Part 11
The criminal case went to trial that summer. Linda was charged with aggravated battery and with poisoning, for harm done deliberately, over a long period, and in a way that endangered life. She was also charged with fraud, for the money obtained through a loan in the name of a person who could not understand what she was signing. Travis was charged as an accomplice, with one important difference: he had come forward on his own, told it himself, and told all of it, including things investigators hadn’t known and likely never would have learned.
The sentence was handed down in August, one year to the week after that day in the yard when the bumblebees droned in the phlox.
Linda never admitted guilt. She stood very straight and said that she had spent her life caring for animals and people, that her daughter-in-law had been seriously ill, that the drug had been given in small doses to calm her anxiety, that nobody had wanted to hurt anyone, they had only wanted peace in the house.
“And there was peace in the house,” she said. “For three years.”
Jules sat on the second bench and looked at her back. She had expected to feel triumph, or hatred, or at least satisfaction. She felt none of that. She felt empty and a little sorry. Not for her mother-in-law, but for herself at twenty, who had once been afraid of this woman and wanted her to like her.
When the judge read out the sentence, Linda didn’t turn around. Jules counted her own breaths, one, two, the way she counted steps between the parallel bars, until it was over.
Linda got six years in state prison. Travis got three years, suspended, with probation, because he had turned himself in, cooperated with the investigation, and had a child to support.
As they were led out, he turned and looked at Jules. She didn’t look away. She looked at him and thought that for fourteen years this man had put his hand on her shoulder, and for three of those years he had handed her a cup, and not once, not a single time, had he asked, Mom, what is this?
It was easier for him not to ask.
The divorce went through quickly, with no fighting. There was nothing to divide.
Sam stayed with his mother. The court decided it that fall, after Jules rented a room in Garnet and went to work, first as a janitor at the school, because there was nothing else, and then, starting in January, as a cook in the school cafeteria. The caseworkers came out, looked around, and talked to the boy.
“I want to be with my mom,” Sam said.
They asked whether he was afraid his mother would get sick again.
Sam thought about it and gave an answer that left the supervisor with the dragonfly brooch silent for a long moment.
“She wasn’t sick. They were giving it to her.”
A month after that he brought his mother a sheet folded in four, torn from an old drawing pad. It was that drawing: the family, the house, a crooked apple tree, a sun in the corner, his father off to one side, his grandmother by the porch, the boy in the middle, and his mother standing.
“I hid it for two years,” Sam said. “Grandma said not to draw stuff like that because it’d make you feel bad. But I didn’t draw it over.”
Learning to walk again took her a year and a half. In town they later told it short: she got up and walked. In fact it was long, dull, and very hard work, with nothing pretty in it.
First came the parallel bars in the rehab unit in Boise, where she was admitted for three weeks. The therapist, a lean man with bitten fingernails, stood her between the bars and counted. One, two. One, two. By the end of the first week she could go twenty-five feet. By the end of the third, a hundred and thirty, with two rests.
Then they discharged her, and the part nobody sees began. In her rented room she tied little sacks of dried peas to her ankles and lifted her legs lying down, counting. She stood up from a chair without using her hands, fifteen times at first, then thirty. She walked the hallway from wall to wall, brushing the wallpaper with her fingertips, and then made herself take her hand away and go two steps with nothing to hold, then three.
Her left leg obeyed worse than her right, and it still does. By evening it drags a little, and when Jules is tired she walks with the cane. She probably always will.
Her head didn’t clear right away either. For almost a year after that August she had lapses. She could forget why she’d stepped out onto the porch, or tell the same story twice. The doctor said that happens and it takes time. She gave herself the time and didn’t feel sorry for herself, because there was no time for that.
The judgment notice from the bank’s lawyers had come that spring, not long after the ruling. The court had split the repayment, and her share was still big enough that looking at the number made her want to lie down. Jules hadn’t waited for them to come after her. She called the collections office herself and said, “I’m going to pay. Just tell me how to pay it monthly and still have enough left for my son.”
The woman there, young, with a framed photo of her dog on the desk, walked her through the hardship form, the protected minimum she could keep, the payment plan.
Jules is still paying. If nothing goes wrong, she has a little over two years left.
She had opened the cellar that May, before the trial.
The house with the blue trim had stood boarded up since fall. She pried the boards off the windows, scrubbed the floors, lit the woodstove, and then sat on the porch for three days, because going inside hurt too much.
Then she went down into the cellar.
The stainless vat bought with the grant money was still there; it had been listed in the case and left with the farm. Jules took Linda’s shelving apart and stacked the boards in the shed. She walled up the recess where the tin box had stood. She brought clay up from the river, and sand, filled the opening with stone, and plastered it herself, crouching, until her back cramped.
She had no starter left. That was the worst of it. Her grandmother’s whey culture had been carried on in the family since before the war. It had been fed, poured off, hauled in a milk can on a wagon when the family moved. Under Linda’s management it had died. They had simply stopped keeping it up, because it was easier to buy dried culture in packets.
Jules sat in the empty cellar and cried over it the way she hadn’t cried in court or at the sentencing.
In the end she drove to Pine Hollow, to old Freda Ingram, who was going on ninety.
“Starter?” Freda said. “Why, I’ve got Martha’s right here. She poured me some back in seventy-something, when my cow was sick. I’ve kept it going. Who wants it these days?”
She set her first wheel in June. The milk was her own, from one cow bought with money she’d borrowed from Ayana, who this time would not be argued out of it. The stamp turned up in the trunk: the basswood block, cracked but whole. Jules pressed the date into the soft rind and sat down on the floor beside the shelf. She sat there looking at that wheel for maybe half an hour…
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