40
Beth had said her good-byes to Trey at Mazy’s after they shared a dish featuring meat of a questionable texture. He lived at the bottom of the mountain in Salida, which was an easy drive from the Blazing B. She suggested that he ought to visit the ranch before it changed into something unrecognizable, and he promised to. She promised to start keeping records for him of Mercy’s appearances.
Nova had shown Beth to the laundry where she could wash her stiff clothes, and then she fed Beth dinner. Afterward she pressed Beth’s blouse and told stories about Burnt Rock and the people who populated it, including Mr. Remke, who was one of Nova’s favorite people. Beth was touched by this chance to see Grandpa Remke in a different light, and she felt sad rather than angry about her lost opportunity to know him.
So the following morning when she left Nova’s home in fresh clothes, with a backpack full of food over her shoulder and Herriot at her heels, she wasn’t expecting to see Garner standing in the middle of the dirt parking lot with a light-blue hard-sided suitcase at his feet.
He looked down at it when she emerged, as if it might contain what he wanted to say.
“Hi,” she said. Herriot ran up to Garner and sniffed his shoes, then his suitcase.
“Dotti said I could find you here.” His eyes moved around her, landing everywhere but on her face.
“Everyone has been really hospitable,” she said.
“Almost everyone. Every small town has to have its crank.”
She smiled and tipped her head to one side. “I know I was a shock.”
“The last several days have been a shock,” he said.
She adjusted her backpack on her shoulder and silently agreed.
“You headed out?” he asked.
“I am. I was aiming for the stables just now. My horse is there. Where are you going?”
“I am going . . . I was thinking . . . It’s really true that I don’t have any money.”
“I know.”
“I feel bad about that. If you knew how short a time ago I lost it—”
“Garner, I’m the last person you need to explain yourself to.”
He wrinkled up his nose. “I’m a stubborn old man, Beth.”
“You’ll fit right in, then.”
Now Garner looked her in the eye. “Right in where?”
“At the ranch. That’s where you want to go, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “I really miss . . . Do you think your mother will be glad to see me?”
“I really don’t know.”
“It’s been a lot of years, a lot of bitterness. I’d rather be going down there with money lining my pockets.”
“We do what we can with what we have,” Beth said. “Even if it’s nothing. I’m starting to believe God can work with that.”
“You sure came a long way for nothing,” he said.
“Not if you come back with me.”
He grinned at her then.
“So,” she said. “I have a horse and a dog. They’re not going to get the two of us very far.”
“Dotti said we could use her car,” Garner said. He bent down to pick up his case. “Either that or she’d shoot us downriver in one of her death traps.”
“I don’t know what that means, but a car sounds safer.”
“So long as you’re driving, it will be.”
“I really like the idea of getting back home in just a few hours.”
“Then that decides it,” Garner announced. “This way to Dotti’s.” He tipped his head in the direction of Main Street and began to lead.
“We’ll have to stop by the stables on my way out so I can make arrangements to send up a trailer for Hastings later.”
“Easy peasy.”
They turned the corner of the abandoned doctor’s office.
“So what changed your mind?” Beth asked.
“Beth, girl, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Several hours later, when Beth turned off the highway, Garner began to second-guess his decision to come to the ranch. They passed under the wrought-iron entry that framed a plank announcing the location. Blazing B had been formed of block letters with a large wood-burning tool, and decorative flames that had rusted to an appropriate vermillion danced along the top rail against a summer sky.
Beth was silent too. Herriot sat up in the backseat as if aware they were close to home now.
“I guess we both have reason to be a bundle of nerves,” Garner observed.
“We’ll go to the Hub first,” Beth said. “I can introduce you to whichever men happen to be there. Then we’ll go to the main house. It’ll be a smoother entrance that way. I think.”
Garner glanced at her but had no opinion on how to go about this.
