Why Did Jesus Stay Exactly 40 Days ON EARTH after Resurrection Before Ascending to Heaven?
The zinc counter at Big Al’s Bait & Tackle didn’t just smell like dead minnows and copper coins; it smelled like the exact moment a man realizes his life has been bought, sold, and traded behind his back.
Jesse didn’t look up when the bell above the door rattled. He didn’t need to. He knew the heavy, dragging hitch of his brother’s left boot anywhere. It was a limp earned at nineteen on a gravel road outside Lubbock, back when they still thought old trucks could fly if you hit the culvert fast enough. But tonight, that dragging boot sounded heavier, like Cole was towing a sack of wet cement through the sawdust.
“The papers came,” Cole said. He didn’t drop them on the counter. He laid them down flat, smoothing the yellow legal envelope with a hand so scarred from catfish spines and crescent wrenches that the knuckles looked like walnuts. “They’re taking the lower fifty, Jess. The whole stretch from the willow creek down to the state line fence. It’s done.”
Jesse didn’t move the file he was working on. He was cleaning the burrs off a brass casting for an old Penn reel, his thumb moving in small, rhythmic circles that had nothing to do with the metal and everything to do with keeping his heart from bursting through his flannel shirt. “They can’t take water rights on a handshake lease, Cole. Our granddad put those posts in with a white oak mallet in fifty-two. The state knows that.”
“The state don’t know nothing but what the grid tells it,” Cole spit, and when he turned his head, the yellow fluorescent bulb above the register caught the dark, wet grease on his cheek. It wasn’t grease. It was the greasy shine of a forty-year-old man trying not to cry in front of his younger brother. “They got a machine down in Austin that says our oak posts are three feet inside the county easement. Three feet, Jess. That’s all it took. They’re running the ditch through the orchard by Tuesday morning.”
That was the first 500 words of the end. If you’ve ever lived in a town where the county courthouse has a copper dome that turned green before your father was born, you know that three feet of dirt isn’t just three feet of dirt. It’s the difference between a family that stays and a family that packs their boxes into the back of an old Ford and goes to look for work in a city where the air tastes like burnt plastic.
The thing about West Texas—the real West Texas, not the stuff they show you in the car commercials with the clean horses and the actors wearing shiny Stetson hats—is that it doesn’t give you anything without a fight, and it usually takes it back when you’re sleeping. We had five hundred acres of red clay and mesquite that had been trying to kill us since the Great Depression. Our grandfather, a man named Silas who used to shave with cold water and lye soap just to prove he could, had spent forty years digging a canal system by hand. He used a mule named Clover and a slip-scraper that looked like a giant iron spoon.
When you spend your youth clearing rocks out of a ditch so that four hundred gallons of muddy creek water can reach a row of cotton plants that look like they’re dying anyway, you develop a specific kind of relationship with the planet. You don’t look at nature like it’s a church. You look at it like it’s an employer that hasn’t paid you in six months but will fire you if you take a day off.
“We got three days,” Jesse said, his voice dropping into that quiet, flat register that always made Cole look around for a heavy object. Jesse was the smaller of the two, but he had our mother’s eyes—grey as a wet zinc bucket, eyes that didn’t blink when the wind started kicking the topsoil into the kitchen. “They think because we’re short on the tax note we’re just gonna let the yellow trucks roll right over the graves.”
“Don’t start that talk,” Cole muttered, but he was already reaching into his pocket for his tobacco tin. That was the sign. If Cole was rolling a smoke, he was listening. “The sheriff’s a second cousin on the Miller side, Jess. He ain’t gonna want to pull a lever on us, but he’s got that mortgage on his brick house near the high school. He’ll do what the judge tells him.”
“Let him,” Jesse said.
Now, if you’re reading this in an apartment in Chicago or a house in Seattle, you might think this is where the guns come out. That’s the movie version. In reality, when the state wants your dirt, they don’t send Texas Rangers with rifles; they send a twenty-four-year-old kid named Brandon who wears a blue polyester shirt and carries a clipboard with a digital stylus. They send a man who smells like lime shaving cream and doesn’t know how to cross a barbed-wire fence without tearing his trousers.
That kid showed up at eight o’clock the next morning. He drove a white Jeep with the state seal on the door, and he didn’t even get out of the vehicle until he had checked his phone for ten minutes. Jesse watched him from the porch, holding a tin mug of coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes ago.
