The water came out in jerks because a two-hundred-litre tambo will not tip while it sits still, and I held it with my knee against the side rail of the flatbed and pushed it forward with my weight, and the water came down in blows onto the soil of the first row, and the bottom of the tambo scraped the sheet metal at every push.

I went into the maize barefoot even when the ground was dry, and my shoes I left on the verge.

The first row is the one up against the asphalt, and the asphalt of the libramiento was two steps away and it burned, and the air above the tar lifted, and the maize on the road side comes up shorter, and that one I watered by hand with the tambo because the pump does not reach that far, and the collar of my shirt I kept turned in because the outer edge was gone.

The patch of packed earth on the verge I kept clear, and that morning a company truck was standing across it with its wheels in mine, and I waited for it to move and then I worked the earth over with my foot until it was flat again.

The tambo emptied halfway down the row and I finished the row with a wet palm, and I put the tambo back on the flatbed, and I tied it with wire.

"We stop the machine and we leave the road alone," I said to Nicolás and his brother-in-law, who wanted to bring the pick-up across the lane, and I said it quietly, and the others waited for me to be the one to say it, and I added my own line, that whoever has no part in it should not pay, and they moved into the shade and the pick-up stayed where it was.

My plot the road has cut in two, and the parcel certificate says the whole piece of land, with the old measurement and no cut inside it, and what they gave us is the payment for prior occupation, a figure for the inconvenience, and the expropriation decree has never been completed, and the kilometres of road inside the ejido are three, and there are sixteen of us, and in twenty-five years nothing has ever been broken at km 90 and none of us has been taken away.

I still have it, that sheet of paper.

I sent Nicolás's boy to call the engineer, and the engineer came to the edge with his helmet in his hand and said that he does not sign anything, and from the federal government nobody came, and the patch of packed earth on the verge stayed empty all morning.

The sheet I did not show him, because the sheet says whole and the land says halved, and I walked him along the edge to the point where the maize ends and the gravel begins, and I showed him with my hand where it ended, and he put his helmet back on.

The men in the shade did not get up, and nobody said anything, not even Nicolás.

The operator is from Mimila like me, and they pay him by the day. He shut off the engine and climbed down from the machine, and he came to the flatbed and put his hand on top of the tambo and did not take it off, and with the other hand he pointed behind himself, the maize, mine, and he said: "The tambo is yours, don Emeterio. Whoever has no part in it should not pay, and I have no part in it." He said that the decree is owed by the others and the day's pay is lost by him, and about the day's pay he was right.

And the line was already in my mouth, the same one I had said to Nicolás under the pick-up, we stop the machine and we leave the road alone, and two words of it came out and the third I left half-said, and I went around the hood and went to the flatbed.

The wire was tight and wet hands get no grip, and I pulled it off with my teeth and let it drop onto the sheet metal, and the empty tambo was tall and light and I hoisted it onto my hip, and I came down off the verge with the bottom of it knocking against my knee, one knock at every step.

The operator stood in the middle of the lane and did not move, and I did not ask him to move, and I carried the tambo to two fingers from his shoes and stood it upright on the tar, and the sheet-metal bottom boomed, and the boom went under the machine and came back off the guard rail, and after that there was nothing more, and in the nothing there remained the diesel at idle and a sheet of metal cooling.

He said my name in full, out loud, Emeterio Bautista, the way a name is read off a list, and I did not look at him and did not answer, and I kept my hand on the rim of the tambo, and behind me the engine revved up.

The engine revved up and the machine moved and did not come toward the lane, and it turned right and went down off the verge on the side of the packed earth, the one I kept clear and worked over with my foot when the trucks stood across it, and the right track went into the maize on the side of the row I had watered that morning.

The stalks did not break right away. They all bent the same way, and then the track went over and they closed under it, and on top there was left the dark soil from the water of the tambo, and the machine went twenty metres into the maize and climbed back onto the asphalt past the tambo and stopped with the bucket raised, and the operator did not come down.

Behind him the vehicles in the queue shut off their engines one after another, and a chicken truck sounded its horn once and then sounded it no more, and the boy who was up on the machine called me, twice, and I stayed where I was. Nobody got out of the vehicles.

The tambo stood upright in the middle of the lane with its short shadow stuck to the bottom of it, and in the maize, behind the tambo, there was the wide rut of the two tracks, and inside the rut the morning's water was rising back up.