Part 4
It was Cody.
She heard the screen door and then the click of his lighter, and she went flat between the rows with the ledger under her and her cheek in the dirt. The porch light didn’t reach this far, but the stars were bright. She was wearing a white nightgown. One turn of his head was all it would take.
He smoked the way he always did on the porch, slowly, elbows on the rail. She could smell it. Cold came up through the ground into her ribs and hips, and her legs, which had carried her twice across this garden, began to jump and cramp. She bit down on her sleeve and held still.
He lit a second one.
When he finally flicked the butt into the yard and went in, the light stayed on another minute and then went out. Leah lay there counting to three hundred before she moved. Getting from the potato rows to the back door took longer than getting from the cave to the potato rows had.
She never found out what woke him. She didn’t sleep that night, either.
She read the ledger for three nights under the covers with Sam’s flashlight. It was her own handwriting, round and level at first, then tilting, then drifting off the lines, and at the end so crooked she could barely make it out.
Took 6 gal. Upper meadow good. Lupine done. Set 4 wheels.
Dizzy by the cave, sat down in the dirt, spilled whey. Funny.
Started D’s tonic. Bitter. Makes my tongue pucker.
3 days in a fog. Counted gallons 4 times, got 4 different numbers.
Can’t feel the floor with my feet.
C brought papers. Signed. Don’t remember what.
D cuts the curd too big, that’s why the wheels weep.
Couldn’t get up today.
After that there were only a few words here and there. The last entry, from the month before the chair, read: God, what is happening to me.
Nobody writes three years of grass and gallons and weather, and along the way their legs going out from under them, and makes it up later. This had been written at the time, by a hand getting weaker as it wrote.
Two nights later she went into the front room.
On top of the wardrobe lay a blue expanding folder with an elastic band. Leah had known it since she stopped walking; it came to her and it went away again. She climbed onto the step stool on legs that held her maybe a minute, clung to the wardrobe door, and breathed through her mouth. Then she sat on the floor between the bed and the wall with Sam’s phone and photographed every page, reading as she went.
The grant agreement was on top. She’d signed that one herself, back when she was well. The farm had to operate at least five years, the money could go only to approved uses, and reports were due every year. A separate paragraph said that on any violation the whole amount came due, and the principal operator was personally liable.
The principal operator was Leah.
Next was a loan dated a few months after she’d started the tonic. Borrower: Leah Tarrant Gunnell. Amount: $280,000. Purpose: farm expansion.
The signature was hers, with the same curl on the L that Grandma had drilled into her. But the letters ran downhill, and the last loop slid off low and sideways, like the signature of someone whose elbow was being steadied over the page. She remembered a cactus in a teacup on a desk, and nothing else.
Under the loan was a mortgage. Pledged as security: the house and lot at 14 Bench Road. Grandma’s house, and all the land under it, including the hillside with the cave.
Then came letters from the bank, polite at first and then not. Missed payments. Acceleration of the full balance. Warning of foreclosure.
Then a page that dried her mouth: a purchase agreement for the Bench Road property. Buyer: Robert Vance, Vance Mountain Lodges LLC. Seller: Leah Gunnell, by and through her court-appointed guardian, upon appointment. Earnest money received in May.
The last document was printed on good paper with wide margins, the way law offices print things. Petition for Appointment of Guardian and Conservator. Petitioner: Darlene Gunnell. Respondent: Leah Gunnell. The respondent suffered from a severe neurological illness. The respondent was bedridden, confused about dates, and unable to manage her affairs. Clipped behind it were a clinic letter and a copy of the discharge papers with that long word on them.
In pencil at the bottom: Hearing Sept. 30. File motion for in-home evaluation ahead.
She turned off the phone and sat in the dark.
She could see all of it now, the way you see the whole valley from the top of the pass. They had made her the owner on paper, borrowed in her name, and pledged the one thing she had from her grandmother. Then they stopped paying. The land had to be sold for a lodge, and only the owner could sell it, and the owner sat in a wheelchair and might wake up one day and start asking questions. So the owner had to be declared incompetent. The court would appoint the mother-in-law who had nursed her for three years, and that guardian would sell the ward’s property in the ward’s own interest, to pay the ward’s own debts.
It all fit. Only one question was left.
Once the land was sold and the debts paid, what would a guardian need her ward for?
Leah looked at the dark window and, for the first time, thought about her own death as something already decided and put on the calendar, like a hearing on the thirtieth of September…
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