“Mr. Callahan?” the kid asked, walking up the dirt path like he was trying not to get his boots dusty. They were clean boots. Red Wing, but the kind you buy at the mall, the ones with the white soles that have never stepped in anything thicker than a spilled latte.
“Jesse,” Jesse said.
“Right. Well, I’m Brandon from the regulatory office. We sent the notification regarding the hydrologic correction on the lower sector.” He used those words—hydrologic correction. That’s machine talk for ‘we’re digging a ditch through your granddad’s melon patch so the subdivision three miles up can have a artificial lake for their jet skis.’
“I saw the paper,” Jesse said. He didn’t offer the kid any coffee. In our family, you don’t give a man a seat unless you’re willing to hear his name after he’s done eating.
“Great. Then you know we need the gate unlocked by six AM tomorrow. The excavation team from Lone Star Trenching is on a hard schedule. They’re moving six hundred yards of dirt a day, and if we delay, the county gets penalized by the district.”
Jesse looked out over the field. The mesquite trees were just starting to put out those small, pale green tassels that mean the frost is finally gone for good. Down by the creek, the water was running slow and brown, thick with the silt of three counties. “My grandfather built that levee with an iron bar and six cases of dynamite he bought off a railroad crew in forty-nine. He blew the rock out of that bend so the water would stay in the channel during the May rises. If you dig that ditch straight, Brandon, the next big rain is gonna take the whole bottom forty acres and wash it down into the reservoir like a bucket of salt.”
The kid smiled. It was a small, professional smile that had been practiced in a mirror during a training seminar in San Antonio. “The engineers ran the simulation on the mainframe, Jesse. The flow dynamics are accounted for. The new channel is concrete-lined for the first two thousand feet. It’s completely stable.”
Mainframe. Simulation. You see, that’s where the world went wrong. People stopped looking at the dirt with their eyes and started looking at it through a glass screen. They think because a computer says a river will go straight, the river is obligated to obey. But water doesn’t care about a twenty-four-year-old kid from Austin or his mainframe. Water behaves like an old hound dog—it goes where it’s always gone, and if you put a wall in its way, it just sleeps against it until the wood rots out from under it.
“You tell your engineers they forgot about the limestone shelf,” Jesse said, his voice flat as a graveyard fence. “Two feet down under that silt, there’s a layer of blue stone that runs all the way back to the hills. You hit that with a yellow machine, and you’re gonna crack the cisterns three miles west of here. The Miller place will go dry by dark.”
Brandon looked at his clipboard. He tapped the screen twice with his plastic pen. “The map doesn’t show any limestone shelf, Mr. Callahan. It’s classified as alluvial loam.”
“The map’s wrong,” Jesse said.
“The map is satellite-verified,” Brandon replied, and for the first time, his voice had a little bit of grease in it too. He was getting tired of the wind. The wind in West Texas doesn’t stop for clipboards; it just keeps coming off the caprock, carrying enough sand to take the paint right off your fender if you stay still long enough. “Tomorrow morning. Six AM. If the gate’s locked, the sheriff has the order to cut the chain.”
When Cole came back from the co-op that afternoon, he had a box of five-eighths-inch bolts and three tubes of grease in the back of the truck. He didn’t look at Jesse. He walked straight into the kitchen, took the pitcher of ice water out of the icebox, and drank out of the spout until his throat clicked.
“I talked to Miller,” Cole said, wiping his chin with his sleeve. “He says he’s sorry. He says his wife’s been sick and the insurance didn’t cover the throat specialist down in Houston. He says if he doesn’t serve the papers, the commissioners will have his badge by the end of the month.”
Jesse sat at the table, a piece of greased paper in front of him. He was drawing something with an old carpenter’s pencil—not a map of the property, but a sketch of the intake valve on the old irrigation pump that sat by the willow bend. “Miller always was a runner,” Jesse said. “Remember when that red heifer got out in the brush back in eighty-four? Miller stayed in the truck because he didn’t want to get his jeans torn by the catclaw.”
“He’s still the law, Jess.”
“The law’s a piece of paper in a metal drawer, Cole. The water’s been here since the Comanches were riding horses through the caprock. You can’t put a badge on a river.”
Now, here is the part where you have to understand the difference between being stubborn and being right. My grandfather used to say there are two kinds of men in this country: the ones who think the world was made for them, and the ones who know they were made for the world. The first kind are the ones who build towns like Las Vegas out in the sand and think they’re smart because they have air conditioning. The second kind are the ones who keep their mouths shut and watch the clouds, because they know that sooner or later, the sand always takes the house back.
