Her Father Healed a Boy’s Dead Legs With Warm Water and Herbs — Twenty-Eight Years Later, She Knelt on the Floor of a Ranch She Didn’t Know Was Hers and Did It Again

The first was a freighter thrown from his wagon on a washed-out road. The fall had done something to his lower back. He arrived at the Voss property on a borrowed cart, unable to feel his legs. Two doctors had already told him there was nothing to be done. Her father worked on that man’s feet and legs for six weeks, every other afternoon. The man walked again before the end of the second month. Not easily, not without pain, but he walked.

The second was a boy of seven who had fallen from a barn loft and landed badly. He had no feeling from the knee down on both sides. Her father worked on him for nearly three months. The boy walked with a slight drag of the right foot for the rest of his life. But he walked. He came back to see Ezekiah twice a year until the day her father died.

Ren had asked her father once what made it work.

The spine can be shocked without being broken, he said. When it is shocked, the nerves go quiet. The body forgets how to send the signal. What we do is remind it. Warm water, the right herbs, pressure in the right places. We are not fixing anything. We are reminding the body what it already knows how to do. We just keep asking it until it remembers.

She was fourteen when he told her that. She had thought about it many times since.

Her father died three winters ago — a pneumonia that settled into his chest in November and did not leave. He was gone before February. He was sixty-one years old.

His brothers arrived from the eastern territory within three weeks of the burial. Her uncle Cyrus came first, the eldest, with a county clerk he had dealt with before. Cyrus had never cared much for Ezekiah’s way of doing things. But he cared very much for the land and the cattle and the account balance that Ezekiah had kept carefully in his neat, precise hand.

Ren was twenty-eight years old, unmarried, and of mixed heritage in a frontier county that did not extend equal legal weight to those circumstances. She had no white husband to speak for her. She had no male relative willing to stand for her. The land office clerk in Grover’s Creek looked past her left ear when she spoke and addressed his responses to the wall. She was off the property in thirty days.

She tried twice more over the following year to file a formal challenge. The first attempt was dismissed without being entered. The second time she was told to leave the building before she finished speaking.

She left.

After that, she walked. She found work where she could — washing shirts for a logging camp, cooking for a road-building crew, laundering linens for a hotel in a cattle town seventy miles south until the owner’s wife decided she was uncomfortable with the arrangement and let Ren go without the last week’s wages.