Part 6
The commissioners met in the exhibit hall at the fairgrounds, because the meeting room in the courthouse annex held only thirty people and Hector had warned her more than thirty were coming. The hall smelled of sawdust and old show cattle. A space heater ticked under the commissioners’ folding table and failed to warm anyone. Someone had left a blue 4-H ribbon thumbtacked to the wall behind the chairwoman’s head.
Jo counted fifty-one people in the folding chairs and recognized most of them. Abe in the second row, in his plaid shirt buttoned to the throat. Dani, straight off a night shift, her badge still clipped to her fleece. Teresa and her sister. Luz, who had driven two hours. Lorna from the co-op. Ed Kowalczyk, at the back, with his cap in his hands.
Teague sat at the front beside the man from the hallway, a consultant from Denver with a laptop and a projector. He nodded to Jo when she came in. It wasn’t a friendly nod. It was the nod one bidder gives another across a sale barn.
Commissioner Maureen Tibbs ran the hearing. She was in her seventies, a retired large-animal vet with a voice like a gate hinge, and she announced at the start that she would end the meeting the moment anyone raised their voice.
Hector summarized the staff report. Then the complainant spoke.
Teague was good. Jo had known he would be. He didn’t make a single joke. He talked about County Road 14, gravel with no shoulders and no lights, and the danger of strangers driving it in winter at dusk. He talked about dust and precedent: let one commercial use into the agricultural zone, and the next applicant would want a wedding barn, and the one after that an RV park. His consultant showed photographs of cars along the west fence on a Saturday in October. Teague talked, without inflaming anyone, about the risks of members of the public standing near large animals of unknown history.
“I respect what Margaret Pruitt was trying to do,” he said near the end. “I respect her niece. But the fact is that this land has minimal agricultural value. Charging admission doesn’t change what the land is. It just changes how many people drive to it.” He paused. “This county shouldn’t take on new risk because a parcel can’t pay its own way.”
He sat down. Tibbs looked at Jo.
Jo didn’t go to the lectern. She stood beside her chair, as she used to stand at her console when the call mattered, and spoke in the voice she had used for sixteen years.
She gave the operation in plain numbers. Fourteen guests, three afternoons a week. Every session over by three-thirty, two hours before a December sundown, so no visitor of hers had ever needed headlights on Road 14. She had logged every car through her gate, with the time and the plate, and she handed Hector a copy for the record. Over eight weeks, her guests had added an average of seven vehicles to the road per session.
“Mr. Teague’s concern about dark roads is fair,” she said. “Darkness matters out here. I agree with him about that more than he knows.”
She gave Hector the restriction, the clerk’s reception stamp from the day before still on it. She read the key terms aloud: no exterior lighting on the parcel in perpetuity, no new structures except a single shade shelter, a fifteen-person cap, no sessions after dusk, no amplified sound. It was binding on her and everyone after her, and enforceable by Alder County, whose commission would have to vote to release it.
The hall was quiet. In the front row, Teague’s consultant had stopped typing.
“I recorded it yesterday morning,” Jo said.
Then she handed the commissioners two more things. The first was the Kettle Butte brochure, open to the inside spread, with Hollis standing small and white-faced in the dusk. The second was the photocopy of page eleven of the lodge’s dark-sky application, with her land hatched in gray and labeled Primary western buffer, and page twelve clipped behind it.
She didn’t comment on either one. She sat down.
Tibbs read for a long time. She passed the pages to the commissioner on her left, who read them and passed them on. The space heater ticked. Somebody’s chair creaked at the back of the hall, and somebody else hushed them.
“Mr. Teague,” Tibbs said at last. “Your own application says your lodge depends on this parcel staying dark and quiet. Ms. Pruitt has just guaranteed that it will, permanently. What’s left of your objection?”
Teague didn’t answer right away. His consultant leaned over to say something, and Teague lifted a hand slightly without looking at him. The consultant stopped.
Jo watched him take it in. She had heard that kind of silence on the line before, from a caller who had been certain what his emergency was and had just learned it was a different one. To keep objecting, he would have to argue in public that the land was too worthless to permit and too valuable to lose, both at once, in front of fifty people who would repeat every word at the co-op.
“I’d like to withdraw the complaint,” he said.
“On the record?”
“On the record.”
When Tibbs opened public comment, several hands went up. Abe’s was first, and Tibbs called on him because, she said, he’d directed her son in the middle school band.
He stood slowly, holding the back of the chair in front of him.
“Folks keep telling me I ought to stand up here and say those animals helped me with my grief,” he said. “I won’t, because it isn’t true. Nothing helped my grief. My wife’s still dead.” He looked around the hall as if checking for disagreement. “What I’ll say is this. For six years, Thursday at two was the only place in this county where nobody asked me how I was holding up. The llamas didn’t care how I was holding up. I sat there and didn’t have to be anything. Then I went home.” He sat down. A moment later he added, from his chair, “That’s all.”
The commissioners voted three to nothing to approve the special use permit with conditions: the cap, the hours, the parking plan, maintained insurance, and an annual report on visitor counts to Hector’s office. Tibbs read them into the record, adjourned, and went to look at the 4-H ribbon on the wall as though she’d only just noticed it.
In the parking lot the wind had come up. Teague stood beside his truck with his collar raised when Jo came out with Ines.
“You could have gotten nine hundred thousand dollars out of me,” he said. “Maybe a million.”
“I know.”
He waited for more. When she said nothing, he looked off toward the dark bulk of Kettle Butte, the lodge cabins invisible against the gray afternoon.
“Ed Kowalczyk’s hay is still in my barn,” he said. “I’ve got more bedding than I’ll use in two winters. I’ll sell you what you need at what I paid. Delivered.”
Jo thought of the second Nebraska payment and the four thousand dollars that would be left after it.
“I’ll take it,” she said. “I pay late.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “So I’ve heard.” He opened the truck door, then stopped with a hand on it. “Margaret ever tell you why she faced that bleacher away from the mountains? Best view in the county, and she turned her back on it. I asked her once.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I’d understand when I quit selling the view.” He got into the truck. “I figured you might know what she meant…”
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