Part 2
She did not swallow.
She kept it in her cheek, set the cup on the tray, and reached for the dish towel that always lay across her knees. She dabbed her lips the way she did after every meal, then pressed the terry cloth to her mouth and let it all go into the towel. It was so easy her hands started shaking.
“What are you trembling for?”
“I’m cold. The window was open all night.”
Darlene took the cup and left. Leah sat very still with the damp towel wadded in her fist and listened to the kitchen faucet run.
That was the start of her second life. Three times a day she took the bitter water into her mouth and didn’t swallow. She rinsed the towel herself in the basin. After a few days she found something better. On the sill by her pillow sat a geranium in a coffee can, leggy and brown at the bottom, and she began spitting into that.
In nine days the geranium died. It keeled over all at once, as if somebody had yanked it, and the stem went black and wet where it met the dirt. Leah stared at it a long time that morning. Then she wheeled out, shook the can empty behind the fence, and set it back on the sill.
“Where’d your geranium go?” Darlene asked that evening.
“It dried up. I forgot to water it.”
“That’s you all over. Anything you touch.”
Before the chair, Leah made cheese.
Her grandmother had taught her. Ada Tarrant lived at the far end of Bench Road in a white house with blue trim, with a potato patch out back and, above all, the cave. Leah’s great-grandfather had dug it into the hillside behind the garden and lined it with river rock. Winter and summer it held the same cool damp and the same smell, which Leah could remember before she could remember herself: sweet and heavy and nutty, cheese coming into its own.
The Tarrants kept their own rules. The milk came only from cows grazed on the upper meadow, where lupine grew in with yarrow and wild thyme. The culture lived in whey that was never used down to the bottom of the jar. And no wheel left the cave before six months.
“Bread you eat and forget,” Grandma Ada used to say. “Cheese remembers what kind of summer it was.”
Every wheel was marked while the rind was still soft. Grandma pressed in the date with a basswood board she’d carved herself, because pencil washes off and a dent stays. And she kept a ledger, a fat oilcloth-covered notebook on the shelf by the cave door. In it, first in Grandma’s hand and later in Leah’s, went the milking, the grass, the gallons, the wheels, the weather, and whatever else happened that day. They kept it the way you keep a diary nobody else is meant to read.
Leah’s mother had clerked at the county courthouse and had been a tired, quiet woman. Leah never knew her father. Her childhood ran between the cave and the upper meadow. At twenty-two she married Cody Gunnell, whose family had a big place at the other end of the valley: elk pens, hayfields, a tractor. Cody’s father had died young, and his mother ran everything.
Darlene Gunnell was loud, capable, and fair, people said, the way people are fair when they always know how a thing ought to be done. She’d spent twenty-two years as the vet tech at the Halvorsen elk ranch over Pole Creek Pass. She could inject, suture, drench, and set bones. People brought her their calves and sometimes their children, because it was faster than driving thirty miles of washboard to the clinic.
Sam was born a year after the wedding. When Grandma Ada died, the house with the blue trim went to Leah. That was the one time Leah went against her mother-in-law. Darlene said, “Sell it. What do you want with another falling-down house?” Leah didn’t sell. She scrubbed out the cave, limed the walls, rebuilt the shelves, bought two cows, and made cheese the way Grandma had.
People laughed for a year or two and then stopped. By twenty-eight she was selling to the general store and the lodges, and a chef from Boise named Matt Kessler drove her wheels to the city and told people she made cheese out of a meadow.
That was when Cody started talking about a real business. Get set up properly, he said. Farm in your name, grant money for beginning producers. “You make the cheese. I’ll handle the paper.”
Leah had been afraid of paperwork since she was a girl, because paperwork always had something in it you didn’t understand. So she let him. The farm was registered in her name and the grant came in her name. The money landed in the spring, and that month Cody drove to Salt Lake and bought a stainless vat.
The sickness started that fall.
She was carrying a bucket of whey up from the cave over the frost when the world tipped. It didn’t spin. It leaned like a boat deck, and she sat down hard. The bucket went over, and the whey ran out white across the white frost. She laughed and told Cody it must be her blood pressure.
It happened again a week later on the stairs. Two weeks after that, she dropped a plate and cut her palm.
