1Far to the south, the two great rivers run down through a land as flat as a floor. Almost no rain falls there. But the soil is the rivers' own gift, black and deep, and where water is led onto it, barley stands as high as a man's belt.
2So the people of that land had learned to lead the water. They cut a ditch from the river, wide as a house, and from that ditch smaller ones, and from those smaller ones still, like the veins in a leaf. Along such a ditch, in the days I tell of, there were two villages. Reed Bend stood near the river, at the head of the water. Two Mounds stood half a day's walk below it, at the tail.
3A ditch is never finished. Every flood the river fills it with silt, and every winter the silt must be dug out with hoes and carried off in baskets, or within three years the ditch is a line of damp grass. It took every back in both villages to do it. Neither could have kept the water running alone. They knew this, and they did not love each other for it.
4In Two Mounds there lived a woman named Etta. Ten years before, in a summer when the river ran low, the men of the two villages had fought with hoes at the place where the ditch divided. Four had died. One of them was Etta's husband, Haro. They carried him home on a door of reeds.
5That same spring, before the fight, Haro had planted thirty date palms along the tail of the ditch, beside their barley field. They were shoots no taller than his knee, cut from the foot of an old tree. A palm is slow. It gives nothing for seven or eight years, and not much for ten.
6"What are you doing?" Etta had asked him then. "We will be grey before those feed us."
7"We will be grey anyway," Haro had said. "I would sooner be grey with dates."
8She had watered those palms for ten years. She had carried the water to them in jars, in the bad seasons. Her son Lugo had been five when his father died; he was fifteen now, tall, with his father's laugh and a great wish to hit someone from Reed Bend. And in this tenth year, for the first time, the palms had flowered. Etta had climbed each one and dusted the flowers by hand, as must be done. Now the fruit hung on them in long green strings, hard as pebbles, waiting for the summer to sweeten them.
9That was the year the river did not rise.
10The flood came late and low. The big ditch ran at half its depth. By the time the water had passed the fields of Reed Bend, there was a trickle left for Two Mounds, and then there was mud, and then there was cracked earth with dead fish in it.
11The barley at the tail turned from green to grey. Then word came down the ditch: Reed Bend had built a dam of reeds and clay across the dividing place, and was holding back all that there was.
12The men of Two Mounds gathered that evening with their hoes. Lugo was among them, with his father's hoe, which had a stone head.
13"They are killing us with a wall of mud," said a man named Ishun, who had lost a brother in the old fight. "We will go up tonight and break it. If they stand in the way, we will break them too."
14"And they will break some of you," said Etta. She had come and stood among the men, which was not her place, and she did not care. "And in ten years your sons will stand here. I have buried one for that ditch. Give me a day."
15"A day for what?"
16"To go up and talk to them."
17"Talk!" said Ishun. "They have the water. Why would they talk?"
18"Because of the silt," said Etta. But they did not understand her, and she had no time to explain. "One day. If I am not back by tomorrow's dark, do what you like."
19They gave it to her, because of Haro. She saw her son's face as she left. He was ashamed of her.
20She walked up the dry ditch through the night. Near dawn she came to the dam. It was well made. Behind it the water stood dark and still, and men of Reed Bend sat along it with hoes across their knees. They stood up when they saw someone coming. Then they saw it was one woman, and did not know what to do.
21"I want the keeper of your ditch," said Etta.
22They took her to him. His name was Dagu. He was an old man with a white beard and one eye, and he had lost the other in the fight ten years before. Etta did not know whose hoe had done it. It might have been Haro's.
23"Have you come to beg," he said, "or to count our men?"
24"I have come to see your barley," said Etta.
25He was surprised into showing her. They walked the fields of Reed Bend in the first light. Etta looked, and her heart sank, for she had hoped to find them fat. The barley nearest the dam was green. But twenty paces on it was yellowing, and at the far edge it was as grey as her own. The dam held back all the water there was, and all that there was could not feed even Reed Bend.
26"So you see," said Dagu. "We are not drinking your share and laughing. There is no share. If I open that dam, the water runs down to you through half a day of dry ditch, and the ditch drinks most of it, and what comes to your fields will not ripen one ear. Then we both starve instead of one of us. I have counted it every way. I am sorry for your children. I have my own."
27Etta stood among the yellow barley for a long time.
28"You have counted this summer," she said. "Count the winter."
29"What?"
30"If we get no water, Two Mounds is finished. Those who do not die will go to their kin downriver. Good. You have the ditch to yourselves. Then the flood comes next spring and fills it with silt. Who digs it out?"
31Dagu did not answer.
32"It takes four hundred backs. You have two hundred. You cannot clear half of it. In three years the water will not reach your own far fields. In ten you will be a few houses by the river, growing onions." She turned to him. "You need us alive, old man. You need us more than you need this year's barley. And we need you. I have hated that for ten years. It is still true."
33He looked at her with his one eye. "My brother said something like it," he said slowly, "the night before the fight. Nobody listened. Then he was dead, and I was half blind, and it seemed a poor time to say he had been right." He pulled at his beard. "Say there is something in it. There is still not enough water. I cannot make water by agreeing with you."
