Ivy Takes Care (5 page)

Dr. Rinaldi watched her. “Some people are just meant to do certain things,” he said with seriousness. “You were fixed in heaven to do vet work, Ivy. Someday you will. Sure as Sunday.”

By then, the storm had cleared. Dr. Rinaldi walked out into the sunny yard, his boots making a satisfactory clopping on the cobblestones. He tossed his vet bag into the back of his pickup. The truck bed was full of cow slings, large forceps, and other mysterious equipment.

“Go on home, now. Your ma’ll have supper waiting. Cut out the aspirin. These pills are better, and throw in one of these antibiotic tablets with her hamburger every day. That critter’ll come around quick,” he said. Then he got into his truck and started the engine. It sputtered and choked to life. Out the window he said, grinning, “Now, you’re not going to tell a living soul I used an expensive antibiotic on a wild critter, are you? Your dad’d laugh me out of his barn.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” answered Ivy.

Biking home, Ivy felt the sun warm her face. She cruised up Mule Canyon hill, pedals flying with no effort at all.

The world was full of invisible powers. There was, across the state of Nevada, the power of the slot machines. Those were called one-arm bandits, and they had the power to make people drop their money into a black hole of nothingness.

There was Annie’s San Francisco tent mate. She had the power to make Annie into someone entirely other than who she’d been just the day before.

And then there was the power Ivy had discovered in Chestnut’s stable. It was the power to bring back life and to stop suffering. That power was Dr. Rinaldi’s. Maybe it could be hers, too.

When the supper dishes had been cleared and Ivy sat down to her summer reading, her mother scooted her chair over.

“Honey, your dad and I were talking,” Mrs. Coleman said softly.

Ivy waited for the direction of this wind.

“When school starts again, we want for you to keep up some to the other girls, with their nice things.”

“It’s all right, Mama,” said Ivy.

“We’re real proud of you having a job,” her mother added, looking down at her feet, taped up with special Dr. Scholl’s supports. “So, Dad and I did a little calculating last night.”

Ivy’s mother reached over to the desk and picked up an envelope from her bill-paying file.

“This is a new envelope,” her mother said. She turned it over so that Ivy could see it. The word
Ivy
was written on it in her mother’s careful, Palmer-method penmanship. “Cora’s full up with guests till November. Let’s hope they’re rich guests who tip Dad nicely and maybe leave something in the kitchen for me.”

Everything depended on tips. The guests left room tips on their pillows when they left. These were collected by Cora Butterworth. But Ivy’s dad took the guests riding into the mountains. If some New York City fellow found a nice rack of antlers for over his fireplace without having to kill a buck, her dad was likely to get a consideration at the end of the guest’s six-week stay.

During the winter months, when the guests were few, Ivy’s dad rode out on the trails, planting racks of sun-bleached antlers. If the squirrels didn’t gnaw them to pieces, he’d know exactly where to find them in the summer.

“Well, look at what we’ve got here!” he would always say, pulling up his horse. Then an excited guest would jump off Texas’s or Mirabel’s back, pull the rack of antlers out of the brush where it had been carefully posed, and struggle it onto the saddle ring, where Ivy’s dad solemnly tied it.

This was usually worth a couple of dollars, handed over at the end of the ride. Once in a while, if Ivy’s mother cooked a guest’s favorite dish just right, that guest might leave a silver dollar under their dinner plate.

With two fingers, Ivy’s mother removed and handed over a five-dollar bill.

“That’s for the ring you want, honey. Don’t want you snooted down by anybody.”

But Ivy did not take the money. She had already bought the ring for Annie and mailed it, using up the five dollars Mrs. Pratt had given her — just about half of Ivy’s entire salary for the job.

“Mama?” she asked. “How much does it cost to go to the U.?”

“The university?” Mrs. Coleman looked over her glasses at Ivy, the five dollars still in her fingers.

“I want to save for college,” Ivy said. “I want to go.”

Her mother gulped. “Why, I’d guess the U.’s more’n four hundred dollars a year for tuition and board, honey. They’ve upped it from three hundred fifty. It was in the paper last week.”

Ivy’s father had been listening while cleaning the mud from his boots over a piece of newspaper. “Doctor or lawyer?” he asked, as casually as if he were commenting on the weather.

“Vet,” said Ivy.

“Well, let’s put the five dollars back,” said Ivy’s dad, “and write a big
U
on that envelope.”

