Ivy Takes Care Page 3

  Ivy left the stable and went to a pine tree behind the Pratts’ house. Out of a knot in the curled and prickly bark she took the spare house key off a rusty nail, where it was hidden.

  The key worked perfectly in the kitchen door. Ivy found the icebox with no trouble. She held her breath and, joy of joys, there was a box of eggs with half a dozen still left. They’d go bad by the time the Pratts came home. She grabbed the box.

  Ivy locked up and double-checked the door before she headed out to the stable. Without showing her face to the fox or making any noise she could help, she squatted down and rolled each egg into the stall so it ended up near the fox’s tail. She followed this up with a dish of water, then left the stable. As she straddled her bike, Ivy paused to listen. She thought she could hear the crunch of an eggshell. All the while, the loopy, jazzy Music from the Stars serenaded both Chestnut and the stranger from the mountains with her tiny, hungry family.

  The Red Star Ranch was not a fancy dude ranch like some of the big spreads in Nevada. It was just a workaday ranch that took on four guests at one time. All of the guests spent exactly six weeks on the ranch in their own little wooden cottage. Each had a bedroom with a single cot, an easy chair, a bathroom with a tin shower stall, and a front porch with a light that collected moths of all varieties. There were screens on the windows, and the towels were changed by Cora Butterworth once a week.

  After six weeks, the guests went home, each of them with a Carson City judge’s signed affidavit saying they had lived in Nevada for the required time. By the time they were home, they were no longer married to the person they’d been married to before they came. In 1949, Nevada, alone in the other forty-seven states, was the Divorce State.

  But Ivy didn’t know any classmates whose parents were divorced or who gambled good money down the drain in the slot machines. She noticed that the divorcing guests all seemed to come from places like New York City or Dallas or Miami. Ivy didn’t think they were bad people. A lot of them were funny and nice. She guessed they had just made mistakes, and so they came to Nevada to unmake them. And while they were at the ranch, there wasn’t a whole lot for them to do except go to the casinos, enjoy the mountain scenery from a saddle, and eat Ivy’s mother’s good cooking.

  The guests seemed not to be members of the Clean Plate Club like Ivy and Billy Joe’s families. At dinnertime, they left drumsticks uneaten, steak half-finished, beans in a pile at the edge of the plate. Almost all of these leavings went to the two ranch dogs, Hoover and Coover, who waited out on the porch, thumping their tails, anticipating their treats.

  “You have to share now!” Ivy told Hoover and Coover the night she’d discovered the fox. She took some bones and chicken wings and baked potatoes from the dogs’ dishes, wrapping the best bits of meat in waxed paper. All for a wild creature and six furry red babies in a horse stall, a couple of miles over the mountain.

  Then she looked up inflammation in The Home Vet and saw that the remedy for most pets was a baby aspirin. There were plenty of aspirin in the medicine closet. She started slipping one quarter of an aspirin a day into a steak rind or a chicken morsel for the fox, so the swelling in her foot would heal.

  One afternoon, Billy Joe saw Ivy putting some waxed-paper-wrapped meat in her bike basket. She had wrapped the T-bone in the paper, sealing it with Scotch tape, neat as a butcher’s package.

  “Where are you taking that meat?” he asked from behind one of the wooden pillars on the porch.

  “Trouble trouble, and trouble will trouble you, Billy Joe,” said Ivy.

  Billy Joe paused a beat. Ivy knew that he knew that she would never answer him. So he got more personal.

  “Where’s that fancy ring of yours, Miss Climbing Vine?”

  “I took it back to the store because I decided I didn’t like it,” she said in what she hoped was a bored grown-up voice.

  Billy Joe sashayed backward into his house with a knowing laugh. “I bet it was for your buddy back East at that camp of hers! I haven’t seen any postcards from Camp Pellagra yet this summer, and I pick up all the mail every day!” he teased.

  That hurt because it was true. Ivy had not heard from Annie yet. “Shut up, Billy Joe,” said Ivy. “And it’s Allegro, not Pellagra!” Was there no limit to his busybodyness?

  Ivy biked to the Pratts’ place with the small sting still inside her. It started to thunderstorm, so first Ivy brought Chestnut in from the rain. Then she tossed the leftover T-bone to the fox mother, whose foot looked worse today. She limped over to the piece of meat, and her eyes did not look bright. The kits cried around her.

  “I’m worried about you, Mama Fox,” said Ivy. “We can’t have you leaving those kits hungry!”

  Suddenly Ivy heard truck tires crunch into the stable yard, then the slam of a door. Dashing into the barn, rain pouring from the rim of his ten-gallon hat as if it were a gutter spout, was Dr. Rinaldi. Dr. Rinaldi had known Ivy from his visits to the Red Star Ranch since she was knee-high. The vet shook off the rainwater, smiled, and put a hand on Ivy’s shoulder.