The spectacle of the ranch took him off guard. He was familiar with this valley, and with the properties here, but he’d been away long enough for their loveliness to fade in his mind. Now the golden grassland stretched ahead of him like a new day that took the edge off his anxiety. The San Juans in the west were protective, towering shades of purple and gray.
The dirt road took more or less a straight line west, and soon a house, several outbuildings, and various fenced corrals came into view. Beyond these were harvested fields that smelled of winter feed, and protective shelters that housed hay bales stacked to the roof.
Herriot woofed, and Garner pointed to the south. Three riders on horseback were approaching the house that Beth had called the Hub.
“That’s Jacob in the front, on the Appaloosa,” Beth said. She seemed to relax at the sight of this man. Even the tone of her voice became less taut. The trio was looking in her direction and probably wondering who this 4x4 belonged to. She’d be close enough for them to recognize her soon. “And that’s Danny, behind him.”
“Your younger brother,” Garner said.
“Yes.” Beth glanced at Garner. “Your youngest grandson.”
But Garner’s eyes had already moved to the rider at the rear, a tall woman in an overlarge plaid work shirt, her thick hair pulled back into a long braid down the center of her back. He could see from here the strands of gray striping her hair. Had it been so long? She was such a kid when she left.
“There’s my Rose,” he said.
Beth rolled down her window and reached out to wave as they rumbled along the drive. The one called Jacob tipped up the visor of his hat, studied her for a moment, then waved back and turned to say something to the others. At this Rose kicked her horse into a trot and quickly passed the men.
Garner turned his head to look out his window in the opposite direction.
Rose got to Dotti’s car before they reached the ranch house. She pulled the horse alongside Beth’s open window and spoke down into the car from her mount.
“I’ve worried myself sick, Beth,” she said. And Garner thought she sounded like the saddest soul he knew.
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. I had to go. I had to try—”
“I should never have told you to leave. That day it wasn’t possible for me to think straight. I said all kinds of things—they were just confused. They were all wrong. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m so glad you’re back. If I had lost your father and you . . .” It seemed she couldn’t finish that thought.
Even though they hadn’t reached the looping driveway in front of the house, Beth stopped the car.
“Of course I forgive you. I should have called.”
“Danny said you left a note.”
“I did. But still.”
Beth opened the door and slid off the seat while her mother dismounted her roan mare. Herriot jumped over the seat and escaped, making a beeline for Jacob and Danny.
“Where did you go? Where’s Hastings?” Rose encircled her daughter in a tight embrace that Garner watched from the corner of his eye. He had no idea what to do. “Whose car is this?”
Rose, now at eye level with the car, seemed to notice for the first time that Beth had come with a passenger. She placed a hand on the retracted window of the driver’s side door and stooped to have a look.
Garner waited. His ears rang with the deafening buzz of uncertainty. Rose put her hand over her mouth and took long seconds to form a reaction. He couldn’t tell if she was going to faint or start screaming at him. He couldn’t stand not knowing.
He grabbed the handle of his door and pushed it open at the same time that Beth took a step away from her mom. Rose didn’t let her get far. She grabbed hold of her daughter’s hand and pulled Beth along behind her around the front of the car, reaching out to her father with her other hand and touching him in just a few long strides. Her arm went around his shoulders and she pulled her to him hard.
She breathed into his shoulder quietly, and as she clung to her father, she tugged Beth into the circle of his embrace. He wrapped his arms around his girls. It was so easy to hold them both.
“I don’t have anything to bring you,” Garner said. “I can’t do anything to save this place.”
“I don’t care,” Rose whispered. “It doesn’t matter. You have to stay. Whatever happens, I hope you will stay. Everything will be all right then.”
“If you insist.”
“I dreamed of this day. I knew you would come.”
When the time was right, he would give credit to Beth for that. If not for her, father and daughter would have each dreamed the same dream until they met at the gates of heaven.
He heard Danny say to Jacob, “Is that my grandpa Remke?”
Garner replied, “It is, son. Back from the grave.” He added so that Beth would hear, “In more ways than one.”
