Part 3
He hadn’t put it quite that way, Hector Ruelas admitted the next afternoon, leaning on her fence with his hat pushed back. What Teague had asked was whether Margaret Pruitt’s Thursdays required a permit. Hector had pulled the file, found nothing in it, and meant to drive out and have a word. Then Mags died, and the folder sat on his desk under three others.
“He asked like it was a civic concern,” Hector said. “Maybe it was. I don’t read minds. I read zoning.”
He was the county’s land-use administrator, a heavyset man in his forties with a feed bucket rolling around in his truck bed. He spent ten minutes watching the herd before he got out his clipboard. “My grandpa ran sheep down by Antonito,” he said. “These are calmer than any sheep I ever met.”
The rules were these. If she charged the public money on a regular schedule, that was a commercial use. On agricultural land, that meant a special use permit: an application, a site plan, proof of insurance, a parking layout, notice to neighbors, a staff report, and a public hearing before the county commissioners. That would take months. In the meantime he could issue a temporary limited-event permit for a small number of supervised sessions while the application was pending, so long as she stayed inside the conditions he’d write down.
“Your aunt never did any of this?”
“Your aunt,” Hector said, “never asked me.”
So Jo drew a site plan on graph paper at the kitchen table, as carefully as if responding units would need it at night. The wide gravel apron by the west gate held eight cars, nine if people were friendly. She set the cap at fourteen guests per session, one under Mags’s ceiling, so no one could ever say she’d stretched it. She set the price at thirty-five dollars, a guess at what the coffee can had averaged, rounded toward the insurance premium. She scheduled Thursdays and Saturdays at two, plus Sundays through the end of October while the weather held.
She didn’t build a website. She recorded a new message on the answering machine, after the beep and under her aunt’s old greeting, in her dispatch voice: If you’re calling about sitting, leave your name, how many, and which day. I’ll call you back by evening.
The shearer came the following Tuesday.
Her name was Luz Medina, and she drove up from the San Luis Valley in a van that smelled of lanolin and coffee. Mags had booked her in July for fall toenail trims, and Luz said she’d kept the appointment “in case somebody out here needed telling things.” She was compact and quick, in her fifties, with forearms like a welder’s. She handled the llamas with brisk affection and called each one by name.
“You know where these come from?” she asked, holding Pearl’s foot between her knees.
Jo admitted she didn’t.
“Pearl and three others came out of a hoarding case outside Garden City, Kansas. A hundred and some animals in a sheep barn. Mags drove out with a borrowed trailer when she was seventy.” Luz clipped, filed, and set the foot down. “The crooked-jaw boy was in a roadside attraction near Raton that went under. Hollis belonged to a widow in Pagosa who went into memory care. Some of them, nobody knows. Mags never bought a single one at a sale.”
They finished by noon. Luz washed her hands at the hydrant, then took Jo into the pole barn and pointed at the wall beside the stalls.
Jo had noticed the pencil marks before and assumed they were feed records. Each stall had a name written above it, and under each name a column of numbers in Mags’s spidery hand, one per year. Hollis’s column started at 30 and ended at 8. Pearl’s went from 45 to 2. One column stopped two years ago at 40.
“Feet,” was all Luz said. “Every spring after shearing.” She tapped the column that stopped at 40. “That one went to a friend’s place in Cortez. Mags said he was happier without people, so why make him live with them.”
After the van pulled out, Jo stood a long time in front of the wall. She didn’t know yet what the numbers added up to. She only knew that nobody keeps a column like that for eleven years by accident.
The phone began ringing in the second week. Mags’s regulars came first, then the people they told. Abe brought his neighbor. Teresa brought her sister, the one who had apologized twice on the machine. The woman in scrubs was named Dani. She worked for a hospice in Cortez and came straight off overnight shifts, slept twenty minutes in her car, then sat with Pearl at her boots. Once, between yawns, she told Jo that half her hospice families seemed to be planning weddings at the new lodge on the butte. “Like somebody’s got to be happy up there,” she said.
The sessions filled. Then the waiting list filled. By the third Saturday Jo had stopped answering the phone at meals and started answering it in the barn.
Nobody talked about healing, and Jo made sure it stayed that way. When a woman from Durango told her the llamas had a gift, Jo said they had good teeth and low expectations. The woman laughed and seemed, if anything, relieved.
The grange hall in Tamarack held a potluck the first Friday of October. Jo went because Abe told her not going would be noticed. She was at the dessert table with a paper plate of somebody’s peach cobbler when Teague’s voice carried over from the coffee urn. He wasn’t talking to her, which was the point.
“Thirty-five dollars a head,” he was telling three men in feed caps. “To sit in a field and watch llamas think about nothing. I ought to charge for my cows. They think about nothing twice as hard.”
The men laughed. One of them, Ed Kowalczyk, laughed late and then looked down at his boots.
Jo ate her cobbler. Answering a man in front of an audience only gives him a second act. When she went to throw her plate away, Ed was standing by the trash barrel.
“I’d have sold you that hay,” he said, low. “He came in first, is all. He came in with the whole amount.”
“I know, Ed.”
“Mags paid late,” he said, as Lorna had. “But she paid.”
The Nebraska hay came on a flatbed in the third week of October. Jo stood in the pole barn breathing the smell of the stacked bales and felt something close to the end of a shift when every call on her board had been closed. Eight weeks into the trial, the ledger she kept in a steno pad on top of the refrigerator showed $7,280 taken in, against $9,000 sent to Nebraska and $1,140 for insurance.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Hector called at 8:05 in the morning.
“I’ve got a formal complaint here,” he said, carefully, like a man reading a document he hadn’t written. “Alleging commercial operation incompatible with agricultural zoning, increased traffic and dust on County Road 14, and visitor activity at dusk creating hazards on an unlit road. Signed by Kettle Butte Lodge and by the owners of the two parcels on your north line.”
“Those parcels are empty.”
“They’re owned by two companies,” Hector said. “Both registered to Mr. Teague’s office address.” He let that sit. “Jo, with a complaint on file I have to suspend your temporary permit until the commissioners hear your application. December 9. As of today, no paid sessions. I’m sorry.”
She looked at the steno pad on the refrigerator. Saturday was full: fourteen names, three of them driving down from Grand Junction. One of those had already left a message from a motel in Montrose, saying they’d come a day early to be sure…
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