My Cousin Put A Price On Water Before The Thaw

The first thing Silvio priced was the water in my coffee.

He stood inside the sugarhouse with his coat still buttoned and said, "Enjoy that. Next month it won't be free."

I set my cup on the shaving bench. Under it lay a curl of white oak, thin enough to see light through. My plane had made a soft hiss, then a dry tick when the shaving broke. Maple made a sharper little squeak. I could tell them apart without looking.

At thirty-nine, I was a broad Italian American man with olive skin, a bent nose, and black curls going gray above my ears.

I made barrels for a living. In late winter, I also made syrup in the sugarhouse Grandfather had left me outside Elkins, West Virginia. Those two jobs suited my hands better than a tie ever would.

Silvio was forty-two, an Italian American man with slick dark hair, a narrow face, and a tan he kept through winter.

He wore shoes that made him watch the floor for sawdust.

"You mean the spring?" I asked.

"The spring was sold years ago. You inherited a building, Dom. Nobody left you the whole mountain."

Through the open door, I could see his new sign beside the gravel lane. CARUSO RIDGE CAMP. He had covered Grandfather's painted maple leaf with black letters on white plastic.

Grandfather had died in October. Silvio got sixty-two acres, the camp store, and the old bunkhouse. I got the sugarhouse lot, its tools, and its equipment. The will also gave me five more seasons to tap marked trees on Silvio's land and use the hauling lane.

Silvio called that "a generous hobby allowance."

He had spent the funeral lunch telling people what each share might sell for.

"Who bought the spring?" I asked.

He smiled. "Somebody who understood its value."

I touched the little oak curl. It looked like a wooden question mark.

"Have you read the deed?"

"I've seen the estate map."

"That wasn't what I asked."

He looked at the barrel on my bench. "Stay with what you know."

What I knew included the weight of a full sap tank, the sound of a loose hoop, and the drawer Grandfather had labeled WATER in block letters.

Inside that drawer sat a tin biscuit box. Inside the box were a recorded deed, a survey, and a boundary agreement with two witness signatures. Grandfather had put them in my hands ten years earlier.

"A paper hoop holds things together too," he had said.

I hadn't forgotten. I had paid the taxes on that small spring parcel every year. The bills came to my barrel shop in town.

"I have thirty-six gallons promised already," I told Silvio. "At sixty-four dollars a gallon. The spring supplies wash water and the toilet. I need it for the food inspection."

We boiled maple sap into syrup. We never stretched it with spring water. Grandfather would have come out of the ground over that.

"Buy a tank," Silvio said.

"Why?"

"Because I'm offering you a clean exit. Eight thousand dollars for the sugarhouse and everything inside."

The evaporator alone had cost Grandfather $11,600.

"No."

"You always make money awkward."

He laid a business card beside my cup. It named a resort company I hadn't heard of: Laurel Verge Development.

"They're considering a lodge above the ridge. Private cabins. Private water. This place could finally be worth something."

Outside, January rain hit the tin roof. Beyond our lower trees, the hills went gray toward the Monongahela forest. Grandfather had thought the place was worth something when it paid two helpers and bought his winter wood.

"Does private mean you plan to close my valve?"

"It means don't invest in another season."

I pulled my order book from beneath the bench. "Put that in writing."

He laughed. "You need a permission slip for bad news?"

"I need the terms you're asking me to accept."

Silvio took out his phone. He liked a screen when he could turn it toward somebody.

"I'll print you the notice. You get until Friday to take my offer."

"And then?"

"Then you'll learn what a building without water sells for."

After he left, I called Hazel McBride. At sixty-seven, she had been retired from title work long enough to grow tired of people saying she must enjoy resting.

"Silvio says the spring was sold," I said.

"It was. Your grandfather paid me to check the sale."

"I'd like you to check it again."

"Bring the biscuit box. And don't let that peacock carry off the biscuits."

I wrapped the oak shaving around my pencil and opened the drawer.

Before I could lift the box out, Silvio's truck came back up the lane. He walked in holding a page fresh from the camp store printer.

Across the top, in bold type, it said NOTICE OF WATER TERMINATION.