Part 2
Under the apple tree, long after the dust had settled, Julia turned Pearl’s words over the way she used to turn a wheel on the cellar shelf.
Drugged.
She had not always sat in this chair. Before the wheelchair, she made cheese.
Her grandmother, Martha Miller, had taught her. Martha’s house in Cedar Fork had blue window trim, a small potato patch, and a stone cellar dug into the hillside behind the garden by Julia’s great-grandfather. Winter and summer, the cellar held the same cool damp air and a smell Julia remembered from before she could remember herself: rich, faintly sweet, nutty. The smell of cheese ripening.
Her grandmother’s people were Brethren, descendants of the plain church families who had come west one household at a time and settled along the creeks. Others in Alder Valley made cheese too, but the Millers had their own way. They used milk only from cows grazing the upper meadow, where bluebells grew among the wild mint. They kept their starter alive in whey, never using up the last of it. 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 will tell you what kind of summer you had.”
They marked the flat side of every wheel while the rind was still soft, pressing in the month and day with a wooden stamp carved from basswood. Pencil could wash away; a mark pressed into the rind stayed.
They also kept a ledger. The thick, oilcloth-covered notebook sat on a shelf by the cellar door. In Martha’s handwriting, and later Julia’s, it recorded the milking, the pasture, how many wheels they had made, the weather, and whatever else had happened that day. Nobody had asked them to keep it. They kept it because they wanted to remember.
Julia’s mother worked at the post office in Millbridge and was a tired, quiet woman. Julia had never known her father. Her childhood had passed between her grandmother’s cellar and the upper meadow.
At twenty-three, she married Derek Bennett.
The Bennetts lived at the other end of the village. They ran forty head of cattle, put up hay, and owned a good tractor. Derek’s father had died young, leaving Lydia to hold everything together.
She was loud, capable, and, as people in Cedar Fork put it, fair. Fair in the way of someone who always knew what ought to be done.
For more than twenty years she had worked as a veterinary technician at the large-animal clinic across the pass, the one that also handled wildlife captures for the state. She knew how to give injections, stitch a wound, get fluids into a sick animal, put a joint back where it belonged. She knew the drugs that came into the county by heart. She had left the job a few years back, but people still brought calves to her, and sometimes they brought themselves. She was closer than the clinic, twelve miles down a battered gravel road.
The wedding was in August. Julia remembered the rain and the boards laid across the mud in the yard. A year later, Sam was born.
When Martha died, she left Julia the house with the blue trim and the cellar. Keeping them was the first time Julia stood up to her mother-in-law.
“Sell it,” Lydia said. “What do you need another falling-down house for?”
Julia did not sell. She washed out the cellar, whitewashed the walls, bought two cows, and began 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, buyers came from Millbridge and Pine Creek, and a chef from Missoula took her wheels into town. Store cheese was made from milk, he said. Hers was made from a meadow.
That was when Derek started talking about a proper business.
“There are development grants for small farm businesses,” he said. “You’ve got the cheese, the cellar, the real thing. We could buy equipment. I could put more into the cattle too.”
Official papers had frightened Julia since childhood. They always seemed to contain something she could not understand.
“I’ll handle the paperwork,” Derek told her. “You just make the cheese.”
She agreed.
The business was registered in her name. The grant was awarded to her too, on the strength of her cheese and her cellar. The money arrived in the spring, and that same month Derek drove to Spokane and bought equipment.
A month later, without telling her, he put some of the money into another venture. Julia would learn about that much later.
That fall, she began to get sick.
She remembered the first time exactly. She was coming out of the cellar with a bucket of whey. Frost lay on the path. The world tipped beneath her like the deck of a boat, and she sat down hard on the ground. The bucket overturned, and white whey ran across the frost.
She laughed about it then. A week later it happened on the steps. Two weeks after that it happened in the kitchen, where she broke a plate and cut her palm.
“It’s your iron,” Lydia said. “I was the same way after I had Derek. You’re as pale as that whey of yours. I’ll make you a tonic. Ten drops, three times a day. In a month you won’t even remember this.”
Under the apple tree, the shadow had crept past Julia’s knees. From the kitchen came the clink of a spoon against a cup: the four o’clock drops being counted. She had heard that sound every day for almost three years. This afternoon, for the first time, she listened to it.
The tonic had been dark and thick. It smelled of alcohol and something sweet and herbal.
By that first winter she was worse. Her legs grew so tired by evening that she felt as if she had spent the day struggling through a plowed field. She began holding on to the walls. Then she noticed that her feet no longer felt cold. She could step onto the enclosed back porch in her socks without realizing how icy the floor was until a burning began.
Her walking went by stages. First she moved around the house holding on to the furniture. Then they bought a walker. By the end of that winter, there was a morning when she lowered her feet from the bed and could not stand at all. Derek rolled her from the bedroom to the kitchen in an office chair.
In the spring they took her to Missoula, then to Spokane. Blood was drawn so often that bruises yellowed the crooks of her elbows. They scanned her spine, then her head, then her spine again. A nerve test came back “borderline.” Lydia sat in on every appointment and answered most of the questions. Nobody asked what Julia was taking at home, because Lydia had already said: vitamins, and an iron tonic.
One doctor said it might be stress. Another said these things sometimes followed an infection. Eventually someone wrote the words Lydia would use to end every question afterward: polyneuropathy, unspecified.
“There,” Lydia said in the hallway, slipping the discharge papers into a plastic sleeve. “We have a diagnosis. Now we’ll treat it our way, since they don’t know how.”
She did. Ten drops three times a day, sometimes fifteen when Julia was especially bad. Lydia kept the tonic in a dark glass bottle and never left it out. She measured the drops herself and took the bottle away again.
Julia cried for six months. Then she stopped. She got used to it.
A person can get used to anything.
Life in the chair settled into a routine. They transferred her each morning, and she washed while holding on to the sink. Breakfast followed, then the yard in summer or the window in winter. She peeled, sorted, shelled, darned. She knitted socks for Sam. She could roll out dough on the low table Derek had made from an old door.
She lost the cellar…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