  “I promised Martha Pratt I’d look in on you now and then,” he said. “Make sure everything was running smoothly.”

  “Chestnut’s fine,” said Ivy. She did and didn’t want to tell him about the foxes. Most people did not believe in nursing wild creatures.

  The vet pulled Chestnut’s ear affectionately and gave him a once-over. “Everything looks shipshape,” he said, eyes on the clean stall and the neat stable.

  “Since you’re here, Dr. Rinaldi,” said Ivy, “could you look at Chestnut’s front right leg? He’s had a festering horsefly bite there all week.”

  Dr. Rinaldi scrambled around in his bag and pulled out some ointment. He applied it, grumbling about horseflies being like a plague of locusts. Chestnut stamped and snorted at him.

  “You bike over here?” the vet asked.

  Ivy nodded. Then she looked up at the doctor. It was now or never. “Dr. Rinaldi, can I ask you something?”

  As if on cue, a soft cry came from the spare stall at the back of the barn. Dr. Rinaldi cocked his head and looked at Ivy. Then he sauntered over to the spare stall and took a long look inside.

  “Oh, my stars,” he said.

  “It’s wild critters,” said Ivy. “I know I shouldn’t feed ’em, but she’s doing poorly and the kits are hungry.”

  Dr. Rinaldi’s eyes flickered from Ivy to the foxes and back again, taking it all in. “Mama’s got an infected front pad,” he said. “She won’t make it without help.”

  “I know,” said Ivy. “I’ve been giving her aspirins in scrap food.”

  Dr. Rinaldi strolled thoughtfully to the tack room and took down a three-inch-wide saddle girth from a peg. Then he opened his medical bag. “First we’ll need a tranquilizer,” he said. He prepared a needle and gave it to Ivy. “Want to give the injection?” he asked. Ivy had never held a shot needle in her life.

  “Now, you gotta move quick while I hold her down,” he said. He opened the stall to the harsh, scratching growl of the mother fox. Lightning fast, he drove the kits into a corner and threw himself over the fox’s body, pinning her down across the head and shoulders with the hard leather girth. The kits mewed and scattered.

  “Shoot her in the rump!” he instructed Ivy. “Right there on the larger muscle. Quick, now!”

  Ivy felt a rush of blood to her head. With his legs, Dr. Rinaldi protected Ivy against the fox’s flailing rear paws with their razor-sharp nails. Aiming at the silky haunch, she plunged the needle, releasing its contents into the fox’s body. Within seconds, the animal relaxed and went quiet.

  Dr. Rinaldi examined the fox’s front paw. With a tweezer, he pincered out a spike of rusty barbed wire. Then he cleaned the foot and took out another hypodermic. “Antibiotic. You want to do another?” he asked Ivy.

  She nodded.

  This time Dr. Rinaldi showed Ivy how to prick the needle into the rubber top of the medicine vial and draw the medicine into the glass. Then he showed her how to c
heck the full needle for air bubbles and get rid of them by popping it with her finger.

  “Here is the muscle,” he said, placing Ivy’s fingers on the correct place on the fox’s withers to inject. “Here. Right here. Just shoot it in.”

  She did exactly as he instructed. The red liquid flowed easily into the sleeping fox.

  Ivy laughed. “I didn’t think I could do it,” she said. “But it was easy. I thought I was afraid of needles, but I’m not!”

  “You know something, Ivy?” said Dr. Rinaldi. “You’re good at this.”

  “Good at it?” asked Ivy.

  “You’ve got instinctive hands and a way with animals,” said Dr. Rinaldi. “Those are things a person is born with. You can’t learn them. Ever since you brought that half-dead rabbit for me to fix when you were four years old, I said to myself, that girl’s got good hands, nerves of steel, heart of gold. That’s what makes a vet. Ever think about it?”

  “Being a vet, like you?”

  “Why not?” Dr. Rinaldi asked. There was no joke in his eyes. “I have no doubt in my mind that you could. Most people are driven by what other people expect. You’ve got a purpose of your own.”

  For one moment, Ivy felt everything small in her life fall away, as if she were already a vet, just like Dr. Rinaldi. Then she took a deep breath of reality.

  “If I could ever afford to go to college,” she said. “But that’s a lot of money. My folks just get by.”

  Dr. Rinaldi smiled. He began packing his medical bag, capping the glass syringes carefully so they could be sterilized and reused.

  “You’ll make it. With a little spit ’n chicken wire, same as me,” he said.

  “And you have to be smart,” added Ivy.

  The doctor laughed. “You were born bright as a tree full of owls, girl,” he said, running his hand over the silky red coat of the mother fox. She was already beginning to stir. Ivy placed the kits on the vixen’s belly, where they squirmed and drank gratefully.

  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 hungr
y 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.”