12
The day of the judgment was blazing hot with the heat of a classic Western. The sun was molten and broiled the earth, weighing down breezes and evaporating much of the water spray that arced over the hayfields. The air rippled above blacktop roads, and the vibration of the elements seemed audible, a low and ominous hum.
Inside the air-conditioned courthouse, the oxygen was almost too thick to breathe. Beth and her father sat next to each other, elbows touching, the only souls on a wood bench worn shiny by use. Only her father had joined her today. Her mother refused to spare the ranch anyone else for “Beth’s drama.”
It was easy for Beth to forgive her mother, who was more frightened about the outcome than anyone.
A very small audience, mostly friends whose pity had carried the Kandinskys through this trying time, heard the judge award Mr. Anthony Darling all the damages he sought. It was a devastating number, much larger than Beth could comprehend in that second when it was uttered, even greater than the number their attorney had called a “worst case.” The decision was read and received dispassionately by those in attendance, but the murmur of agreement continued to swirl around Beth’s head after the judge rose and left his seat.
There was no mercy, only judgment. No nick-of-time miracle, only the expected reality. The girl with nothing was forced to give all to the man who had everything, because she had made a grave error.
Darling passed by without looking at the Borzois. Their attorney said how disappointed he was in the outcome, gave them instructions to contact his assistant for an appointment in the coming weeks, then left abruptly, as if he’d already overspent his time with this family that had no more money to give him. The courtroom emptied.
Beth had eighteen months to pay Darling. If she didn’t, or couldn’t, the court would proceed by issuing liens against the Blazing B, forcing subdivisions and sales of land and property if necessary. It would be necessary. The two jobs she’d taken wouldn’t even skim the fat off the top of this stew.
Abel picked up the cowboy hat that sat on the seat next to him. A new frown line over his nose that matched the cleft of his chin was the only indication that he’d heard the judge’s words.
Abel was older than the fathers of Beth’s peers, nearly old enough to be her grandfather, having married Rose late in his life. The sun-sunk lines of his wide round face were deep, and his hair, which was once the same gold-red as Beth’s, was entirely gray now, including his mustache and eyebrows.
It was his ready smile and peaceful approach to the world that made him seem young—his smile and his eyes, which were still as blue as a stellar jay’s tail feathers. But when he took Beth’s hand and pulled her out of her shocked state, drawing her gently off the bench, he looked old to her, and tired.
“Can we appeal it?” she asked. Hope was an invisible gas that she couldn’t grab hold of. The last atoms of it floated away on her father’s shuddering sigh.
“We’ll figure this out, honey,” he said. He wiped a beaded line of sweat off his brow, then reseated his hat. More moisture clung to the tiny hairs at his temples. “God can do anything.”
“I’ll think of something.”
Her father shook his head as they walked down the long, empty hall. “Sometimes there’s nothing to think up but belief. Faith that God can do something incredible.”
God, Beth feared, would ask the family to let everything go. Equipment, vehicles, livestock, land. Staff. Livelihood. Dreams. More dreams. Maybe even love—her parents’ love, her brothers’ love. Even all that might not be enough.
Abel said, “Sometimes God brings us to the end of our options so that when he does his will, no one else can take the credit for it.”
“I wish I had your faith that he’ll save the ranch,” she whispered.
“I said God can do something incredible, not that he will. Maybe the ranch has served its purpose. My faith isn’t in good outcomes, Beth, only in the goodness of God.”
Father and daughter exited the courtroom, and then the air-conditioned building. Outside, the sun bounced off the walls of the white courthouse and the reflective concrete lot, cutting through sunglasses. Abel held on to her hand as if knowing she’d need his help to wade through the dense heat. It slowed her movements and her thinking. It seemed to pry at their sweat-slicked palms. Her life was heavy as water, and she wished to be ripped away on a drowning current, but her dad’s hold was lifesaving. Somehow his silence reassured.
Inside his melting, sticky-vinyl Ford, Beth developed the beginnings of an idea. Her father turned on the A/C and pulled out onto the highway.
“Cut me off,” she said. “I’ll sell my share of the ranch to Levi. I’ll leave the valley. If I’m not connected to the Blazing B, they can’t come after it.”
