The buyer had already refused a truck without proof that the fish were clear. Diane's HOA notice had no force on my land. But she had found a way to cost me time. Diane folded her arms like she had won. In the shallows, three more fish rolled pale near the bank.
There was my false defeat, plain as daylight. I could keep the fish alive badly or move them without that record and hand Diane the accusation she needed. I chose the harder road. "Fine," I said. "We sort here under your eyes."
Harland looked at me. "You understand? That makes this a long night." It was already a long night. Then my phone buzzed.
Mason Bell had sent one message. "I still have the digital manifest. Diane signed the job." I did not open it in front of her. I just looked at my gate, Nenah's clipboard, and the tanker ruts dark in the pasture. and I knew what tomorrow had to be.
No more arguing at a fence. We were going to put all three things where everyone could see them. By 8 the next morning, my back pasture looked like a county fair nobody wanted to attend. Paul Harland parked his county pickup near the dam, not blocking anything, just present enough that everybody behaved. Nenah had stock tubs lined in a row with aerator hoses bubbling like coffee percolators.
Troy had the tractor idling beside the equipment shed, bucketloaded with nets, gloves, and empty fish crates. On the other side of the fence, Blue Cedar residents gathered along the service road in golf shirts, workout clothes, and bedroom slippers. All staring at the pond Diane had told them was my disaster. I walked to the gate and pointed at three things before anyone touched a net. "This is simple," I said.
"My gate, their fish, her signature." Diane stood near her golf cart with her arms crossed. "You do not get to stage a performance on contaminated property." Harland looked up from his notebook. "Mrs. Mercer, this is not a performance.
This is supervised sorting to reduce die-off." That quieted her for about 3 seconds. Then the first seine went in. Troy and I pulled from opposite ends, boots sinking in the soft bank, shoulders burning as the net tightened into a silver crescent. Fish thrashed so hard the floats jumped.
Nenah called counts as we lifted sections into the tubs. Marketable, stressed, dead, original stock. Harland watched her method and wrote down the numbers. Nobody needed a college lecture. They could see the problem with their own eyes.
Too many fish. Wrong pond. Not enough time. Diane tried to recover the room from across the fence. "These numbers are being created by Mr. Whitaker's hired consultant."
Nenah did not even look at her. "Then watch the next pull and count with me." A woman from Blue Cedar stepped closer to the fence and did exactly that, lips moving as fish dropped into the tub. By the third pull, the murmuring behind Diane had changed from suspicion to arithmetic. Then Mason Bell arrived in his tanker truck.