Danny was beaming. “Prodigious,” he said.
Garner laughed, still holding Rose and Beth close to him. “Now that sounds like something I would have said when I was your age.”
“You two already have something in common,” Jacob said. Garner saw the man cast a smile at his granddaughter, though he was talking to Danny. His first thought was that this cowboy was far too old for Beth—and then he turned his back on the thought. He had no desire to travel that judgmental road again. He despised the destination.
Rose tilted Beth’s forehead toward her and planted a firm kiss on it. “I can’t believe you did this,” she whispered.
“Why don’t you take your dad back up to the house?” Jacob said to Rose. “Danny and I can keep looking for Wally.”
Beth stepped out of Garner’s embrace. “What’s happened to Wally?”
“He ran off during the night,” Rose said. “Sometime after bed check.”
“He was upset yesterday,” Jacob told Beth. “That lockbox of his is gone again. He accused one of the other men of stealing it. You know how they tease him sometimes.”
“We try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum,” Rose said to her father. “Most of the time the men are really decent.”
“He took a couple of shovels and went off last night, then didn’t show for breakfast. The three of us have been all over the southern property line, but so far, nothing.”
“It’s easy to dig down there by the creek,” Beth said. “And there’s lots of places to hide something.”
“Those were our thoughts,” Jacob said.
“I looked there for my truck when—did Levi really sell it?” she asked.
“No! Why would he tell you that?” asked Rose. “And when?”
“It doesn’t matter now. Who else is searching?”
“Everyone,” Rose said. “Eric and Emory are searching the west side, Roy’s on the north, and Lorena’s keeping a lookout at the ranch house.” She looked at Garner and squeezed his hand.
“Everyone except Levi,” Danny said. “He’s got higher priorities.”
“Respect your brother, Danny,” Rose said.
“I know, Mom. But c’mon. We all know that Levi’s the reason why Wally’s so agitated,” Danny said. “Jacob’s just too respectful to say so.”
“What do you mean?” Beth asked, looking at Jacob.
Rose said, “Sam Johnson has been on the property a lot this past week—he and Levi are already drawing up plans.”
“I haven’t surrendered my share yet,” Beth said.
“No one has. But they’re moving ahead. In any case, Wally was up at the cemetery while Sam and Levi were surveying those acres, and—you tell it, Jacob. I guess everything I know I heard from you.”
“Wally said he heard them talking about relocating the family plots.”
Beth looked at her mother. “Levi promised not to.”
“I know, hon.”
“That sounds bad,” Garner said.
“Downright iniquitous,” said Danny. Garner liked this boy more and more.
Jacob continued, “Wally barged in and started objecting. He threatened to tell you all about their plans, Beth.”
“Me?”
“He hasn’t stopped talking about you since the day we buried your dad. He’s been wanting to know where you are. Levi told him you were dead, and that’s why you hadn’t been around.”
Beth paled.
“Spawn of the devil,” Garner said. Danny belted out a laugh. Rose shot him a look of disbelief. “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Garner said.
“Wally came back around suppertime out of his head,” Jacob continued. “He said he couldn’t find his lockbox and Levi had stolen it. He was desperate to get it back.”
Beth’s sigh was heavy. “I suppose Levi denies it all.”
“Not in so many words. You know the notebook Wally carries?”
“Yeah, it’s how he remembers things.”
“He pulled it out and started taking notes of their conversation. Levi took the notebook, nothing else, he says. I got it back and thought that would settle Wally down. By the way, I assured him that you are not dead.”
“Where else might a man hide something around here?” Garner asked. “It’s a mighty big place.” He would try to redeem his spawn-of-the-devil remark as fast as he could. And yet Rose’s posture was already withdrawing from him. Not offended, but fearful, aware she had jumped toward him across a great chasm on a flimsy bridge that might not hold.
“We’re racking our brains,” Jacob said. “We’ve gone up and down the entire creek, the irrigation ditches. I’m starting to worry he might have gone off the property.”