Abel shook his head. “We’d had to have done that long before this trouble, if that’s what we wanted. Which I don’t, by the way.”
“Do it anyway. To protect yourselves.”
“That’s no protection, honey. I don’t know the law, but I’d guess your mother and I’d become accessories in breaking it.”
He took a long breath and placed one hand over his heart.
“It’s not fair that you have to pay for my mistakes. Not like this.”
“This is what it means to be a family.”
She feared that Levi and her mother would harbor a different sentiment.
“You wouldn’t say that if we were talking about the herd,” she muttered.
“What? A family is not a herd, young lady.”
“All my life you’ve said it’s healthiest for the weak ones to be culled. If a coyote takes a calf, you let it go. And you won’t ever waste anyone’s time tracking down that coyote.”
“Coyotes do what coyotes do. We don’t waste resources trying to stop that.”
“My point is, the predators sense the weakest calves. And the weak ones weaken the entire herd. I’m the weak one, Dad. You’ve got to let me go.”
The rare frown between Abel’s eyes deepened, and Beth thought she might be making some inroads.
But then he said, “You thought I was talking about the calf ? You’re twenty-two, and you’ve grown up thinking we should let predators cull the herd?”
“What else could you have meant?”
“Those calves were killed by the natural order of the world, honey. But the culling was never about the calf, it was about the parent—the cow who failed to protect her baby. If all the other cows can keep their little ones safe from the hunter, what’s wrong with the one who can’t? We don’t want to keep breeding those. We single out the mamas who fail. We cull the herd—your mother and me, Jacob. That’s not the coyotes’ job.”
Beth’s argument leaked out of her. “And those mamas who fail go into the group you sell each year.”
“What did you think was happening to them?”
“I knew they were sold, but I thought it was for other things. There’s a dozen reasons why certain cows go.”
“If you think you’re weak, maybe it’s because your mom and I have let you down,” Abel said.
“You know that’s not what I was trying to say. I’m an adult. You’re not responsible for my poor judgments, Dad.”
“Most parents I know feel like they are, on some level. Doesn’t matter how universally imperfect kids are—or how good. You’re one of the good ones, honey.”
“You feel responsible because my mistakes have affected the whole family, the whole ranch.”
Her father smiled at her, his unforced, unconditional smile that brought some light back to his tired eyes.
“So my cull-the-calf metaphor breaks down,” she said, “but I still think there’s got to be a way to spare the family from my mess.”
The truck glided by bright green circular fields watered by central-pivot irrigation systems. In some fields, hay that was cut but not yet baled lay fading under the sun in wide swaths. Fresh rectangular bales the color of peas sat waiting collection. Older bales, cut and dried earlier in the summertime, stood in tall yellow stacks under shelters.
“Hot one today,” Abel observed. He sounded more exhausted than she felt.
Small herds of cows not sent to the public lands to graze nibbled on fields that were rotated with the crops for this purpose. Everything in this valley was dependent on something else for survival. The ranchers on their cows; cows on the grass; the grass on the water; the water on the mountain snow. In this part of the country, every cow-calf pair needed roughly twenty acres of property to survive, and the ranchers needed enough cows to breed and to sell to keep their acreage financially afloat. They had to have enough water and soil to grow food to keep herds through the winter with a minimum of supplementation, and ideally with a little extra to sell. Permits to graze herds on public lands, which prevented valuable croplands from becoming overgrazed, ran tens of thousands of dollars.
There was almost never enough money to prosper, just barely enough to get by. In the valley, the balance between survival and ruin teetered on fragile scales. It was life-giving, life-taking work that families out here did for love, not for cash. A rancher’s worth was hardly ever liquid, and most of it was tied up in the land, beautiful but demanding. Parting with assets was nearly the same as parting with water in a desert.
Anthony Darling and the courts expected the Blazing B to hand over every canteen it possessed.
They passed a field recently cut, and a man bent over the open engine of his baler, greasy parts spread out on the ground and glistening with black oil under the sun.
Worse than the judgment itself would be turning it loose on her family. The news they were carrying back to their home was a fanged rattlesnake, coiled and hostile.
“What am I going to tell Mom?” she murmured.
