The pair moved quickly to follow the woman inside.
Hank’s voice was flowing in the theatrical manner so familiar to Garner. He told exciting anecdotes of other visitors who had come to this site and experienced deliverance from all kinds of ailments, be they of body or soul. People of all faiths had experienced the love of God in whatever manner was most meaningful to them, and this love was available to all.
The woman in green stood in the aisle listening to his words, enraptured. She began to sway, but Garner couldn’t reach her before she collapsed on the floor and finally lost hold of her hat.
When her whole body went into terrible, non-spiritual convulsions, the teenage smart-aleck with a chain through his nose wondered aloud what a tabloid might pay him for exclusive photos of this miracle, and his friend suggested a YouTube video might be more lucrative.
The mortified parents dragged them by fistfuls of T-shirts out of the sanctuary.
Trey knelt beside the woman and asked if anyone present was a doctor.
“I’ll fetch Cat,” Garner said, and he hurried out through a rear door where he knew he could find a phone.
20
Beth’s path to Garner started in the family graveyard.
She wasn’t looking for him when she went there with Danny to clear rocks from the site that would be hollowed for their father’s coffin. She expected to find only Levi there, working and cursing her for not coming sooner.
Danny walked along beside her. He had spoken less than a paragraph’s worth of words, big or small, since their father’s death. He didn’t speak to her now either, but his silence toward Beth was quite different from her mother’s and Levi’s, which felt more like a shunning. Though Danny had given up expressions of physical affection—hugging, kissing, even wrestling—back when he was ten or eleven, today he grabbed hold of his big sister’s hand and held on to it until they reached the cemetery.
Every step on her injured foot felt like a walk across inhospitable ground, stabbing, stabbing. The glue held her cut together and showed no sign of infection, and yet the pain reminded her that she had no legitimate role in this land that couldn’t abide foolishness.
Danny released Beth’s fingers as they passed between two boulders, the closest thing the cemetery had to an entrance.
“It’s just wrong to put someone you love in a hole,” Danny said. “I mean, I get it, the whole dust-to-dust thing, but still, it’s just wrong.”
The private cemetery was the only disordered spot in the expanse of the Blazing B. When it came time for them to go, family members picked their sites under the shelter of mature Wasatch maple trees, whose leaves would turn fiery red in the fall. It was for these trees that the original Borzois had named the ranch. The dead inserted themselves between or beside (and in a few cases, as far away as possible from) other long-gone family members. There were no neat rows of markers here, but a gathering of marble slabs and arched granite headstones and metal crosses as eclectic as the family personalities.
Rusty wire on stakes, and sometimes short garden fences—here a white picket, there a decorative black plastic—marked the coffin locations so that no errors would be made in digging. The siblings’ grandfather was here, and their great-grandfather, and the wives and children, and some of the aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, first and second and third cousins. That is, the ones who had chosen the ranching life over an easier one. A few beloved employees had also earned spots on these history-rich acres.
Abel Borzoi had requested a spot next to the tiny headstone of Beth’s unnamed sister, where there was also room for Rose.
Beth, like her brothers, had been born at the Blazing B into the hands of their mother’s midwife. According to the family stories, Rose stood when she delivered her babies, letting the strength of her legs, gravity, and women’s intuition do the work.
Two years after Levi was born, Rose and Abel lost the child who would have been an older sister to Beth. Not to complications during delivery, but to a kick from a frantic cow who’d been separated from her calf. Rose had been in her second trimester. After a painful delivery, also at their home, the preterm girl had been placed in the ground, where she waited for her parents to tuck themselves around her.