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.”