Ivy cracked open her book and threw her legs over the arm of her favorite chair. Ivy’s mother returned the bill to the envelope, put the envelope back in the desk drawer, and turned the key. In this way the future was settled.

The fox kits seemed to grow up by the day. They were playful, and their red coats shone with good health. As far as Ivy could tell, the mother fox’s foot had healed quickly. After a few evenings of treats dropped over the side of the stall, the vixen had lost her fear of Ivy, and she now padded over to catch whatever Ivy tossed in. The kits yipped happily at her arrival.

If Ivy had not been respectful of the fox mother and her wildness, she would have tried to sit with the kits and play with them for hours, but she never touched them. “It’s better if you fear people,” she told them. “People will try and kill you, so you must go back to your life in the desert.”

Two nights from the time the Pratts were to come home, Ivy pedaled on down to Chestnut’s stable. She took the pony out and performed all her night chores. Then she took half a meatball sandwich and went over to the fox’s stall, where she dropped it in, to the hungry pleasure of mother and kits alike. It was at that moment that she heard the stamping of another horse outside the stable.

Ivy froze.

She didn’t have to wonder long who it was. She smelled his bubble-gum breath over the manure pile and other stable smells.

Through the cobwebbed tack-room window, Ivy saw Billy Joe tie Texas neatly to a ring on the outdoor wall and stride into the Pratts’ stable.

“What are you doing here, Billy Joe?” asked Ivy, trying to sound casual.

“Whatcha got here?” he asked, hoisting himself onto a saddle rack and peering over the side of the stall. “Look at that! That’s five bucks, maybe more, waiting for me like fish in a barrel. There’s a five-buck-a-pelt bounty for foxes, and I could get two bucks each for those kits.”

“Leave them alone,” said Ivy. The mother fox opened her mouth like a cornered cat and chattered at Billy Joe. Tiny flecks of her angry spit glistened in the air.

Billy Joe climbed down from the saddle rack and walked over to where the Pratts’ shotgun hung on the wall.

“That’s not your property. Don’t even think about it,” said Ivy. But Billy Joe was not to be turned away.

Ivy’s heart pounded. He was going to shoot this little wild family that she had healed, fed, and so much loved. He was going to kill them, skin them, and take the pelts to the sheriff. He’d cash them in for bubble gum baseball card packs and the Roman candles he liked to set off in the mountains.

“Leave the gun alone and go home.” Ivy said, her voice rising with panic. “This is
private property
!”

But private property was not an idea that Billy Joe understood. He tried to reassure Ivy, “Oh, I’ll split the money with you, Miss Climbing Vine. Don’t worry. I’m not a piker! Fifty-fifty! We can make close to twenty bucks between us, and you can get one of those fancy sweaters that Mary Louise wears to school.”

“Billy Joe,” she said, “if you don’t get on out of here right now, I will
ruin
you!”

“Ruin me!” Billy Joe laughed. He snapped his bubble gum but did not yet reach for the gun. “And how would you go about that, Miss Climbing Vine?”

So that he would have to listen to her very carefully, Ivy whispered, “Billy Joe, do you know what
Joker!
magazine is?”

Billy Joe turned a shade of red. Everyone knew that
Joker!
was a magazine full of off-color humor. Completely and totally forbidden in the Butterworth house. “What of it?”

“You remember Mr. Cuthbert?”

Billy Joe squinted. It was hard to remember the guests’ names once they left the ranch, unless there was something special about them. “So, what about him?” asked Billy Joe.

“When Mr. Cuthbert went home, he left a whole pile of
Joker!
magazines under his bed. I found ’em and hid ’em where no one knows but me. Billy Joe, if you hurt these critters, your mother is going to find those magazines under your bed someday soon, when you least expect it. And then she’ll skin you alive for reading smut.”

“You are lying, girl!” said Billy Joe.

“Try me,” said Ivy.

Mr. Cuthbert had actually left a stash of
Time
magazines, not
Joker!
magazines, but Billy Joe couldn’t guess that. Ivy knew a thing or two about Cora Butterworth, a deacon of the Methodist church. To Cora Butterworth,
Joker!
magazine would stand about as close to the Devil’s work as ever came between two covers. Billy Joe knew it, too.

She could almost hear Billy Joe skim through the possibilities of what would happen to him if his mother found a pile of
Joker!
magazines under his bed.

