at her hip, empty, and she flattened the hand against her thigh and went to the counter.
Marge Dunlap had the desk. The county clerk, a woman Joey had bought hunting stamps and paid taxes across from her whole life. She looked up over the reading glasses that rode a chain around her neck, then took them off and let them swing.
"Josephine," Marge said. "Heard the board put you and Marsh on a plan together."
"Word travels."
"Word's got nothing else to do in this town." No smile in it, no barb either. "What do you need."
"Every rights holder on the spring. All of them, for the co-op sheet. I've got mine, I've got Antler Creek. It's the small places up the draw I'm short."
"That I can pull." Marge slid a blank co-op sheet across the counter without being asked.
She turned to the monitor at her elbow and typed with two fingers. The screen threw a pale square of light up under her chin. She scrolled through the roll to the water record, the transfers stacked newest on top.
Joey came around the end of the counter to read it, as you did when the clerk turned a screen your way and you both looked at it together.
The transfers ran down the column by date. Small shares, the kind the little places carried, eighty acres, a hundred and twenty. Reyes. Talley. The Kowalski place up on the bend. And in the buyer's field beside every one of them, the same name, typed the same way each time.
Marsh, Gideon A.
She read down the list once. Then again, because the first pass her eye kept sliding off it like it was a typo somebody had left in.
"He's been busy," Marge said, easy as reading out the weather. She reached over and tapped the tally at the bottom of the column. "Pretty near half the little shares on that spring in his name now. Forty-seven percent, last I ran it. Been coming in every few weeks since April to file 'em."
She said it the way she'd read out an easement or a lien. No weight on it at all. A fact off a screen for a woman who'd asked to see the screen.
Joey stood with the co-op sheet in her hand. The blank one, the one Marge had just set on the counter — the one she'd driven eight miles of gravel thinking her name and his name side by side on it was the whole shape of the thing.
Not so long ago she had stood in a dry creek and fallen into rhythm with his hands. She had called it efficiency and believed herself.
He'd been buying the water out from under everybody's boots since April, and standing in that channel beside her he had never said one word about it.
Maybe it was a wall against Cardinal Basin. Every share he held was a share the company would never get to buy. Maybe it was the exact shield the co-op was supposed to be, only built early and built quiet, built by a man who fixed things without asking a soul.
Or maybe forty-seven percent of the little shares was a man four points shy of the number that let somebody file for the whole spring, and her half of the gate the last thing standing in the way of it.
The screen glowed. Marge waited, patient, glasses swinging on their chain.
Forty-seven percent of the little shares already in his name, and she had no way to know whether the wall he was raising was meant to keep Cardinal Basin off their water or to fence her inside it.