Jesse wasn’t trying to save the five hundred acres because he wanted to get rich on cotton. We hadn’t made a profit on cotton since the Nixon administration. He was saving it because he knew that if you break the line between a family and their dirt, the men turn into something else. They turn into the kind of people who live in trailers outside Odessa and spend their nights watching television programs about other people’s lives. They become ghosts before they’re even under the sod.
That night, we didn’t turn on the lamps. We sat on the porch and watched the headlights of the big trucks moving along the state highway two miles away. They looked like little yellow bugs crawling across a black blanket. Every now and then, you could hear the Jake brake on a cattle truck when it hit the grade near the oil tanks—that low, tearing rattle that sounds like an old canvas sail ripping in a gale.
“You remember what she said before she died?” Cole asked. He was talking about our mother, Sarah, who had gone into the ground back when the cotton was six inches high in the dry year of ninety-two.
“She said a lot of things,” Jesse said. “Most of it about you not leaving the tractor grease on the kitchen chairs.”
“No,” Cole said, his voice dropping until it was just a vibration against the screen door. “She said if you ever let the creek go dry, the house won’t stay straight. She said the wood remembers where the water was.”
Jesse didn’t answer that. He stood up, his boots groaning against the pine planks of the porch floor, and walked out into the dark toward the barn.
At five-thirty the next morning, the world was the color of a wet slate shingle. The air was cold enough to make your breath look like smoke, but you could feel the heat coming up behind the hills like a stove being stoked.
Jesse was down by the gate. He hadn’t used a padlock. He had taken an old logging chain—the three-quarter-inch stuff with the square links that they used for dragging cedar logs out of the brakes—and he had wrapped it around the fence posts seven times. Then he had taken the oxy-acetylene torch from the shop and welded the links together into a solid lump of grey iron. If you wanted that gate open, you weren’t going to use a key; you were going to need an industrial saw or an hour with a torch.
The white Jeep showed up first, its headlights looking pale and sickly in the dawn. Behind it came the flatbed truck carrying a yellow excavator that looked like a giant, sleeping insect with its greasy iron arm tucked into its belly. Behind that was the sheriff’s cruiser, the blue lights turning slow and regular, casting long, bruised shadows across the grease-grass.
Sheriff Miller got out of his car first. He was a fat man now, his belly hanging over his leather belt like a sack of grain, but he still had that quick, nervous walk he’d had when he was a boy playing shortstop for the high school team. He walked up to the chain, looked at the welded links, and then looked at Jesse, who was sitting on an overturned five-gallon oil tub with an iron pry-bar across his knees.
“Jess,” Miller said, nodding once. “You’re making this hard on everybody.”
“It ain’t hard, Miller,” Jesse said. “You just stay on your side of the post, and we’re all square.”
The kid Brandon came running up behind the sheriff, his clean boots slipping in the red mud near the culvert. He had a different shirt on today—grey instead of blue—but he still had that plastic stylus in his hand like a weapon. “This is a violation of the civil code,” he shouted, his voice cracking a little bit in the cold air. “We have the emergency access injunction from the county judge. Cut the chain, Sheriff.”
Miller didn’t move. He reached under his coat, scratched his hip, and looked at the excavator truck. The driver of the flatbed had his window down, spitting tobacco juice onto the gravel and watching them with the bored, heavy gaze of a man who gets paid by the hour regardless of who owns the dirt.
“Jess,” Miller said again, leaning his weight against the fence post. “They got thirty guys from the state office coming down with a court order by noon. If I don’t clear this gate, they’re gonna bring in the state troopers from Abilene. You want those boys in the wide-brimmed hats tearing up your fence? They don’t know where the old wells are, Jess. They’ll drop a tire into one of those holes and sue you for the truck.”
“Let them bring the troopers,” Jesse said. “The fence is legal. I checked the survey from eighty-eight. The county line runs through the center of the creek bed, Miller. Not thirty feet north of it. If that yellow machine puts its bucket in the grass where that kid’s standing, he’s trespassing on private land under the homestead act.”
Brandon held up his screen. “The eighty-eight survey was superseded by the satellite assessment of two thousand twelve, Mr. Callahan. The water course shifted during the flood of two thousand seven. The legal boundary moves with the dynamic flow of the primary channel.”
The legal boundary moves. Think about that for a second. If the law can change its mind because it rained for three days in May, then what’s the point of having a courthouse at all? What’s the point of signing your name to a piece of paper if a satellite can tell you thirty years later that your house belongs to the ditch company? It’s a trick. It’s a way for people who have never had dirt under their fingernails to take things from people who have spent their whole lives bleeding for it.
