Part 3
Travis brought the papers. It became routine, like bringing in the electric bill. He’d come into the room with a folder, set it on the low table, and say, “Need you to sign again. Farm stuff.”
“What is it?”
“Reports. You’re the owner.”
Sometimes there were two sheets, sometimes ten. Jules would look at them and the letters would slide apart. After the drops she always felt as if her head had been stuffed with dry grass. It didn’t hurt, but it was empty, and it rustled. She’d pick up the pen, and her hand would write on its own. She had a pretty signature, with a flourish. Her grandmother’s schooling.
“And these, where the checkmarks are.”
“Travis, I can’t make sense of any of it.”
“Jules, don’t make this a thing. I have to be in Garnet by three.”
Once or twice a year they drove her to town. Travis took her under the knees and Linda under the back, they loaded her into the truck, drove her in, unloaded her outside the bank or the notary’s office, and rolled her up the ramp. She remembered those trips in fragments, the way you remember a dream. A white office. A cactus growing in a teacup on the desk of the woman at the bank. Someone’s voice reading something in an even tone, like a prayer. Her own hand with a pen. Linda’s voice: “She understands. She’s just worn out from the drive.” Her own face in the elevator mirror, gray, with sunken eyes, her hair thin and dull, pulled back in a limp ponytail.
Her hair started coming out in the second year. She found it on her pillow by the handful. It stayed in the brush, on her shoulders, in her plate. By last fall the braid she’d been proud of since she was a girl had dwindled to a mouse’s tail.
“Cut it,” Linda said. “Why suffer? We’ll give you a bob. It’ll grow back thicker.”
She cut it herself with the kitchen scissors on the back porch, over spread newspaper. Afterward they swept the hair into a dustpan.
That night, when everyone was asleep, Jules wheeled herself out to the porch, found her braid in the trash can, crumpled and held in the middle with a rubber band, washed it in a basin, dried it, wrapped it in an old waffle-weave towel, and hid it. There was only one place to hide anything. She rolled out to the shed, where her grandmother’s trunk stood, brought over from the house with the blue trim, and pushed the bundle to the very bottom, under the rags.
She didn’t do it because she suspected anything. She did it because she was thirty-two years old, and it was her hair.
On the evening of Pru’s visit, the house felt the way it does before a storm. Linda banged the dishes louder than usual and talked to herself so everyone could hear.
“Let a fool onto the place, and now look. They come around whispering, waving their hands. Scare people half to death so they’ll come back later with a sack. And people pay her for it, too. Honey, meat. An old woman’s an old woman. What do you expect?”
All the same, she cut the crusts off Sam’s sandwich for the morning and wrapped it the way he liked, in wax paper folded like an envelope. She had always been good to the boy.
Travis ate in silence, bent over his plate. He was thirty-six, big-boned and fair, with a neck burned red by the sun. When Jules was nineteen she had thought he was the best-looking man in the valley. He still was. But over these years something had blurred in his face, like a photograph left too long in the light.
“Travis,” Jules said.
“Mm.”
“What she said to me. Did you hear?”
“I was out at the elk pens. Mom told me.”
His spoon stopped for a second. One second, and then it moved again.
“And what do you think?”
“I think the old woman’s lost her mind and she messes with people’s heads,” he said into his plate. “You saw specialists. You think specialists are dumber than some herb lady?”
“The specialists didn’t find anything.”
“Exactly. They didn’t find anything because there’s nothing to find. Jules, don’t start. I’m beat.”
He finished eating, put his plate in the sink, and went out to the porch for a smoke.
That night Jules didn’t sleep. She lay in her bed by the window, the low one with boards under the mattress, and watched the shadows of the apple tree move across the ceiling. The house was quiet. Travis snored behind the wall, and somewhere under the floor a mouse scratched.
They’re dosing you.
A hundred times that night she told herself it was nonsense: Pru was a good woman, but odd, forever seeing curses and hexes and other people’s ill will, and all of it came from living alone out past the ford. A hundred times she came back, because there was one thing everything snagged on.
May of last year.
Linda had gone to Salt Lake that month for cataract surgery. Travis drove her and stayed with her at a cousin’s place, because after the operation she couldn’t be left alone. They were gone two weeks. Jules stayed home with Sam. Their neighbor Ayana came by every day, brought bread, ran her bath, and helped her move from bed to chair.
Here is what happened in those two weeks.
On the third or fourth day her headache stopped. It just stopped, and she didn’t notice right away. She noticed when she realized she was reading aloud to Sam and not losing her place on the line.
On the sixth day she woke up and could feel the blanket with her feet.
On the eighth she was sitting on the bed holding the headboard with both hands and suddenly drew one leg up under her. She did it herself. She didn’t lift it over with her hands; she pulled it in. Afterward she sat without moving, afraid to breathe, and then she cried, and she told no one.
On the tenth day she stood up. She held on to the windowsill, shaking all over, for eight or ten seconds, but she stood. She looked out the window from a height she hadn’t seen in a year, and it made her dizzier than any illness had.
She decided it was a miracle: prayer, or the summer, or her body finally fighting back. She planned a surprise. When they came home, she would meet them standing in the doorway.
They came back on a Saturday. Linda walked in wearing dark glasses, set down her bag, and the first thing she said was, “Well? Did you wear Ayana out? Come here, I’ll give you your drops. I bet you haven’t had a thing this whole time.”
Jules took the drops, and the surprise never happened. Three days later her legs were strangers again. A week later she couldn’t draw a leg up under her. She decided the miracle was over, that it happens sometimes, that the illness backs off and then returns. It was the bitterest summer of the three.
Now, in the dark, she went through those two weeks day by day, like beads on a string.
Ayana hadn’t given her any drops. Ayana didn’t know anything about drops. Linda had taken the bottle with her in her bag. Jules remembered that for certain, because she had asked, “What about me?” and her mother-in-law had said, “You’ll manage. There’s only two weeks’ worth left anyway. I’ll make up a new one when I’m back.”
Two weeks without drops, and she stood up. Three days with drops, and she was down again.
Jules lay there listening to her heart pound. She was more frightened than she had been even on the day she couldn’t get out of bed. If this was true, there was no illness. And if there was no illness, then the people asleep behind that wall had been handing her a cup for three years…
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