She dried her hands on the towel and looked out at the white trucks again. Three men had gotten out and were standing near the corner post, one of them holding a tablet, gesturing at the slope that ran down toward the river bottom. The slope where the ground went soft in May.
“Dad?” “Mhm.” “That’s a bad place to build.” He looked at her for a long second. He knew what she meant. He’d grown up on this land, too. But he was tired. And he had eight hundred dollars of vet bills on the kitchen table. And he said, “It’s not our land, Maren. The bank can do what it wants with it.”
She nodded. She understood. But she went and got her notebook anyway.
The first time she met them was a Tuesday. She was walking the fence line the way she did every week, checking for breaks in the wire and looking at the ground where the cattle crossed. The three men in the white trucks had become four men and a woman. And they were standing around a folding table set up on the bank side of the fence with a roll of plans weighted down by river stones.
The woman saw her first. She was maybe forty, blonde hair pulled back, expensive boots that hadn’t been broken in yet. “Hey there. You live around here?” Maren pointed across the fence. “Right there.” “Oh, perfect. We’re going to be neighbors, sort of.” She smiled. And it was a real smile, not unkind.
“I’m Lauren Castille. I’m with Continental Trust. The bank that owns this parcel now. We are project managing the development.” Maren looked at the plans on the table. She couldn’t read them upside down, but she could see the layout. A long rectangular building marked phase one down near the river bottom with what looked like parking and a holding yard above it. Two more phases stretched up the slope toward the timber.
“You’re putting the main building down there?” Lauren glanced at the plans. “The processing facility, yeah. We need rail access and the spur line runs along the bottom. Why?” Maren considered her words. Her grandfather had taught her that you only got one chance to be heard by people who weren’t listening. And you shouldn’t waste it on the wrong sentence.
“The river doesn’t stay where you think it does.” Lauren tilted her head still smiling. “What do you mean?” “It moved twice in my grandfather’s lifetime. There’s an old channel under that bottom. You can see it in the spring. The grass comes in different. The ground’s soft a long way down. And it runs from the high pasture down toward our spring.”
One of the men, older in a fleece vest with the bank’s shield on the breast, looked up from his tablet. “We’ve got a geotechnical survey scheduled for next week. Drilling test pits across the whole footprint. Appreciate the heads up though.” He said it kindly. That was the part that hurt. He wasn’t sneering. He was being polite to a child.
“The pits won’t be in the right places,” Maren said. “The channel curves. It doesn’t run straight.” The man smiled. “We use a licensed firm out of Billings. They know what they’re doing. Bank wouldn’t sign off otherwise.” She nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say.
She put her hands in her jacket pockets and walked back along the fence. And behind her she heard Lauren say something quiet. And one of the younger men laughed. Just a small laugh, the kind people make when something is harmless.