Brooke stood in the dust of the county road with the paper in both hands, and for a moment I did not recognize her. She was thirty six years old, and she had worn her hair in the same ponytail since high school, but she held herself differently now, shoulders square, chin level, like her father. The deputy beside her nodded, and she walked forward to the gate. She did not look at Cole. She looked at me through the bars, over the chain and the padlock, and her eyes filled. “Mom, I am sorry it took me so long,” she said. “I found the messages on his phone last night.”
She turned the paper around so that Cole could see it. It was a protective order, issued at six that morning by a judge in Winnemucca, and it carried the raised seal of Humboldt County. Margaret Ellsworth, it read, petitioner. Cole Anthony Ellsworth, respondent. He was ordered to stay away from the ranch, to surrender any keys, phones or documents belonging to the petitioner, and to cease all contact. “I drove into town at dawn and told the judge what you did,” Brooke said. “I told her about the chain, and the pump timer. And I told her about the two hundred and thirty thousand dollars you owe to people who do not send letters.”
Cole took a step backward. The folder dropped out of his hands and spilled across the gravel, and the transfer papers fluttered in the wind like white birds. He began to say her name, then thought better of it, and looked at the deputies, and at Hank Delgado, who had climbed down from his red pickup with a pair of long bolt cutters in his hands and was walking toward the gate. “Brooke, honey, this is a misunderstanding,” Cole said. “I was only trying to help your mother.”
A two way radio hidden in a cedar chest gave one widow the weekend to bring her daughter back to the gate of the ranch in Winnemucca.
Hank cut the chain with one clean bite. It dropped to the dirt with a ringing clank, and the gate swung wide on its hinges for the first time since sunrise. He did not say a word. He only looked at me, a seventy eight year old fireman in a cap that said Humboldt Volunteer Fire, and nodded. I walked out through the gate in my slippers. The first thing I did was to put my hand against the post that Dale had set in 1974. It was warm already from the sun. “Hank, thank you,” I said. “I did exactly what Dale told me. Channel nine.” His mouth trembled. “Maggie, he would have laughed so hard,” he said.
Cole made one attempt to run. I do not think he planned it. He backed away from the deputies in the heat shimmer, toward his truck with the engine still running, and then he lunged for the open door. The second deputy, who had gone to school with Brooke, was faster. He caught him by the belt, and Cole went down across the hood, sputtering. “Sir, you are under arrest,” the deputy said. He was almost gentle about it. “You have the right to remain silent.” Cole turned his face to the side, pressed against the hot metal, and looked at me. His eyes were wet with fury and with fear. I did not look away.
When it was done, Brooke sat down in the road. She did not make a sound. She put her face between her knees and her arms around her legs, the way she had as a child after a nightmare, and she shook in the dust. I knelt down beside her, which is no small thing for a woman of my age in August, and I put my hand on her back. “Brooke Dale,” I said. “It is all right.” She lifted her head. “Mom, I wanted so much to believe he was good,” she said. “I let him take your phone. I let him take your keys. I believed him when he said you were forgetting things.” I told her I knew.
The deputies found my truck keys, my phone and the keys to the pump house in the glove box of Cole. The well timer was reset by a county electrician within the hour, and the pump came to life with a long sigh from the pipes. I stood on the porch and listened to the water run through the walls of my kitchen for the first time all week. It was the sweetest sound I ever heard. Hank and his crew carried cases of bottled water to the barn and set up a fan in my kitchen. He refused a glass of tea. “Maggie, I will take a rain check,” he said.
The money consequences were final. Cole was charged with unlawful imprisonment, extortion and attempted fraud, and the judge in Winnemucca set bail so high that he stayed where he was. The mining company, which had never been told about the chain, withdrew its offer in writing, with a letter from its general counsel that I framed. The water rights on Pole Creek were put into a trust at the courthouse, a perpetual one, in the names of Dale and Margaret Ellsworth and their descendants, and nobody would ever be able to sell them out from under the ranch.
In the name of my husband, Dale, who passed in March and who kept a radio in a cedar chest because he believed that a neighbor should always be one call away, I started the Channel Nine Fund. It pays for radios, safety checks and legal help for older ranch families in Humboldt and Pershing counties who live too far from the road. In the first year, we helped forty one households. A widow of eighty, with a face as weathered as a fence post, sat in the office and said, “I have been out there alone for nine years. I did not know that anyone would come.”
In October, on a cold bright Sunday, Brooke came up the road in her pickup with a pie on the seat and a baby blanket in her lap. She was five months pregnant, and she was glowing. She had moved back into the old foreman house on the ranch, two hundred yards from mine, with a dog and a new lease on life. We sat on the porch with our feet on the rail and watched the sun slide down the long slope of the sagebrush. After a while, she put her hand on her belly. “Mom, I would like to name him Dale,” she said. I said yes. I said it twice, to be sure she heard.