Welcome to Paradise (21 page)

Gabe glanced up at the sight of the five women coming wearily back across the Clearing to join Hank on the bench. His eyes flew, as always, to Mira. He saw the blood staining her apron and was alarmed for a moment, until he realized that the rest of the women, except Maria-Elena, looked the same.

“Looks like a rough one,” Stanley grunted, working with Kevin to lift a top rail into place near the spot where Gabe was digging yet another posthole. They’d dug the holes on the first twelve-foot side together, then settled that Gabe, the strongest of them, would dig the remainder, while Stanley and Kevin worked to set and tamp the posts, fasten the rails in place.

“Yeah,” Gabe agreed, reaching down for his jar of water and taking a swig. “We know who won?”

“Arcadia,” Stanley said grimly. “Cliff just told us.
But only by 15 points.
And judging by the looks of them,” he nodded in the direction of the other homestead’s pigpen, “we’ve got this. Long as we keep it up. You want me to spell you some on that?”

“Nope. I’m good.” Gabe looked at Stanley’s shirt, the huge sweat-soaked patches on the back, under the arms, and knew his own looked the same. But Stanley was almost thirty-five years older than he was, and the day was hot. “You’re drinking enough, right?” he cautioned. “You get dehydrated, we’ll lose for sure.”

“Yeah, Doc,” Stanley grinned back tiredly. “I’m drinking. You just keep digging. Don’t worry about your girl. We’ll win it for her.”

“All righty, then.” John stood in front of the bench where the six men sprawled, dirty and exhausted, an hour and a half later. “We’ve got us two pens here, all right. Let’s talk about how you did.”

He walked to Paradise’s pen first. “Stanley,” he began. “Want to tell me why you decided to put your rails on the inside of the posts, instead of the outside like Arcadia did? What made you choose to do that?”

 
“Thought a
pig’d
be less likely to push the posts over that way,” Stanley answered, wiping his handkerchief over the back of his neck, wet now from the pitcher of water he’d poured over himself.

“And that was a good thought,” John said approvingly. “Get a 400-pound sow shoving up against those posts, she’ll push ’
em
right down. That’s 10 points from Arcadia, putting the rails on the outside.”

“What?” Scott exploded. “Nobody ever told us that!”

John looked at him coldly. “I have a pretty good recollection of talking about building fence with you all. If you weren’t listening to everything I said, thought you knew it all already, guess that’s your look-out.”

“Now,” he went on, “what about the latch on the gate here? Now that, Arcadia, you
did
put on the inside. What was your thinking on that?”

“That you’d care more about getting out fast than getting in fast,” Scott said proudly. “In case there was any trouble.”

“Uh-huh,” John said. “Only problem with that is, pig’s
smarter’n
a dog. She can figure out how to lift that latch in no time. Now she doesn’t even have to push over the posts. She can just
open that gate up
,
walk right on out
. That’s another 10 points from Arcadia. Ten more points gone for being second, and another five for being second by a country mile, and we’ve got . . . Paradise winning by 35 points,” he finished.

“And that means,” Cliff said, “since Arcadia won the women’s challenge by 15 points, that Paradise wins today by 20 points. And that I’ll see all of you here tomorrow night, when Paradise will be doing the talking once again.”

“And I know you’re all pretty hot and tired after all that,” he went on over the sounds of celebration on the Paradise side, the glum silence from Arcadia. “Probably don’t feel much like cooking dinner tonight, do you?”

“Nope,” Rachel agreed with a sigh. “Not even chicken.”

“Well, I’ve got good news for you,” Cliff said. “You don’t have to. Go home and get cleaned up, take care of your animals, and come on back here. You’re going to get the best dinner you’ve had yet out here tonight, and a surprise too.”

“What about our chickens, though?” Rachel asked practically. “After all that work, we’d better get to eat them.”

“Already in the freezer,” Cliff promised. “We’ll give them to you last thing tonight so you can cook them for dinner tomorrow. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, though, to put them in the
springbox
until you’re ready to do that. Nobody’s died on
America Alive
yet, though you’ve made some pretty good attempts at it. We’d like to keep it that way.”

The first thing they noticed was the smoke.

