House of Mercy (14 page)

As Dr. Cat Ransom became more and more adored, Dr. Katrina White receded into the shadows of Cat’s imagination. Nevertheless, the two women shared one unfading quality: selfless devotion to the well-being of others. No court would ever strip her of that.

As she worked, however, Cat’s hatred of the Sweet Assembly’s magnetism grew, as did her distaste for the commercial promises of astrologers and so-called psychics. No wonder she and Nova would never get along. She hoped Garner wouldn’t also lose his head.

After a productive hour of gathering as much as she could reasonably store and use in the coming winter, she felt better. Renewed. Cat began the walk out of the field and was startled to take note of a sprawling growth of stalks about two feet tall. This relative of the lily bore clusters of small creamy white flowers, like a spear, that were beginning to drop. The leaves, slender and floppy, rose like tall blades of grass around the stalk.

Uprooted, the bulbs resembled green onions, with small edible bulbs. Well, the blue-flowered stalks, the common blue camas, were edible. These with the white flowers were so toxic from top to root that it was said they were deadlier than strychnine. They were called the death camas, and though they had killed more livestock than humans, no doctor or outdoorsman was cavalier about them. When the flowers weren’t in bloom, the blue and white camas were nearly impossible to tell apart. And yet they weren’t even in the same plant genus.

In Colorado, one generally assumed that no camas was edible. Blues tended to be rare in this part of the Rockies, whereas the white death camas came in two varieties: the fatal mountain death camas, and the seven times deadlier meadow camas.

Nonetheless, Garner once told her that all mountain residents should be educated in the life-and-death consequences of their local botany. He taught her a trick to help distinguish between the two, a bit of lore that had never failed him yet, though he hadn’t seen it documented by a qualified scientist anywhere.

He had cut off a death camas stalk about two inches above ground. At the cross section, the leaves around the stalk folded into each other to form the general shape of a triangle. Then he pulled the bulb out of the soil and sliced it in two horizontally. The core of the fatal onion twin also resembled a triangle. Similar cross-sections of the blue camas bore tidy little circles rather than three-sided designs.

“I think we ought to name these Bermuda onions,” she had said. “As a mnemonic device.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You know—the triangle?”

“Oh. Well, death camas is far more poetic, don’t you think?” he said. “And I think the real Bermuda onion growers would object.”

At this time of year, identification by slicing was unnecessary. The alluring white flowers and the egg-shaped bulbs that didn’t smell like onions were all the clues she needed.

Cat had no practical use for these plants, but she thought she should collect some. Play with it a little. It was wise to be prepared for all possible events, in and out of season, and
Zigadenus venenosus
wasn’t exactly available online.

Wearing her gloves, she stripped a slender aspen branch of its leaves and used it to help pry the death camas out of the earth undamaged. She hardly needed the tool; summer rains had softened the earth, and nearly all of them uprooted with ease.

Cat filled a large brown sack with a couple dozen. Surely more than she needed, but she found the gesture cathartic after such a difficult morning. Just one of these bulbs could kill a child and two could kill a man, and she was no murderer. But such a large bag did make her feel a little bit powerful.

She would need to take great care with how she labeled it, to prevent an innocent soul, even herself, in a split second of distraction from accidentally applying the meadow death camas to a tragic use. Because she was all about keeping people alive.

12

T
he 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.