34"No. But there is enough for half," said Etta. "Not half of yours. Half of all. Hear me. Each village picks the best part of its fields, the part nearest the ditch, where the least water is lost. We water only those. The rest we let die: yours and ours. The water goes by turns, three days to you, three to us, and one keeper from each village stands at the gate whenever it is opened or shut. What ripens, we cut together and share by the head. It will be a thin year. Nobody will be full. But both villages will be standing at the end of it, and there will be seed, and four hundred backs to dig in winter."
35"Your people will let their fields die on your word?"
36"I do not know," said Etta. "Mine is at the tail. It will be the first to go."
37She had not let herself think of the palms until she said it. The barley was one year's bread, and a field could be sown again. But the palms stood at the very tail, and there was fruit on them for the first time in ten years.
38Dagu was a ditch-keeper, and he knew what stood where along his water. "Haro's palms," he said. "I have seen them from the bank. They are in fruit."
39"A palm has deep feet," said Etta. Her voice was not steady. "It can thirst one summer and live. It will drop its fruit. It will not die." She wiped her face with her hand, roughly. "I have waited ten years. I can wait eleven. Call your people."
40It was past noon before Reed Bend agreed. There was shouting. Dagu did not shout. He sat and repeated the count of backs, over and over, until the shouters had worn themselves out against it. Then he took his staff and walked down the ditch with Etta, slowly, for he was old.
41They were too slow.
42Ishun had not waited for tomorrow's dark. He had not trusted her to come back, or had not wanted her to. As the sun went down, Etta and Dagu came in sight of the dam and saw men running along it, and hoes rising and falling, and heard the sound that she had heard in her sleep for ten years.
43She ran. She came up onto the dam screaming for them to stop, and no one heard her. She saw her son in the middle of it with his father's hoe, face to face with a boy of Reed Bend no older than himself. She saw the stone head swing. The boy went backward off the dam and into the dark water behind it, and did not come up.
44Everything stopped. Even Ishun stood still. Lugo looked at the hoe in his hands as if someone else had put it there.
45"Zimu!" It was Dagu's voice, cracked, from the bank. The boy was his grandson.
46Then Lugo dropped the hoe and went in after him. The water behind the dam was deeper than a man, and neither village's children learned to swim, for there had never been a need. He went under. He came up with nothing and went under again. On the third time he came up with the boy's hair in his fist, and hands reached down from the dam, Reed Bend hands and Two Mounds hands together, and pulled them both out onto the clay.
47The boy Zimu lay like a wet sack. Then he coughed, and brought up water, and began to cry with the pain of his broken shoulder. He would never lift that arm above his head again. But he was alive, and every man on that dam had seen how near it had been.
48Lugo knelt beside him in the mud, shaking. Dagu came up slowly on his staff. He looked down at the boy who had struck his grandson and then gone into the water for him. Nobody breathed.
49"Your father had that same swing," the old man said at last. "I hope you have more sense in the rest of you." He turned to the men, all of them, with the dam half broken between them and the water starting to run. "Mend it," he said. "Both villages. Now. Then sit down, for this woman has something to say, and you will hear her, or by the river I will take out my other eye."
50They mended it together in the dark. Then Etta told them, and Dagu counted the backs for them, and it was a long night. Ishun fought it hardest. In the end it was Lugo who answered him. He said, "I nearly killed a boy tonight over water that would not have reached our field. I would sooner be hungry." After that there was not much more to say.
51It was done as she had said. Each village chose its best ground and let the rest go. They set a gate of reeds and clay in the dam, and a keeper from each village stood by it. They counted the days with pebbles in two bowls, so that neither could cheat without the other's bowl showing it. Etta's field was the first to be given up. She stood at the edge of it and watched it die, and it took eight days.
52The palms dropped their fruit in the heat of summer. She found it lying under them one morning, small and green and hard. Then she sat down with her back against the tallest palm for a while. The fronds were still green. She put her palm flat on the trunk, as one does with an animal that has been ill.
53It was a thin year. Nobody was full. But the watered fields ripened, and both villages cut them, and the grain was shared by the head. Nobody died of hunger in Reed Bend or in Two Mounds, and both seed stores were sealed.
54That winter four hundred people dug the ditch. They dug it deeper than it had ever been, and they did not stop at Two Mounds. They carried it on past Haro's palms, so that in a low year the water would have a shorter road to the tail. The keepers kept their gate, and the two bowls of pebbles.
55Etta's palms bore the next summer, and every summer after. The dates were brown and soft, and so sweet they hurt the teeth. She was grey by then, as Haro had said.
56She carried the first basket up the ditch herself, to Reed Bend, and set it down in front of a boy with a crooked shoulder. He looked at it, and at her, and at the tall young man who stood behind her not knowing where to put his hands. Then he took a date, and held the basket out to Lugo.
57A palm lives a hundred years. Those thirty were still giving fruit when no one in Two Mounds knew who Haro had been. People only knew that someone, once, had planted them for people he would not live to see.