“Barbecue,” Stanley said appreciatively. And sure enough, the long table set up in front of the kitchen area wasn’t the only thing that had changed when they returned to the Clearing a few hours later. Two huge barbecues were now pouring smoke into the late-afternoon sky, manned by two men, while two women moved between kitchen and table. The men’s jeans and long-sleeved shirts weren’t much different from the homesteaders’ own attire, but their coloring was impossible to mistake.

“I wondered about this,” Gabe said. “If they were ever going to talk about the original inhabitants. About time, too.”

He broke off then to greet Alec, nodding to the rest of the Arcadia group. Scott, he saw, stayed near Lupe as she greeted her daughter with a warm hug.

“Yeah,” Alec said, following the direction of his gaze and reading his thoughts perfectly, as always. “The only one softhearted enough to give him the time of day at this point.
I have to say
,
sorry you won
. Because having him around another week is going to be a killer. And I’m guessing you aren’t going to be voting Mira out tomorrow.”

“Nope,” Gabe confirmed as they walked toward their dinner.
“Not hardly.
”

“Welcome,” Cliff said when they were all seated around the long table. “I promised a good dinner tonight, didn’t I? Fresh salmon, to be exact, graciously provided by members of the Nez Perce tribe, who are your hosts tonight.”

Food had never tasted so good, Gabe
decided,
as their hosts served the meal and settled down to eat it with them. He was always hungry enough out here to enjoy anything put before him, but the perfectly cooked salmon fillets, so fresh they must have been caught that day, took it to a new level. Add buttery, pine nut-flecked carrots, tender roasted potatoes, and tortilla-like flatbread, and he was a happy man.

He groaned aloud when dessert was set in front of him. “Maria-Elena, I think you’ve just been given a run for your money,” he announced. “And vanilla ice cream. I think I’ve just died and gone to heaven. What kind of pie is this?” he asked the woman across from him, who’d introduced herself as Deborah.

“Huckleberry,” she smiled. “They’re ripe now. You should find some good patches up the mountain a bit from you. Have you done much exploring?”

“Not much chance,” he said ruefully. “You’ve just given me a good reason to make time, though. These are delicious.” Like blueberries, but smaller, with a tart/sweet quality all their own.

“Just watch out for the bears,” she cautioned. “They’ll be pretty interested too.”

Finally, though, the last piece of pie was consumed—by Stanley, Gabe was amused to see. Well, that had been a pretty tough challenge today. He’d eaten two pieces himself, and was starting to wonder if undoing the top button of his pants was an option.
 

“Many of you probably appreciate the irony of what you’ve experienced tonight,” Cliff said as the last plate was shoved away with a sigh of satisfaction, the last swallow of coffee drunk. “You know already, of course, that the Homestead Act was enacted to settle the open lands of the West. But of course, the land was only open because the original inhabitants had been removed. Jeff Bradford here,” he indicated the man who now rose to take a spot at the head of the table, “is a professor in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Idaho, and he’s going to give you some of that history tonight.”

“Nice,” Kevin murmured happily to Gabe’s left as he eyed the muscular build, high cheekbones, and strong nose of the man who stood now to face them, the glossy black hair cut short. “More eye candy, just for
meeee
.”

Gabe fought back a chuckle, but quickly sobered as the man began to speak.

“The spot where you’re sitting tonight, the homesteads you’re been working, everything you see around you,” he said, gesturing around in a wide circle, “was all Nez Perce land less than ten years before your group is supposed to have settled on it. Not just by tradition, but by treaty. The 1855 Treaty of Walla Walla assured us over seven million acres, and gave us hunting and fishing rights on the rest of our ancestral lands, the lands we ceded then to the government.”

“But less than twenty-five years later,” he went on, “the U.S. government decided that wasn’t enough.
That they wanted everything.
So they broke their treaty, and told us to get out. Told us they were taking our land, and we were moving to the reservation.”

“Right,” Gabe heard from several seats down. “Now it starts. Of course.” Scott. Who else?

He saw Deborah stiffen, felt the uncomfortable shift in Mira’s posture to his right, even as Kevin murmured in his ear, “He’s not sure he’s nailed that Most Unpopular Contestant title. He’s going for the gold.”

“Excuse me?” Jeff asked, looking down the table at Scott, an expression of polite interest on his handsome face.