“We’re giving ourselves until sundown,” Rose said to Beth. “Then we’ll call the sheriff.”
“Did he say anything about a wolf ?” Beth asked. She was facing north, twisting a piece of hair around her finger.
“Nope,” Jacob said. “What makes you ask that?”
Beth fell silent. Garner, curious about the wolf in her question, tried to follow her secret thinking.
“But you know what he did say that I thought was odd?” Jacob asked.
She looked up at him.
“When I told him you were alive, he was so relieved. And he said, ‘That’s good news, because Beth promised to help me dig.’ ”
Beth said, “I think I know where he is.”
41
Beth drove north along the access road, her mother in the passenger seat and her grandfather in the back. The ranch looked the same but seemed so different from when she had left it.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Rose kept murmuring. “I can’t believe you’re both here.”
Danny and Jacob stayed at the Hub to water the horses, and Beth promised them a phone call as soon as she knew whether her hunch turned out to be correct.
“You’ve done well for yourself, Rosy,” Garner said from the backseat, admiring the beauty of the land.
“Appreciate it while you can,” she said. Her tone was more gentle than Beth had heard in months.
“I’m sorry about Abel. I was wrong about him, you know. Very wrong. Clearly, he was a fine man.”
“Thank you, Dad.”
Apology accepted. Simple words carrying father and daughter toward each other. Beth imagined the real work of mending this relationship would take months. Years even. A slow and careful return. She imagined her grandfather here on the land in October, sipping tea and gazing out the screens of the enclosed porch while the cows returned to the property. It was a moment she hoped to witness.
Months ago she had found Wally digging in the cottonwood grove and used this same road to take him back to the Hub. Today she traveled toward the grove, where she had never kept her promise to help him dig. She wondered when he had remembered it. The car passed the ranch house, and Beth saw Lorena standing behind the porch screen that Herriot had jumped through. The mesh had been repaired. Beth waved at the girl. Lorena lifted a tentative hand.
The road ran alongside the horse pasture, the barn, the winter lean-to shelters—all empty now while the animals were out helping to search for Wally. Beyond the pasture at a walking distance, two hulking boulders marked the entrance to the cemetery. Beth looked in the direction of her father’s grave. A flash flood of sadness entered the space in her chest that had been filled the past week with urgency and sleeplessness and frantic prayers. Had it only been a week since her father passed? It felt like a year.
Today, however, there was no frantic desperation mixed up with Beth’s grief. She noted a new feeling of peace.
Later she would pay her respects. Right now it was more urgent that they find Wally. She turned her head to the cottonwood grove when the car passed it on the left. If Wally was there, he was hidden by the thick trunks and undergrowth.
A hundred yards past the grove, Beth parked Dotti’s 4x4 where the road ended, under the shade of a lush Wasatch maple, in the same place where she had left her truck the night she’d stolen Jacob’s saddle. Her mother and grandfather got out of the car and followed her back to the trees. The leaves rustled in a light breeze.
Dozens of small holes punctured the ground, everywhere that the roots would allow a shovel to enter.
They entered the grove and stepped over and around the prodded earth. The trees backed up against a steep hillside, a tiny intrusion of San Juan’s foothills, and it only took a few minutes for the threesome to reach the upward-sloping ground. They spread out then and turned down the narrow strip of earth. It was much longer than it was wide.
Beth found Wally’s shovel first, when she stepped on the blade and caused the gray wooden handle to rise up off the ground.
“Wally?” she called out.
“Who wants to know?” he answered.
Her heart lightened at the familiar question.
“Abel’s daughter,” she said.
“Beth!” he answered. “Over here.” She was quickly joined by Rose and Garner.
They found Wally seated on the ground with his back to them, one knee drawn up to his chest, shining a flashlight at a wide trunk that grew at an angle from the knobby hillside. She wondered why he needed the flashlight while the sun was still high. He twisted and looked up at her right away.