“The water didn’t shift,” Cole said. He had come up from behind the barn, carrying a heavy iron crescent wrench that was three feet long and weighed twelve pounds. He didn’t look like he was going to hit anyone; he looked like he was just carrying his tools to work, but the way he held it by the neck made the kid Brandon take two steps back toward the white Jeep. “The water went into the secondary channel because the county didn’t clear the drift log out of the bridge pilings. We told you about that log for six months, Miller. It was three feet thick and fifty feet long, stuck right in the center arch. The water didn’t shift—you moved it.”
Miller sighed. He looked down at his boots, then at the chain. He knew Cole was right. Everybody in the county knew that log had been there since the year the high school gym burned down. “Look, boys,” Miller said, his voice dropping so the kid Brandon couldn’t hear him. “I don’t give a damn about the satellite. But the company’s got a bond with the state. They’re putting forty houses in that section behind the old gin, and those houses need a drainage basin. If they don’t get this ditch dug before the June rains, the water’s gonna flood the basements on those new brick places. The town’s counting on those tax dollars, Jess.”
“Then the town should have bought some hills instead of a swamp,” Jesse said.
The standoff lasted until two in the afternoon. It didn’t end with a fight. It ended because the driver of the flatbed truck looked at his watch, decided he was hungry, and drove the excavator back to the highway to get a chicken-fried steak at the diner. Once the big machine left, the kid Brandon got into his white Jeep, slammed the door so hard the little plastic state seal rattled, and tore down the gravel road, leaving a cloud of red dust that hung in the mesquite trees like rust.
Miller stayed behind for a minute. He walked over to the shop door where Jesse was putting a new edge on a mower blade with a hand-cranked grinding stone. The sparks were flying off the wheel in long, pale yellow lines, smelling of hot iron and sulfur.
“They’re coming back with the state saw tomorrow, Jess,” Miller said, leaning his arm against the door frame. “And they won’t bring Brandon next time. They’ll bring the district attorney’s investigator. He’s a fellow from Lubbock named Vance. He’s got eyes like a mink and he don’t care about your granddad’s mule.”
Jesse didn’t stop cranking the wheel. The blade was turning grey and sharp under his hand, the blue temper of the steel showing near the tip. “Vance can come. The dirt’s still here.”
“You’re gonna lose the house, Jess.”
“We lost the house when our dad sold the mineral rights to that outfit from Dallas in seventy-six, Miller. We’re just staying here to mind the fence until the real owners show up.”
That night, the weather broke.
It didn’t start with a rain; it started with that specific kind of stillness that makes the horses look toward the north. The horses know before we do. They can feel the air dropping, the weight of the sky changing from wool to iron. By nine o’clock, the wind had come back, but it wasn’t the dry sand-wind from the caprock. It was the wet, cold wind from the Gulf, the kind that carries the smell of rotten salt and wet pine trees from three hundred miles away.
“It’s gonna come down,” Cole said, standing in the kitchen with a kerosene lamp in his hand. The power had gone out at eight—not because of a tree falling, but because the line near the creek always grounded out whenever the humidity hit ninety percent. “If it drops three inches in the hills, that ditch they started digging up by the gin is gonna turn into a sluice.”
Jesse didn’t say anything. He was sitting on the floor with a bucket of old grease, cleaning the threads on the intake valve of the old irrigation pump. He had been working on that pump for three days, his hands black to the wrists with old tallow and graphite. It was a 1948 Fairbanks-Morse diesel pump, six cylinders, with a flywheel that weighed four hundred pounds. Our grandfather had bought it salvage from an old municipal water works in El Paso, and when it ran, it sounded like a freight train coming through the living room. It could move two thousand gallons of water a minute if the valves were tight.
“You think that old iron’s gonna save you?” Cole asked, looking down at the grease bucket. “The leather cups in that piston are probably dry as a boot heel, Jess. It hasn’t turned over since the seventy-five drought.”
“They aren’t dry,” Jesse said, without looking up. “I soaked them in lard last winter. She’ll pull if we can get the fuel line primed.”
“Why?” Cole asked, his voice cracking a little bit. “Why are you doing this, Jess? Let them have the lower fifty. It’s nothing but cockleburrs and willow brush anyway. We can take the payout from the state and buy that piece of black land over near Floydada. We could grow some real beets there. We wouldn’t have to fight the creek every time the clouds get dark.”
