Part 8
Leah said yes.
They met in Kira’s basement office, because Kira refused to allow it anywhere else. She sat at the end of her desk with a pencil and didn’t pretend not to listen. Cody came down the stairs in his good jacket and stood until Leah told him to sit.
He’d lost weight. He looked at her cane, and at her legs, and away.
“It was the grant,” he said. “The first year. Part of it went on the vat. The rest I took to a guy in Salt Lake that Dale from the elk association knew. He was doubling people’s money. I was going to put it on the table in front of you.” He rubbed his thumb across his knuckles. “By fall he quit answering his phone.”
Leah waited.
“The report was due that winter. You started going through the account. You said the numbers were wrong and you were going to drive to Boise and ask. You would’ve, too.” He almost smiled. “Mom said you were worked up. Said a week of something to calm you down and you’d let it go.”
“And in that week.”
“In that week I took the loan. Covered the grant so the report passed. Bank wanted the house for it.” His voice went flat. “After that you couldn’t find out about the loan. Then about the payments. Then you couldn’t stand up, and there wasn’t anything left to decide.”
“Did you tell her to stop?”
“I told her. I said, Mom, enough, she can’t even walk. She said, ‘We can’t stop now. Stop now and in a month she’s up and she remembers everything.'”
Kira’s pencil had stopped moving.
“Did you know what was in it?” Leah asked.
Cody looked at the floor for a long time. “I didn’t ask.”
There were a lot of things she could have said. She’d rehearsed some of them in Emmett at three in the morning. What came out was smaller.
“You go upstairs and tell Dana every word of that. And someday when Sam’s old enough to ask, you tell him too. Yourself. Not your mother, not a lawyer. You.”
He nodded without lifting his head. She watched him climb the stairs, and then she sat with her hands in her lap until Kira passed her a tissue she didn’t need.
The guardianship hearing lasted twenty minutes. Darlene’s lawyer filed for a continuance on grounds of ill health. The judge with the very quiet voice asked Leah the date, the season, the governor, a hundred minus seven and minus seven again, her son’s name, and what she’d do if someone handed her a thousand dollars. Then she asked, “Do you understand what this petition asks the court to do?”
“Yes, ma’am. It asks you to make me someone other people decide things for.”
The independent evaluation, three weeks later in Boise, found nothing that impaired her judgment, and the petition was dismissed.
The bank was slower and colder, and no villain. It had lent money and wanted it back. Kira sued to undo the loan and the mortgage for lack of capacity. The file held the hair report, the vials, the ranch logs, the ledger, Cody’s statement, and one thing nobody had expected. The loan officer, the woman with the cactus in a teacup, had written in her notes that the client seemed sluggish and answered in single words, and she’d raised it with her manager. The manager had written back: If she signs, she signs.
In February, the week the pass closed, the judge set aside both documents. The lien came off Grandma’s house. The money that had actually landed in the farm account still had to be repaid, as money that never should have been received, but without three years of interest and penalties. The court split the burden with the two people who had spent it. Rob Vance got his earnest money back. He drove up once in March, walked the fence line of the Bench Road place, and knocked to say he hadn’t known. Leah believed him. When he asked whether she’d ever sell, she said, “It’s a cave,” and he laughed and left.
The criminal trial came in August, a year after the bees in the phlox. Darlene admitted nothing. She stood very straight and told the jury she had spent her life treating animals and people, that her daughter-in-law had been gravely ill, and that the doses were small and meant only to ease her anxiety. Nobody wanted to hurt anybody. They wanted peace in the house.
“And there was peace,” she said. “For three years.”
She got six years. Cody got probation for coming forward and telling it all.
In the hallway afterward, a deputy walked Darlene past the bench where Leah sat. Darlene stopped, and the deputy let her.
“You always were stubborn,” Darlene said. “I told Cody that before the wedding.”
“I wasn’t stubborn,” Leah said. “I was asleep. Somebody woke me up.”
Darlene looked at her a moment longer, then walked on.
Sam came to live with his mother that fall, after she rented a room in town and went to work: janitor at the grade school first, then in January a cook in the cafeteria. A caseworker came to look around and asked Sam whether he was scared his mother might get sick again.
Sam thought about it. “She wasn’t sick. They were giving it to her.”
A month later he brought her a sheet of drawing paper folded in quarters. It showed a house, a crooked apple tree, a sun in the corner, his father off to one side, his grandmother on the porch, a boy in the middle, and his mother standing.
“I kept it hid,” Sam said. “Grandma said not to draw you like that because it’d hurt your feelings. I didn’t draw it over.”
