Part 12
The oilcloth log came back to the shelf by the door once it was no longer needed as evidence. They returned it with an evidence stamp on the cover. Jules started a new one, but she kept the old one beside it, and sometimes she reread it. Not all of it, just the first pages, where the handwriting was still round.
A year later there were four of them.
Ayana left the post office and came to her, first to help, then to work. Then came Shayna, Ayana’s niece, who had finished her food science certificate. Then came the two women from Pine Hollow, the same ones who had worked for Linda and been left with nothing that winter. Jules thought about it for three days, then took them on.
“They worked for her,” Ayana said.
“They worked for the cheese,” Jules said. “They’ve got nowhere else to go. One of them has three kids.”
They registered a co-op the next spring, the five of them, with no grant, because Jules was more afraid of grants now than she was of debt. Kira helped with the bylaws and took a wheel of cheese as her fee, which she later regretted, because the wheel ran out.
That was when the conversation happened that Jules remembers most often.
A man came out from Boise, one of those people who do marketing and branding. He looked over the cellar, tasted the cheese, walked the high meadow, and said, “You need to trademark the name in your own name while there’s still time. Tarrant. And don’t give your starter to anybody else, anywhere. That’s your edge. Five years from now, if you do it right, you’ll have a brand you can sell for more than this whole cellar is worth.”
Jules heard him out.
“I’ve already given the starter away,” she said.
“To who?”
“Three places. Pine Hollow, Sweetwater, and Burnt Creek. Whoever asked, I gave it to.”
The man looked at her the way you’d look at a simpleton.
“Do you understand you just gave away the one thing you’ve got?”
“It’s mine,” Jules said. “It was my grandmother’s. Somebody poured some for her, too. It’s been going hand to hand around this valley for a hundred years. That’s why it’s still alive.”
In the end they made the brand a shared one: Elkhorn Valley, for everyone who makes cheese the old way, with one condition. The milk comes from the high meadows, and the cheese ages at least six months. Anyone who breaks that is struck from the mark. Jules doesn’t own any of it. She is one of five on the board.
She took cheese to Pru in the fall.
The way to Pru’s place ran across the ford and then up an old wagon road through the firs, about four miles. Jules walked it. She set out at six in the morning in rubber boots, with the cane and a backpack holding two wheels of cheese, a wool shawl, and a jar of honey. She went slowly, stopping to sit on fallen logs. Twice she thought she wouldn’t make it. Once she sat by a creek for forty minutes, listening to the water.
She got there at noon. The dog barked once and went quiet.
Pru came out onto the porch, wiping her hands on her apron, and stopped. She watched Jules cross the yard and said nothing. She just watched, and nothing in particular showed on her face. Then she suddenly turned and began, for no reason at all, to fuss very carefully with the herbs drying on the porch rail.
“Well,” she said at last. “You came.”
“I came.”
“Took you a while.”
“Six hours.”
“Then the legs work.”
They drank tea inside, where it smelled of dried mint and woodsmoke. Jules set out the cheese, the shawl, and the honey on the table.
“Will you take money?”
“No. Pru, I’m not bringing charity. This is for the work.”
“What work?” Pru said. “I never healed your legs. I told you what I saw with my own eyes. You did the rest yourself.”
“They called you into court?”
“They called me. Asked how I knew. I told them, her eyes were fixed and glassy, and they wrote on their paper, ‘Witness stated she made her determination based on outward signs.'”
She gave a short laugh.
“Let them write. Their words are different, but it means the same thing.”
Jules was quiet for a while.
“Pru, I wanted to ask you. Why did you say it out loud? Right there, in front of everybody? You knew they’d throw you out.”
Pru blew on her tea for a good while.
“I knew.”
“Then why?”
“Because otherwise you wouldn’t have believed it,” she said. “If I’d whispered it to you, just the two of us, you’d have decided I was feeling sorry for you. But when it’s said in front of people, and the lady of the house comes flying off the porch, that’s when a person starts to think.”
She set down her cup.
“And there’s the other thing. I could’ve been wrong, Julie. I’m not God. I saw what I saw. It could’ve really been sickness. If I was wrong, I’d have insulted a woman for nothing. If I was right and kept my mouth shut, how would I have lived with that?”
That fall Jules got a letter from the women’s prison in Pocatello.
She didn’t open it right away. It lay on the windowsill for three days, and every evening Sam, grown now and shot up tall, glanced sideways at the envelope.
She opened it on Sunday.
Linda wrote in the same even, careful hand as the entries in the notebook from the cookie box. She wrote that her health was bad, that the food was terrible, that she thought about her grandson every day and was asking for a photograph. About what had happened, there wasn’t a word. Not one.
At the very end, on a line by itself, it said: You were always stubborn. That’s been your trouble and your luck.
Jules sat with the letter in her lap for some time. Then she put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in the dresser drawer with her papers. She didn’t send the photograph, and she didn’t write back.
She hadn’t forgiven, didn’t intend to, and didn’t believe she owed it. But there was no hatred left in her either. Hatred is a tether too, and she had already spent three years tied down.
She simply closed the drawer and went out to split kindling for the stove, because it was Saturday and the wash water wouldn’t heat itself.
In late spring, when the lupine was coming on up on the high meadow, Jules climbed up there, as she did every year, to check the grass before the season started. The climb was steep and straight up, and she took the cane and went slowly, stopping to rest.
That morning she reached the top and sat down on a rock.
Below lay the valley: the river bending around a bluff, the roofs of town, the patchwork of gardens, the thread of the road with the milk truck crawling along it. Beyond stood the mountains, and on the far peaks lay snow that didn’t melt even in August.
Her left leg hurt. She had a debt with two more years to go. She had five cows, four women working with her, a teenage son who had started talking back, and a cellar more than a hundred years old.
Jules sat on the rock and thought that the most frightening thing about those three years wasn’t even that they had kept her from walking. It was that they had explained to her that this was how things had to be: that she was sick, that she wasn’t imagining it, that the hands passing her the cup were caring hands, and that there was no other life for her and never would be.
She had lived inside that so long that she very nearly believed it.
Then a stranger, a woman the town considered backward and of no account, crouched down in front of her wheelchair, took her dead leg in her hands, and said out loud, in front of everyone, what was true.