Roy left.
July arrived hot.
Then hotter.
An eleven-day heat wave settled over the county.
Daytime highs stayed in the upper nineties.
Night temperatures barely dropped.
The pond warmed.
Eli watched oxygen numbers decline each morning.
7.0.
6.4.
5.8.
5.3.
Still acceptable.
But moving.
Denise had explained the danger.
Warm water physically holds less dissolved oxygen.
Fish metabolism rises with temperature.
Bacteria decomposing waste consume oxygen too.
Algae produce oxygen during daylight but consume it at night.
That meant the most dangerous time could be just before sunrise.
Eli started waking at five-thirty to test.
Grant noticed.
“School's out.”
“You know that?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you awake before me?”
“Fish.”
Grant shook his head.
“Should have planted beans.”
On the ninth morning, Eli walked down at 5:41.
He knew something was wrong before reaching the meter.
Fish crowded near the surface.
Mouths opening.
Closing.
Not normal feeding behavior.
Gasping.
His stomach dropped.
He ran the test.
2.3 milligrams per liter.
He stared.
Tested again.
2.2.
“Dad!”
Grant was inside.
Eli ran halfway toward the house while calling.
Grant answered on the second ring.
“What?”
“Pond oxygen crash.”
“How bad?”
“Two point two.”
“What do you need?”
“The irrigation pump.”
Grant did not ask anything else.
Five minutes later, he arrived wearing sweatpants, work boots without socks, and yesterday’s T-shirt.
Together they dragged an old centrifugal pump from the shed.
Eli did not simply dump cold well water into the pond at maximum flow.
A sudden temperature or chemistry shift could create another problem.
Instead, he used the pump to recirculate pond water and spray it through the air across the surface, maximizing contact and turbulence.
Grant rigged a second line.
They ran both.
For twenty minutes, nothing visibly changed.
Eli stared at the fish.
“Come on.”
Grant put a hand on his shoulder.
“Keep working.”
At 6:30, oxygen rose above three.
At seven-fifteen, three point eight.
Some fish left the surface.
Others did not.
By eight-thirty, sunlight reached enough of the pond for photosynthesis to begin helping.
Oxygen climbed.
Eli found the first dead fish near shore.
Then another.
Then seven.
By noon, he had collected thirty-one.
By evening, fifty-eight.
Two more appeared the next morning.
Sixty.
Exactly sixty.
Eli placed them in a wheelbarrow.
Roy arrived while he was pushing it toward the fence line.
For once, Roy did not joke.
“What happened?”
“Oxygen.”
Roy looked into the barrow.
“That's a lot of fish.”
“It could have been all of them.”
Roy looked toward the pond.
“You save the rest?”
“I think so.”
Grant joined them.
“Temporary.”
He said.
“We need real aeration.”
Eli nodded.
He already knew.
That afternoon, he opened the account where his truck savings sat.
Solar-assisted aeration system.
Diffusers.
Tubing.
Controller.
Backup connection.
$742.
He stared at the total for almost a minute.
Then clicked BUY.
The truck could wait.
The dead fish bothered him for days.
Not financially.
Sixty out of roughly three thousand was survivable.
Emotionally, they were proof that his planning had not been enough.
At Sunday dinner, Roy finally said:
“Heard the pond had trouble.”