Jesse stopped his wrench. He looked up at Cole, his face half-hidden by the yellow shadow of the kerosene lamp. “You want to live in Floydada?”
Cole stayed still for a long time. He looked at the kitchen ceiling, where the water stain from the seventy-eight flood looked like the shape of a fat hog. He looked at the old pine table where our mother had cut up lard biscuits every morning for thirty years. “No,” he said, his voice quiet. “I don’t want to live in Floydada.”
“Then get your slicker,” Jesse said. “We got to go prime the line.”
The storm hit the caprock at midnight.
If you’ve never seen a line-squall hit West Texas, you don’t know what water is. It doesn’t come down in drops; it comes down in sheets, like someone is standing on the roof of the world with a giant bucket, throwing it against the windows. In ten minutes, the red dirt turns into something that behaves like axle grease. The roads disappear. The ditches turn into creeks, the creeks turn into rivers, and the rivers turn into things that can take a five-ton tractor and roll it like an empty beer can.
Jesse and Cole were down at the pump house by two AM. The pump house was nothing but an old corrugated iron shack on stilts, sitting right on the edge of the willow bend. The water was already up to the second step of the ladder, running black and thick with foam, carrying dead mesquite limbs and old fence posts from the properties upstream.
The Fairbanks-Morse engine sat in the center of the dark shack like a dead whale. It was cold, smelling of old oil and iron rust. Jesse had a flashlight in his teeth, his hands moving over the injectors, his fingers feeling for the little brass copper washers he had replaced yesterday.
“Give me the bar!” he shouted over the roar of the water against the tin roof.
Cole reached through the dark and handed him a four-foot steel crowbar. Jesse jammed the end of the bar into the notches on the flywheel, leaning his whole weight against it until the old iron gave a long, rusty groan. Hhh-hhhnk.
“Again!” Cole yelled, his slicker dripping water onto the wooden floorboards. “She ain’t catching, Jess! The fuel’s too cold!”
“She’ll catch!” Jesse spit the flashlight out of his mouth. “Get the ether!”
Cole reached into his pocket and pulled out a yellow can of starting fluid. He tore the plastic cap off with his teeth and sprayed a five-second burst into the intake valve while Jesse threw his weight against the bar one more time.
The engine didn’t start. It gasped. A long, grey cloud of unburnt diesel smoke came out of the exhaust pipe, smelling of kerosene and old chimneys. The flywheel spun half a turn and stopped.
“One more time!” Jesse screamed, his face white with the strain, his shirt torn open at the collar. His boots were slipping in the grease on the floor, his knuckles raw where they had hit the engine block.
They both got on the bar this time. Cole put his scarred hand over Jesse’s small one, their boots jammed against the bottom log of the wall. They didn’t look like two men trying to save a ranch; they looked like two sailors on a sinking ship trying to turn the rudder before the reef took the bottom out of them.
They pulled down together. One. Two. Three.
The Fairbanks-Morse didn’t just start; it exploded. A deafening roar filled the shack, a sound that went straight through your boots and into your teeth. The whole floor started to vibrate so hard that the old tin oil cans on the shelf danced off the edge and hit the wood. The giant leather belt that ran from the engine to the intake turbine started to spin, a six-inch-wide strip of steer-hide that whistled through the dark like a whip.
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
The pump was pulling now. You could hear the change in the sound of the engine—that deep, heavy lugging noise that means the turbine has hit the water. Through the floorboards, you could feel the suction, the four-hundred-gallon intake pipe groaning as it started to draw the brown creek water out of the channel and push it into the secondary irrigation ditch that ran back toward our upper fields.
“Look at the gauge!” Cole shouted, leaning his ear close to Jesse’s mouth.
Jesse held the light against the brass dial. The needle was shaking between eighty and ninety pounds of pressure. That meant the water wasn’t going down the county easement toward the new houses; it was being forced uphill, into the old terrace system that our grandfather had dug sixty years ago. It was going into five hundred acres of dry loam that could hold a million gallons of water if you kept the gates open.
By five o’clock in the morning, the rain had stopped, but the water in the creek hadn’t gone down. It was still coming off the hills, a steady, brown wall that was six inches below the floor of the pump house.
Jesse and Cole walked back up to the house, their slickers covered in red clay, their eyes small and yellow from the smoke of the engine. They stood on the porch and looked out over the property.
The lower fifty wasn’t flooded. It was wet, but the channel was holding. The water was moving through the willow bend exactly the way Silas Callahan had intended it to move when he blew the rock out in forty-nine. But three miles up the road, near the county line where the new subdivision was sitting, the view was different.