In town they told it short afterward: she got up and walked. In fact it took a year and a half of dull, hard work with nothing pretty in it. There were three weeks between the bars at the rehab unit in Boise, with a therapist who chewed his nails and counted. Then came the rented room, bags of dried beans tied to her ankles, standing from a chair without her hands, fifteen times, then thirty, and the hallway walked wall to wall with fingertips on the wallpaper until she could lift them off for two steps, then three. The left leg still drags by evening. When she’s tired, she uses the cane, and she probably always will.
Her share of the debt was a number that made her want to lie down. She went to the court clerk before anyone came looking for her, asked how to pay it monthly and still feed a boy, and signed the plan. She has two years and change to go.
She opened the cave the next May.
Grandma’s house had stood boarded all winter. She pried the plywood off, washed the floors, lit the woodstove, and sat on the front step for three days before she could make herself go inside. Then she went down. She took apart Darlene’s painted shelving and stacked the boards in the shed. She hauled clay from the river and sand from the bar and walled up the ice recess where the blue tin had sat, laying the river rock herself and squatting until her back cramped.
The culture was dead. Darlene had switched to freeze-dried packets, and the jar that had come down through the family since before the war had simply been left to die. Leah sat on the cave floor and cried for it harder than she had at any hearing.
Then she drove to Pinegrove to see Edna Fry, who was close to ninety.
“Ada’s culture? I’ve got it,” Edna said. “She poured me off a jar back in seventy-something when my cow was poorly. Kept it going ever since. Who wants it anymore?”
Leah set her first wheel that June, with milk from one cow bought with money Joanie lent her and would not be talked out of. The basswood stamp was still in Grandma’s trunk, cracked but whole. Leah pressed the date into the soft rind and then sat on the floor by the shelf and looked at that wheel for half an hour.
The oilcloth ledger came back from the evidence room with a sticker still on its cover. It went back on its shelf by the door, and she started a new one beside it.
In a year there were five of them. There was Joanie, then her niece Tessa out of school, and then the two Pinegrove women who had worked for Darlene and been left with nothing that winter.
“They worked for her,” Joanie said.
“They worked for the cheese,” Leah said. “Rhonda’s got three kids.”
A branding man from Boise came up that summer, toured the cave, tasted the cheese, and told her to trademark Tarrant and never give that culture to anyone. “Five years from now, it’s worth more than this whole hill.”
“I already gave it away. Pinegrove, Clayton, a woman up by Stanley. Whoever asked.”
He looked at her as if she were simple.
“Somebody poured it off for my grandmother, too,” Leah said. “It’s been going hand to hand up and down this valley a hundred years. That’s how it stays alive.”
She took cheese to Vesta Pruitt the second October after.
It was about four miles across the ford and up the old wagon road through the firs. She left at six in rubber boots with her cane and a backpack holding two wheels, a wool scarf, and a jar of honey. She rested on deadfall. Twice she thought she wouldn’t make it. Once she sat by a creek for forty minutes and just listened to the water.
She got there around noon. The dog barked once and quit.
Vesta came out on the porch wiping her hands on her apron and stopped. She watched Leah cross the yard without a word, and nothing much showed on her face. Then she turned all at once and began rearranging the herb bundles drying on the porch rail, which didn’t need it.
“Well,” she said at last. “You came.”
“I came.”
“Walked it?”
“Six hours.”
“So. Legs.”
They drank tea in the cabin, which smelled of dried mint and woodsmoke. Leah set the cheese on the table, then the scarf and the honey.
“You’ll take money?”
“No. I don’t take charity.”
“It’s pay. For work.”
“What work? I never touched your legs. I told you what I saw. You did the rest.”
“They made you testify.”
“They did. Asked how I knew. I said her eyes had that look, and they wrote down, Witness states she drew her conclusions from physical signs.” Vesta snorted. “Let them write it their way.”
Leah turned her mug on the table. “Why did you say it out loud? In front of everybody? You had to know she’d run you off.”
Vesta blew on her tea a long time.
“If I’d whispered it to you, you’d have figured I was just sorry for you. When the lady of the house comes off her porch like a scalded cat, that’s when a person starts to think.” She set the mug down. “And I could’ve been wrong. I’m not God. If I was wrong, I hurt a woman’s feelings for nothing. If I was right and kept quiet, what would I have had to live with?”
She pulled one of the wheels across the table and turned it over. The date was stamped in the rind: the first June, the first wheel out of the cave after. Vesta ran her thumb over the numbers and left it there. Then she got up, took her knife down from the nail by the stove, and cut two thin wedges. The rind gave with a small dry crack.
They ate without talking. The crystals crunched between their teeth. Out in the yard the dog turned around twice and lay down in the sun. Under the table Leah stretched out her left leg, which had carried her four miles uphill and ached now from hip to heel, and she let it ache.