“You remembered my name,” she said, smiling at him.
“That cowboy said you . . . went on a trip. Actually, I don’t remember where he said you went. I only recall that you are not dead. Which I am so happy to see is true.”
“Me too,” she said.
“I’ve been waiting for you to get back. If you told me how long it would be, I forgot to write it down.” His little spiral-bound book was lying on the ground next to him, and he pointed at it. “This is all the memory I’ve got some days.”
Wally’s pleasure at seeing her faltered when he spotted Garner, and for a second she thought Wally might be as upset as if Levi had shown up.
“Doggone it,” Wally said. “Each time I think I’m getting better . . .”
Beth understood. “You haven’t met him before, Wally,” she said. “This is my grandfather, Garner Remke. Garner, my friend Wally.”
Garner extended his hand. “I’m Rosy’s dad.”
“It’s a pleasure, sir,” Wally said. “I’m sure it will be a pleasure each time. For me anyway. Howdy, Mrs. Borzoi,” he said to Rose.
“You okay, Wally?” she said. “Everyone’s worried about you.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m surely sorry if I’ve caused any trouble. I’m just in a bit of a dilemma here, and you showed up at a fine time to bail me out of it.”
He glanced back toward the tree and lifted the flashlight again. He hadn’t been shining the light on the trunk as Beth first thought, but alongside of it. A tall Apache plume grew here, the shrub’s downy leaves and pink-feather flowers looking like a fluffy pillow behind the cottonwood.
Wally leaned in and pressed the silvery branches aside to expose another hole, this one larger than the pockmarks in the grove, deeper, and running straight back into the hillside rather than down into the ground. The flashlight’s beam disappeared into blackness.
“Did you dig that yourself ?” Rose asked, bending over his shoulder.
“No, ma’am,” Wally said. “Something else dug this.”
A metallic glint on one side of the hole about twelve feet back caught Beth’s eye.
“Is that your lockbox?” Beth asked.
“I do believe it is,” he said.
Garner uttered the first question to pop into Beth’s mind. “How did it get way back there? The hole’s too small for a man.”
The answer came just as swiftly to Beth’s heart: “Mercy put it there,” she said.
“Who?” asked her mother.
Beth looked at Wally. “The night it first went missing, you told me the wolf took it.”
“What wolf ?” Rose demanded.
“That I did,” Wally said. “Says so right here.” He released the shrub and picked up his notebook, then began to flip through the pages.
“The wolf’s name is Mercy,” Beth said without thinking, and she noted her grandfather raised his eyebrows. Though he had yet to explain the reason for his change of heart, she was beginning to suspect that Mercy might have had something to do with it. “I first saw him”—she wished she could close this can of worms—“that same night.”
“Him?” Wally asked. “The wolf I saw was a girl. Any chance your memory’s starting to go?”
This silenced Beth. Garner started chuckling.
“Yes, I’ve got it here,” Wally said. “I drew a little wolf face to remind me. Put the box in her mouth and a bow over her ear. See?” He held the sketch out under Beth’s nose.
“What wolf is this?” said Rose again, straightening up and crossing her arms.
“And I made a note,” Wally said. “‘May 23. Gray wolf. Mile 6.25 fence post, cottonwood grove.’ That’d be here. Been back here a lot since then, but I just found this last night.”
“So what’s your dilemma?” Beth asked.
“My dilemma, right. Well, as . . . as this fine man here has already observed”—he indicated Garner—“I’m a little too big for the opening, and I’d like to get my box back. But that’s a minor detail. Bigger one is I can’t leave this spot, because your brother knows where to find it for himself. After all the work I’ve done, he’d surely find this place a lot quicker than I would.”
“Levi took your notebook,” Beth said, recalling Jacob’s account of their argument.
“Read it back to back, no doubt,” Wally accused. “No telling what that boy might do if I let this place out of my sight.”
Garner was kneeling by the hole now, holding back the Apache plume and looking in.