“That’s iron,” Darlene said. “Same thing happened to me after I had Cody. You’re white as your whey. I’ve got a root tonic I make. Couple weeks and you’ll forget you ever felt bad.”
The tonic was dark and syrupy, and it smelled like alcohol and something sweet and green. Leah drank it.
By winter her legs were heavy every evening, as if she’d walked all day through plowed ground. She started holding on to walls. She’d stand on the porch in her socks and not notice the boards were icy until her feet began to burn. In spring they drove her to Boise, then to Salt Lake. They drew so much blood the insides of her elbows turned yellow. One doctor said nerves, another said a virus, a third read the file and said nothing. In the end they wrote down idiopathic polyneuropathy: the nerves in her legs were failing, and nobody knew why.
“Well,” Darlene said in the hospital hallway, sliding the discharge papers into a folder. “Now it’s got a name. We’ll treat it our own way, since they can’t.”
By the end of the first year Leah used a walker. Then one morning she put her feet on the floor and could not get up, and Cody rolled her to the kitchen in a desk chair because they didn’t have a wheelchair yet.
She cried for six months, and then she stopped. People get used to anything.
She lost the cave, too. It was four stone steps down, with a lip at the door the chair couldn’t take. For a while Cody carried her down, then his back hurt, then he quit. Darlene took over. She hired two women from Pinegrove, set the grant vat running, and sent the cheese out fast and shrink-wrapped with a sticker that had the valley’s name on it. Tasting it once a week was like hearing a stranger sing your song, with every word right and nothing behind them.
The oilcloth ledger stayed on its shelf by the cave door. Nobody wrote in it anymore.
Sam was ten, long and skinny with scabbed knees, and the only one in the house who talked to his mother as if nothing had happened. That spring his teacher had the class draw their families.
“Did you draw me?”
“I drew everybody.”
“How’d you draw me?”
Sam was quiet a moment. “Standing,” he said, and ran off.
The first days without the drops were worse than anything she’d braced for.
On the second night she started shaking from somewhere deep inside, fine and fast, like an engine idling rough. The sheet under her was soaked. Her heart stumbled and caught and stumbled again, and each stumble brought a wave of nausea. On the third day her ears rang until dark, and something kept flicking across the edge of her vision like a black thread.
On the fourth night she didn’t sleep at all. Toward dawn she thought she saw Grandma Ada standing in the corner, not saying anything. Leah knew it was the sleeplessness, and she whispered to her anyway: “Hang on, Gran. I’m not done yet.”
“Who’re you muttering at?” Darlene asked that morning.
“Praying.”
“Since when do you pray?”
“Grandma taught me.”
Darlene studied her too long. “You look awful. I’ll give you a little extra.”
She gave her extra, and Leah spat out more than usual and felt sick from the smell all day.
On the seventh day the ringing stopped. On the eighth she woke before dawn and lay there trying to work out what was different. A rooster was going off next door, and the air smelled like cut hay and woodsmoke. Then she had it: the fog was gone, the dry rustling stuffing she’d lived inside for three years. The world sat still and had edges. She could see every seam between the ceiling boards. She remembered she needed to ask Sam about his reading log, and the thought stayed put and waited for her.
She cried into her pillow without making a sound. Nobody else would take that as proof. For her it was enough.
Her legs came back slowly. The pain came first, around the eleventh night: a burning in the soles of her feet, pins and needles a hundred times over, spreading up into her ankles and calves. She lay biting the corner of the quilt, crying and laughing at the same time. For years those feet had barely known the floor.
On the fourteenth day she moved her right big toe. The left one wouldn’t go. She tried all day, until she was slick with sweat, and toward evening the left one twitched too.
After that it went faster. She could bend a knee. She could draw a leg up to her chest, the same movement she’d called a miracle last May. Then one night, with the whole house asleep, she swung her feet to the floor, set her palms on the mattress, counted to three, and stood.
The floorboards were cold and rough and more real than anything had been in years. She swayed so hard she had to grab the windowsill, and her knees wobbled like a newborn calf’s. She stood for half a minute, sat down, and pressed her hand over her mouth, the way she had in the yard.
In the morning, when Cody came to lift her into the chair, she let herself go heavy in his arms, the way she had for two years, and felt him not notice…
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