In answer the Ford lurched, and Beth’s attention snapped to her father as the truck began to drift across the center line. Her left hand reached out for the wheel to pull them back before her mind had processed what was happening.
Her father was gripping his shirt, a fisted wad of court-worthy clean and pressed cotton directly over his heart. Pain deepened all the lines of his face, squinting around his eyes and yanking on the corners of his mouth.
“Dad?”
The weight of his own hand dragged the steering wheel in the direction opposite her efforts, with the net effect of keeping the truck square in the wrong lane.
Abel’s body slouched toward the support of his door, away from her, away from life. On the short horizon, an oncoming car was swiftly closing the distance.
“Dad, I need you to let go of the wheel.”
Her voice sounded disembodied, the confident authoritative voice of someone who knew exactly what to do, someone whose heart was not thrashing about, someone whose muscles weren’t shaking uncontrollably.
“Let go, Dad.”
Either he couldn’t hear her or he couldn’t will his fingers to obey.
His body stiffened in a spasm, and his legs tried to straighten. His foot floored the accelerator and the truck surged for an electric second, straining against the stick-shift gears. Then his shoe slipped off the pedal and the car lurched again, decelerating like a sky diver caught up by his chute, stalling the engine.
Beth’s fight against her father’s body weight became a futile competition against the entire heavy-duty vehicle. Even if her seat belt hadn’t held her at this awkward angle, she wouldn’t have been able to leverage the drifting truck.
Her prayer was an inarticulate cry as the oncoming car bore down on them and began to swerve. Beth released the wheel, and her sagging, unconscious father pulled them off the shoulder and across the dry grass. Thanks to the stalled engine, they hit the solid power line just hard enough to deploy the air bags, and then the truck bounced back. The hood was dented and steaming.
Beth had raised her arms in front of her face at the moment she let go, and the skin of her forearms took the sting of the bags’ explosion. Her mind worked quickly, hyper alert, and her body sprang into focused action the moment the car came to rest. In one smooth motion that she had never practiced, she swept the nylon bag out of her way, released her belt, found her phone, activated the speaker, dialed 9-1-1, put the phone on the dash, and had her father unbuckled by the time the operator answered. She was able to say exactly where the accident occurred—which highway they were on, which cross street they had just passed.
“My father had a heart attack while driving. He’s unconscious. He’s breathing. This is his second attack.” Thanks to the first one, Beth knew the latest CPR recommendations. Everything the operator told her to do made sense.
It should have been difficult to get him onto his back, and yet she had no trouble standing over him within the confines of the truck cab. It didn’t occur to her to get out, to try to open his door and drag him onto the ground. Her feet found firm braces against the armrest and the gear box. Her strong legs squatted and lifted while she gripped him under the arms, locked her fingers behind his back, and turned him across the bench seat, her sticky cheek pressed into the sweat of his hair and neck. His knees angled oddly, trapped by the steering wheel. She twisted him at the waist, making his spine as flat as possible.
“He stopped breathing,” she heard herself saying. She dropped all the weight of her back and arms into rapid chest compressions, knowing that there was still enough oxygen in his blood to keep his brain and body alive, so long as she could keep it moving.
Her memory pulled up his heavy sighs, his perspiring forehead, his extreme fatigue, and interpreted all these clues much differently now.
Press-press-press-press.
Was this how God would prove his goodness?
Please, don’t let him die, she prayed. If only she understood the “healing touch” that Jacob claimed she had. If only the miracle worker could control her own gift.
The operator continued to speak to her, and she continued to answer. She heard the creaking of a distant car door and remembered that there was another driver somewhere. She feared his fury. She heard a man’s shout but didn’t know what the words were, didn’t look up until a shadow fell over the truck’s cab.
Her passenger door opened, and hot but fresh air rushed in, lifted her chin. Press-press-press-press. Beth registered that a man stood there, and that a small cut under his eye was blooming and had dripped blood onto his shirt, a green polo with an embroidered design on the right shoulder. Wolf Creek, it said. A mountain-pass ski resort west of the valley. She’d skied there before but had never paid attention to its logo until now. Between two mountain peaks, the head of a wolf looked down on her with piercing triangular eyes. The man’s blood dotted its nose.
Press-press-press-press.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“It’s stopped,” he said. “I’m an EMT. How can I help?”