Rose’s voice took on a more gentle tone. “What’s in your box that Levi would want, Wally?”
Wally’s expression took on a sudden look of anxiety.
“Your ‘legal tender’?” Beth prompted, recalling Wally’s frustration the first night the box went missing. “You have money in the box?”
“What? Fifty bucks? Pfft. He can have it,” Wally said. “I used to be a rich man, you know, back in my Wall Street days. Wish I still was—once upon a time I could have helped you all out. But the people who call themselves my family sank their teeth into that gold mine long ago. Where there’s money, there’s always someone who wants it. It’s something I like about the Blazing B, you know. The simple life.”
He was talking over his worry now, Beth thought: he couldn’t remember why it was so important he guard the lockbox from Levi. There was no proper response to that, just as it wasn’t right for Beth to speak the truth: the survival of this “simple life” was dependent on quite a large sum of money.
Oddly, though, that truth didn’t drive a knife through her heart the way it might have a week earlier. She looked at her mother and grandfather. There was something good and right about this moment, these three family members making their way through loss by returning to each other, each of them having nothing, and repairing what was broken.
Wally licked his thumb and began to search for the answer in his book. “It was important.” He seemed flummoxed that he couldn’t find what he had previously written down. “It was really important.”
“It’s okay, Wally,” Beth said. She knelt beside him and rested her palm on his shoulder. “We can stay here until it comes to you. Let’s think of a way to get it out. I might be small enough to climb in.”
“You will not,” her mother ordered.
Garner fished through some fallen leaves for Wally’s discarded flashlight, found it, and aimed it into the hole for a clearer look.
Wally sighed. In his right hand he let his notebook fall shut, and he raised his left hand to press it against Beth’s cheek. His skin was dusty and cracked and as gentle as a loving father’s touch.
“Do you ever see something and find that it reminds you of something else, but your mind can’t make the connection?” he asked her. “That’s what most of my days are like now, since the stroke. But the reason I could always remember your father is because when I laid eyes on him, my old, broken brain always made the connection. I could remember why I came to this ranch, and what a gift that man had extended to me.”
Beth placed her own hand atop Wally’s, holding it next to her skin.
“My family found a way to get my money, but they couldn’t be bothered by the old man who has trouble remembering what he ate for breakfast. You know what kind of life awaits someone like me?”
Beth could guess. She nodded once.
“Your father gave me something that exceeded every imagination, every hope. And he never asked about the money. Never needed it. Such a man is impossible to forget.”
Beth closed her eyes and called up her own unforgettable memories of the man she missed so much. She heard Wally’s notebook hit the dirt, and he placed his other hand on her other cheek and pulled her bowed head toward him. He planted a soft kiss on the middle of her forehead and then let her rest her face on his narrow shoulder. He smelled like alfalfa and rainwater. She leaned into his kindness, his hands warm on her back.
Her nose picked up another scent too, in the breeze that enveloped them. It was musky and earthy, solid, rich. It was the scent of Mercy, growing more familiar to Beth with each passing day.
A flinch in Wally’s wrists brought her back to the present. She lifted her head, and his eyes were shining.
“I remember,” he said.
“What?”
“It’s not the box that needs protecting.”
Beth waited.
“It’s them,” Wally said, and he pointed over her shoulder.
Before she was able to turn, Beth caught sight of her mother’s face. Rose was pale and looking past Wally’s outstretched finger. “Don’t move,” she whispered, but she herself took a step backward.
At the mouth of the hole, behind the bent shrub, Garner looked up and then rose from his belly. Beth turned. As she came around, a wet muzzle swiped the side of her cheek, and Beth tipped backward on her hands. The gray wolf Mercy pressed in and ran his moist nose along Beth’s jaw and into her hair, sniffing as if meeting her for the first time.
“There she is,” Wally said happily.
The wolf licked Beth’s nose, and Rose uttered a small scream.
“It’s okay,” Beth said, wiping away the damp greeting. “That means I can stay in the pack.”