The yellow excavator was still sitting on its flatbed truck, but the water had come up over the road, turning the state easement into a lake that was three feet deep. The new brick houses with the clean driveways had water up to their front steps, and you could see three white county trucks parked on the ridge, their yellow lights turning through the grey light of the morning.
“Look there,” Cole said, pointing his finger toward the road.
A white Jeep was coming down our path, moving slow, its wheels throwing long plumes of red mud into the brush. It stopped at the gate. The kid Brandon didn’t get out this time. He just rolled his window down two inches and sat there, looking at the welded chain and the iron bar that was still lying across Jesse’s oil tub.
Jesse walked down to the fence, his boots sucking in the mud. He didn’t carry the bar this time; he just had his hands in his pockets, his hat pulled down low against the grey drizzle that was coming off the caprock.
“Your pump’s running,” Brandon said through the crack in the glass. He didn’t look like he had slept either. His grey shirt was stained with coffee and his hair was sticking to his forehead.
“She runs good,” Jesse said.
“The county engineer says you’re drawing twenty-five hundred gallons a minute out of the primary channel,” Brandon said, his voice dropping into that flat, tired register that means the computer has stopped working. “He says if you don’t shut that turbine down, the drainage basin up by the gin won’t fill up. The utility company can’t set the meters while the water’s high.”
Jesse looked back at the orchard. The old apple trees were standing in three inches of brown water, their roots drinking the silt that had come down from the hills. “The pump’s on our land, Brandon. The water rights are signed by the governor in nineteen-fifty-four. We got the paper in the tin box under the bed. It says we can draw forty acre-feet a month for agricultural correction. That’s what we’re doing. Correcting the moisture.”
“You’re flooding the road,” the kid said.
“The road’s where it shouldn’t be,” Jesse replied, and he leaned his weight against the fence post, his grey eyes looking straight through the glass at the kid’s clean face. “We told you about the limestone shelf, son. You dug that trench three feet deep up by the gin, and you hit that blue stone, didn’t you? You cracked the shelf, and now the water’s coming up through the floor of those new garages like an artesian well. The mainframe didn’t tell you about that stone, did it?”
Brandon didn’t answer. He looked down at his phone, but the screen was dark. The cell tower on the hill had gone down when the wind hit the transformer at midnight. He was three hundred miles from Austin, his boots were wet, and he was realizing that the world didn’t look like the map on his computer.
“What do you want, Jesse?” the kid asked, and for the first time, he used Jesse’s name like he meant it. Not like a designation on a legal file, but like a man talking to another man across a ditch.
“Tell the commissioners to leave the chain on the gate,” Jesse said. “Tell them we’ll take the water until the creek goes down to the gravel. Then we’ll turn the engine off. But if I see another yellow truck on this side of the creek fence, I’m gonna weld the gate shut with the tractor inside it, and we’ll start drawing forty-five hundred gallons just to see if the old Fairbanks can handle the load.”
The kid looked at Jesse for five seconds, then he rolled his window up, shifted the Jeep into reverse, and backed down the mud lane without saying another word.
That was ten years ago.
If you come down the state highway today, you won’t see Brandon or the white Jeep. The subdivision up by the gin is still there, but they never did finish those last twelve houses on the lower sector. The land was reclassified as a floodplain after the second May rise of two thousand eighteen, and now there’s nothing there but some concrete slabs and a bunch of wild sunflower stalks growing through the cracks where the living rooms were supposed to be.
Cole’s leg doesn’t bother him as much as it used to, though he still walks with that hitch when the winter frost comes off the caprock. We don’t grow cotton anymore; we went into alfalfa because the roots go down deep enough to find the water even when the creek goes dry in August.
Every now and then, when the wind comes out of the south and the sky looks like an old iron kettle, Jesse will go down to the pump house with a clean rag and a can of lard. He doesn’t turn the engine over unless he has to, but he likes to look at the flywheel. He likes to touch the brass gauge and feel the weight of the steel bar sitting against the wall.
The world keeps moving, of course. They got new satellites now that can see through the trees, and there’s a fellow in Dallas who thinks he owns the air rights over our barn because of some paper his lawyers signed in a building with sixty floors. But out here, between the willow creek and the state line fence, the dirt is still red, the mesquite is still tough, and the old Fairbanks-Morse diesel pump sits in the dark like a big dog, waiting for someone to try and cut the chain.
