Part 2
Before the wheelchair, Jules made cheese.
Her grandmother, Martha Tarrant, taught her. Martha had a house with blue trim around the windows, a small potato patch, and a stone cellar that her own grandfather had dug into the slope behind the garden. The cellar was the heart of the place. The same things held in it all year round: cool air, damp, and a smell Jules remembered before she remembered herself. It was sweetish, heavy, and nutty, the smell of cheese ripening.
Her grandmother’s people were Brethren, plain folk who had come into the Elkhorn Valley in the 1880s, quietly, one family at a time, and settled along the creeks, and kept to their own ways ever since. People in the valley made cheese before them and after them. But the Tarrants had their own rules. The milk came only from cows that grazed the high meadow, where lupine grew blue among the wild thyme. The starter was carried on in whey that was never used up to the last drop, and no wheel left the cellar before it was six months old.
“Cheese isn’t bread,” Martha used to say. “You eat bread and forget it. Cheese remembers what kind of summer it was.”
Every wheel was marked on its flat side. While the rind was still soft, they stamped it with a wooden die: the day it was set, the month and the date, carved into a block of basswood. Jules never wrote the numbers in pencil, only with the die, because pencil washes off and a stamp stays.
They also kept a log. A thick notebook in an oilcloth cover lay on the shelf by the cellar door, and in it, first in her grandmother’s hand and then in Jules’s, they wrote down when they milked, what the grass was like, how much milk they took, how many wheels it made, what the weather was, and what had happened that day. It wasn’t bookkeeping. It was memory, the kind you keep for yourself and nobody else.
Jules grew up on that. Her mother worked at the post office in Garnet, the county seat, and was a tired, quiet woman. Jules never knew her father at all, and her whole childhood passed between her grandmother’s cellar and the high meadow.
At nineteen she married Travis Pruitt. The Pruitts’ place backed onto her grandmother’s, two gardens over, and they had a solid operation: fifteen head of elk in the pens, hay ground, a tractor. Travis’s father died young, and his mother held it all together. That was Linda, a loud, capable woman who, people in town said, was fair. She was fair the way people are who always know how things ought to be done.
Linda had worked more than twenty years as a veterinary technician at the big elk ranch over the pass. She could give shots, stitch, drench, and set bones. She knew by heart every drug they trucked into the county, and people came to her not only with calves but with themselves, because she was quicker than the clinic in Garnet, twelve miles out on washboard gravel.
The wedding was in August. Jules remembered that it rained, and they laid planks across the mud in the yard. Sam came some years later, when she was twenty-four.
When Martha died, the house with the blue trim and the cellar went to Jules. It was the one time she went against her mother-in-law.
“Sell it,” Linda said. “What do you need a second wreck for?”
Jules didn’t sell. She scrubbed the cellar, whitewashed it, rebuilt the shelves, bought two cows, and started making cheese the way her grandmother had. For the first few years people laughed at her. Then they stopped. By the time she was thirty, the store in Garnet was taking her cheese, and so were the lodges up toward Ketchum. Rafting outfits came by in summer. A chef from Boise hauled her wheels to the city and said her cheese had a taste you’d never find in a store, because stores made cheese out of milk and she made it out of a meadow.
That was when Travis started talking about a real business.
“Set it up properly,” he said. “You’re a small farm. There’s grant money. They’ll give it to you. You’re a woman, you’ve got your cheese, everything’s aboveboard. We buy equipment, expand the cellar, I add to the elk.”
Jules didn’t want to. She was happy as she was. And she had been afraid of paperwork since she was a girl, because paperwork always turned out to hold something she couldn’t understand.
“I’ll handle all the forms myself,” Travis said. “Your job is the cheese.”
She agreed. The farm was registered in her name. The beginning-farmer grant went to her too, for her cheese, her cellar. The money hit the account in spring, and that same month Travis drove to Salt Lake and bought equipment. A month after that it turned out he had put part of the money into a venture he hadn’t told her about, because it was a sure thing and he didn’t want her worrying for nothing. Jules found out about that venture much later.
The illness started in the fall.
She remembered the first time exactly. She was coming up from the cellar with a bucket of whey. There was frost on the path. Suddenly the world tilted. It didn’t spin; it tilted, like the deck of a boat. She sat down right on the ground, the bucket went over, and white whey ran across the frost. She laughed about it then and told Travis it must be her blood pressure.
A week later it happened on the stairs. Two weeks later it happened in the kitchen, and she broke a plate and cut her palm.
“That’s your iron,” Linda said. “Same thing happened to me after I had Travis. You’re pale as your whey. I’ll make you a tincture. I’ve got elk root. Ten drops three times a day. In a month you’ll forget all about it.”
The tincture was dark and thick. It smelled of alcohol and of something herbal and sweetish. Jules started taking it.
Over the winter she got worse. By evening her legs were as tired as if she’d walked plowed ground all day. She began holding on to the walls. Soon she noticed she couldn’t feel the cold with her feet: she’d go out onto the unheated back porch in socks and not realize the floor was freezing until it started to burn.
In spring they took her to Boise, then to Salt Lake. They drew so much blood that the veins inside her elbows turned yellow. They scanned her spine, then her head, then her spine again. One doctor said it was nerves. Another said it sometimes happens after an infection. A third looked over the paperwork and said nothing. In the end they wrote down the word Linda would later use to shut down every question: polyneuropathy, unspecified. In plain terms, the nerves in her legs worked badly, and nobody knew why.
“Well, there you go,” Linda said in the hospital corridor, slipping the discharge papers into a folder. “Now there’s a diagnosis. We’ll treat it our own way, since they can’t.”
She did. For three years it was ten drops, three times a day, sometimes fifteen when things were very bad. Linda brought the tincture in a small dark glass bottle and never left it where anyone could see it. She measured the drops herself over the cup and took the bottle away with her.
By the end of the first year Jules had stopped walking. It didn’t happen in a day. First she got around the house by holding on to furniture. Then they bought a walker, and she shuffled with it as far as the porch. Then came a morning when she swung her legs off the bed and simply could not stand, and Travis rolled her from the bedroom to the kitchen in an office chair because they hadn’t bought the wheelchair yet.
She cried for six months. Then she stopped and got used to it. People get used to anything, and that may be the most frightening thing about them.
Life in the chair settled into an order, the way any life does. In the morning they moved her into it, and she washed up holding on to the sink. Breakfast, then the yard if it was summer, the window if it was winter. She peeled, sorted, shelled, darned, and knitted socks for Sam. She could do dishes if the basin was set on her lap. She could roll out dough on the low table Travis had knocked together for her out of an old door.
She lost the cellar. Four steps led down to it, and there was a sill the chair couldn’t get over. The first year Travis still carried her down. Then he started saying his back hurt. Then he just stopped.
Linda took over the cheese. She hired two women from Pine Hollow and bought a stainless steel vat with the grant money, and the cheese came out fast and in quantity, vacuum-sealed, with a sticker printed with the valley’s name. It wasn’t bad. It was just different. Jules tasted it once a week, and it was like hearing a stranger sing your song: the same words, and all of it missing.
The oilcloth log stayed on the shelf by the cellar door. Nobody wrote in it anymore.
Sam kept growing. He was nine, long and skinny, with skinned knees, and he was the only one in the house who talked to his mother as if nothing had happened. He would climb into her lap, though he was a big boy now, and tell her about school, about how Jake from down the road caught a fat cutthroat in the creek, about how the teacher wanted them to draw their families.
“Did you draw me?”
“I drew everybody.”
“How’d you draw me?”
Sam was quiet for a second.
“Standing,” he said. “You’re standing up in it.” And he ran off…
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