“There’s a pack?” Rose croaked.
“Seven of ’em,” Wally said. “Ha! What do you know? I didn’t even have to look that up in my little book!”
At this announcement Beth realized that the wolf who’d greeted her wasn’t Mercy after all. This one’s coat was a lighter gray color, more silver than ash. The dog’s frame was slightly smaller, and the gender was, just as Wally had claimed, female.
The dog left Beth and padded up to Rose, who clamped her eyes shut and murmured, “Will she hurt me?”
“She’s wild,” Beth said wryly.
“This one won’t,” Garner said. And this time it was Beth’s turn to raise her eyebrows and laugh.
A pattering of paws on the undergrowth announced the arrival of five adolescent wolves, neither pups nor fully grown. They leaped over Beth’s extended legs and joined their mother’s investigation of Rose, rising to place their front paws against her thighs.
“Get them off.” Rose pulled her hands and elbows up toward her shoulders.
“People pay money for this kind of experience,” Wally said.
“I don’t care!” Rose was moving backward.
“At least stand still,” Wally said. “Garner! Talk some sense into your daughter.”
“She’s got plenty of her own,” Garner said.
“But these wolves need—Hey! I remembered your name.” Wally reached out to touch Garner’s arm. “And that you’re her dad. Did you notice that?” he asked Beth.
One of the young wolves tired of Rose and dashed away, ducking behind Garner and the Apache plume and into the hole where the lockbox was hidden.
Beth’s lips parted in surprise. “It’s a den,” she said.
“For the pack,” Wally said, looking at her.
“A pack of endangered species.” Garner nodded knowingly. “If that doesn’t put a kink in Levi’s plans to develop this property, I don’t know what will.”
He started chuckling, and Beth’s smile reached all the way up to her ears. The other wolves trotted into their home, except for the female, who sat down in front of Rose’s feet like a guard dog. Rose eyed her warily, all the tension still in her shoulders.
“How can you be happy about something like that?” Rose demanded.
“Mom, a pack of gray wolves on our land!” Beth said.
“Yes! I’m imagining the nightmare of what that will mean when the cows come home for winter!” At this, Garner’s amusement became a belly laugh.
Beth said, “Mercy won’t touch them. And if we can keep Levi from harming the pack—”
“He won’t be able to sell the land, yes, I see that. So tell me, if Sam Johnson won’t buy it, how will we get out of our financial scrape?”
No one had an answer for that.
“These wolves aren’t the same as money,” her mother went on.
“Maybe they’re something better,” Beth said.
“Better than money? What do you—” Rose gasped and put her hand on her throat. “Stars! He’s huge!”
Beth followed her mother’s gaze and discovered Mercy, who had silently arrived within arm’s reach of Beth. She placed her hand on his head between his ears. He twisted his neck to nuzzle her palm.
“Beth, don’t touch it,” Rose whispered.
Garner’s laughter became an outright fit of gasping.
“Is that funny to you?” Rose said to her father, though her fearful eyes stayed on the wolf. “He’ll eat us alive.” Except for the movement of her lips, Rose was petrified. Mercy sauntered toward her and bumped up against the female, who looked up briefly at Rose and then followed his urging into the den.
Rose put her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. “What is happening here?” she murmured. “Why isn’t anything ever simple?”
“If we had the answer to that, we could get rich off it,” Beth said. Rose frowned. Beth got off the ground and went to her mother, then hugged her stiff and frustrated form. “Mom, only God knows what’s going to happen to the Blazing B in the next year and a half,” Beth said. “But no matter what happens, he’ll take care of us.” Her eyes locked on her grandfather’s. They overflowed with tears of hilarity, and he wiped them off his cheeks.
“God is good,” he said.
“Yes,” Beth echoed. “God is good.”
“You’ve all gone crazy,” Rose accused.
Wally said, “Bananas!”
Everyone stared at him.
He beamed at Beth. “I had bananas for breakfast.”