Finally Billy Joe said darkly, “That’s blackmail, Ivy. Blackmail.”

“And that’s murder,” said Ivy, pointing to the gun.

Billy Joe did not linger. He walked out of the barn, untied Texas, threw the reins back over the horse’s neck, and got in the saddle. Ivy watched his every move.

“Blackmailer!” he yelled, so Ivy was sure to hear it.

She watched him until his horse made a turn at the top of Mule Canyon, so she knew for sure he intended to go home. But she also knew that life in the stable was no longer safe for her foxes. The vixen mother padded gracefully around the stall, putting her full weight on the injured foot. Her family was ready for the outside world.

Ivy opened the door of the stall wide, got the hose, and aimed a jet of water above the foxes. “Go on, now!” she yelled.

The fox mother and her kits bolted out of the stall and into the stable. Another blast of the hose sent them out into the paddock. But then they stopped. They circled and watched her, as if they might get one more piece of steak.

Ivy picked up the gun and broke open the barrel. There was a cartridge in each chamber.

“Git! Git!” she shouted at them. “Go, little family! Don’t ever come back!”

As she discharged the gun into the air, the fox mother and her kits lit out like red streaks for the mountain beyond. The last things she saw were two white tail tips disappearing behind the sagebrush.

Ivy piled up some stray cinder blocks to seal the hole where the mother fox had crawled into the stable. She ejected the used cartridge from the shotgun, then locked it and all the remaining cartridges in a drawer in the tack room. She didn’t trust Billy Joe one lick.

“Stay out there, where you belong!” she yelled after the fox family and into the distance. She knew she would never see them again.

Monday morning, Ivy woke as her alarm clock hit five a.m. She heard the train coming eastward from California. The Pratts were on that train, coming home after three weeks away.

The night before, Ivy had made sure that Chestnut would be show-ring clean, with his mane braided, his hooves oiled, and his stall clean as a whistle when the Pratts’ Pontiac turned into the drive.

Sure enough, Mrs. Pratt was thrilled to see her pony so fit and happy.

“I’ll miss Chestnut,” said Ivy.

“You may come anytime and say hello and enjoy him,” said Mrs. Pratt, taking five silver dollars and a fifty-cent piece out of her purse and giving them to Ivy.

Ivy thanked Mrs. Pratt. “I would have taken care of Chestnut for nothing!” she added.

“That’s the best kind of work, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Pratt. “The kind you’d do anyway, for nothing. Don’t spend it all in one place,” she added.

“It all goes in my college envelope,” said Ivy.

“I thought you’d say something like that,” said Mrs. Pratt. “Honey, if you are going to run a business, you should get yourself a wristwatch. Strunk’s carries a large variety of them. Here’s another five dollars. Consider it a tip. Promise you’ll get a nice watch for yourself, now?”

Ivy promised with a big smile. “You can call me anytime,” she said. “I’ll be here. And, thank you, Mrs. Pratt. I never thought I’d have a wristwatch till I graduated from high school!”

Ivy rode into downtown Carson City. She parked her bike at Strunk’s General Store and clanked down her ten new silver dollars for Mr. Strunk’s Savers’ Club. If you put a dollar in the Savers’ Club every month, Mr. Strunk gave back your twelve dollars at Christmastime and added a dollar interest, hoping you’d spend it in his store. But come Christmastime Ivy was going to withdraw her money with interest and put it all in the U. envelope.

“Well, if it isn’t Miss Moneybags!” came a voice from the end of the soda fountain. This was followed by a loud snap of gum. Who else but Billy Joe Butterworth was looking right down the soda bar at Ivy with that superior expression on his face. “Making money hand over fist! How much did you get paid?” he asked with a snort. Ivy paid Billy Joe no mind whatsoever.

On one side of Strunk’s front window was an array of Star Crazy watches. The tiny Star Crazy girl on the face of the watch smiled a movie-star smile, little jewels for eyes.

Ivy asked to try the watch on. Mr. Strunk was happy to let her try it in three different color band and jewel combinations. “I asked you a question, Miss Snoot!” said Billy Joe. “How much did those people pay you for walking that fat little horse around the paddock twice a day?”

Ivy plonked her arm down right in front of Billy Joe, who didn’t own a watch, and never would, because his mother knew he’d lose it, break it, or dunk it in the rain barrel the very first day.