Part 5
Pru came on Thursday night, late, toward Friday.
Jules didn’t hear her come onto the place. The Pruitts’ dog never barked once, and later Jules thought about that a great deal and never did figure out how it happened. A face in a low-tied kerchief simply appeared in the window above the dark garden. Jules pulled herself up on her arms and pushed the window open.
“Pru, listen. My legs. I get up. At night I walk along the wall.”
The woman outside the window was silent for a full minute. Then she said, “So it’s true.”
“Pru, please, tell me straight. What could it be? What is she giving me?”
“I won’t give you a name for it. I’m no pharmacist, and I won’t lie to you. What I see is something else. Your eyes have looked drunk for three years, and you don’t touch a drop. Your mouth’s dry. Your skin’s dry as paper. And a leg doesn’t waste like that from bad nerves. From nerves it wastes clear to the bone. Yours still has the meat on it. It’s just asleep.”
“Who’s going to believe me?”
“Nobody,” Pru said calmly. “Right now you’ve got my word, and that’s all. Nobody else has anything to go on.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Three things. First: keep not swallowing, but don’t rush. Don’t break your body trying to go too fast. It’s been down in a hole long enough. Second: that braid they cut off. Did you keep it?”
“I kept it. It’s in Grandma’s trunk.”
“Leave it be. Don’t wash it, don’t comb it. Let it lie the way it lies. The day’ll come when it speaks for you.”
“Pru, how can hair speak?”
“How does a tree tell you how old it is, and which summer was the hungry one? By its rings. Hair grows in rings too, only lengthwise instead of across. Whatever a body eats and drinks stays in it, layer by layer, root to tip. People knew that before me and they’ll know it after me. You just need to find somebody learned who can read it.”
Jules gripped the windowsill.
“And the third?”
“Third. Find the bottle. Not the one she drips from. The one she keeps in her pocket. Find where she fills it from. Stuff like that doesn’t keep in the warm. It’s kept somewhere cold.”
From the Pruitts’ porch to her grandmother’s place was a little over a hundred steps along the path across two gardens. By day it was nothing. In summer they sometimes wheeled Jules over to sit by the old house, and the chair rolled easily over the packed dirt. It was only right at the cellar that the path dropped away, and there you always had to call someone.
At night those hundred steps turned out to be as long as a whole life.
She went out after two in the morning, when the house slept deepest. She slid off the bed onto the floor so the springs wouldn’t creak, and she made it to the back porch on all fours, dragging her rubber flip-flops behind her. On the porch she stood up, holding on to the doorframe.
Outside it was cold. At night, late in August, the valley breathes out all the day’s heat, and such a chill comes off the river that you’d think there was ice lying somewhere nearby. The sky was black and full of stars right down to the edges, and a milky band stood over the jagged line of the peaks.
She started walking. For the first ten steps she held on to the rail fence. Then the fence ended, and she had to cross open garden between potato rows. She took four steps and fell. It didn’t hurt; she landed in soft potato vines. Getting up again took her a while, because there was nothing to hold on to. She rose the way a newborn calf rises: first onto her knees, then one foot under her, then the other, and so, swaying, upright. She fell three more times.
She didn’t remember how long it all took. She remembered the smell of crushed potato vines, sharp and green, and a night bird calling somewhere beyond town, and that on the last stretch she wasn’t walking anymore but crawling down the slope toward the cellar door, holding on to the grass.
The door was fastened with a wooden turn latch. She opened it and crawled inside. The smell met her, that same sweetish, nutty, damp smell, and she felt better than she had since the chair. She was home.
The cellar was stone, her great-grandfather’s masonry, with a low vaulted ceiling. It ran a good ten paces back into the hill, and at the far end, where the cold held steadiest, they had always kept the old stock. Nearer the door was Linda’s new operation: the stainless vat bought with grant money, painted board shelving, rows of wheels in plastic. Jules reached the switch. The bulb under the vault came on, dim and yellow.
The log was where it had always been, on the shelf by the door. The oilcloth cover had faded, and mildew ran along the spine. Jules took the notebook, pressed it to her chest with both arms, and stood there holding it, not moving.
Then she went to the far end.
There, behind the whey barrels, was a recess in the wall. Her great-grandfather had built it for ice, and they had hauled ice to it from the river until electricity came to the valley. Now it held the things that mustn’t get warm: starter cultures in glass jars, two jugs of vinegar, a box of veterinary odds and ends, and a tin cookie box.
Jules had known that box since she was a child. Her grandmother had kept buttons in it.
She sat down right on the dirt floor, set the box on her knees, and lifted the lid.
Inside were three small bottles of dark glass with screw caps, two opened and one full. One was tiny, the kind a pharmacy gives you. The other two were different. They had labels with a long Latin name, and below it, in small English print, a line that turned Jules’s hands cold: For veterinary use only. For immobilization of large animals. Store below the indicated temperature, protected from light. There was a stamp from the ranch over the pass, the same ranch where Linda had worked more than twenty years as a vet tech.
Under the bottles lay a little homemade notebook, quarter-size, stitched with thread. Jules opened it.
Dates ran down the page in a column, month after month, three years of them, and beside each date were small, neat numbers and notes. Some dates had checkmarks, some had short words, written the way people write for themselves, never expecting anyone else to read them.
Heavy. Light. Sluggish. Walks by the wall. Fell on porch. Asked about the land.
In the middle, across a two-page spread, was a gap of two weeks, and slanting across the gap, a single word.
Salt Lake. Jules sat on the cold dirt floor of her grandmother’s cellar at three in the morning, holding three years of her life in her hands…
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