“I know all this is the politically correct viewpoint,” Scott said. “And that we’re supposed to buy into it now, no questions asked. I’m not denying that abuses took place, but I’ve never seen how a tribe could have claimed to own some huge swath of property, just because they’d camped on it occasionally. The whole basis for the Homestead Act was that you had to improve the land, be doing something with it,
be
settled
on it, for it to become yours. That concept, in fact, is firmly established in English common law, the basis of our legal system. What would you expect any government to do, especially back then? Isn’t it a social good, and simple economics, to put the land to its highest use?”

“You got a car?” Jeff asked him.

“What?” Scott stared at him. “What does that have to do with it?”

“You got a car?” Jeff asked again.

“Yes. A BMW,” Scott finally answered.

Jeff’s mouth twisted a little at that. “Well, I’ve got a higher use for your BMW. April here’s a visiting nurse,” he said, nodding at the woman a few seats down. “Her car just broke down, and she needs a new one. Public health nurse versus what, lawyer?” He caught the nods and grins of the others. “I’d call that a no-brainer social good, right there.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Scott said stiffly.

“Nope, it’s not. But if I were holding a shotgun to your head while I asked for the keys, we could get a little closer,” Jeff decided.

“But back to my story,” he went on calmly, leaving Gabe sure that he’d encountered this argument before. “Suddenly the Treaty was gone, and we were supposed to march ourselves off to the res.
Because the U.S. government had a
higher use
for our land.
But not everyone was willing to go. Eight hundred men, women, and children took off, led by Chief Joseph, to join Sitting Bull and some of the other Lakota Sioux in Canada. They traveled over a thousand miles, across four states and multiple mountain ranges, pursued the whole way by two thousand U.S. soldiers.
 
Two hundred Nez Perce warriors held off or defeated those soldiers, ten times their number, in eighteen battles.”

“But they didn’t make it, all the same,” he finished. “Chief Joseph was finally forced to surrender, along with the rest of the survivors. They were only forty miles short of the Canadian border.
His surrender speech is remembered today by every Nez Perce
. You might want to think about this, while you’re settling your land.”

 
He quoted from memory, his voice strong but not loud.

“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead.
Toohoolhoolzote
is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say, "Yes" or "No." He who led the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

“So when I hear people say this land was uninhabited, free for the claiming . . .” Jeff went on into the silence around him, “I can’t help but think, this land wasn’t free. It was paid for with the blood and the tears and the lives of my people.”

The group broke up soon after that, the homesteads preparing for the walk back in the evening twilight.

“Just a moment,” Gabe told Mira. He found Alec by his side as he walked over to talk to Jeff.

“Thanks for that,” he told the other man after introducing himself and Alec. “Don’t judge us all by that one . . . bad apple. The rest of us appreciated it. The story, not the food,” he clarified. “Although the food was fantastic too,” he added with a grin.

“You got a little Indian in you, the two of you?” Jeff asked, looking from one to the other. “I see it in you, mostly,” he told Gabe. “Not so much him.”

“We had a Cherokee great-grandmother,” Gabe confirmed. “Oklahoma, I guess, back in the day. So we’re, what, an eighth.”

“Enough to be enrolled in the tribe,” Jeff said with a wry smile. “If you want all the fabulous benefits.”

“Enough to know the story, anyway,” Alec said. “The Trail of Tears. Not so different from what you talked about tonight.”

“Except that a lot more died,” Jeff agreed soberly. “No shortage of sad stories, is there? All along the way.”

“If you guys want to vote Scott off tomorrow,” Mira told the others, the day’s emotional and physical toll weighing on her like a suffocating blanket as the quiet group walked back to Paradise, “I’ll go.”

“You’re not responsible for the ignorant things he says,” Zara said firmly. “You weren’t before, and you sure as hell aren’t now.”

“How could I have gone out with him, though?” Mira asked in anguished bewilderment. “How could I not have seen what he was really like?”

“Well, why do you think?” Zara asked.

Mira thought a moment. “Because he didn’t show it, I guess, early on. He just seemed confident, and strong, and self-assured. And I admired that, at the time. I didn’t see the . . . the mean side. Or I didn’t recognize it.”

“Yep,” Zara said. “That would be it. Bet he was a dreamboat when you were first dating. They’re different when they’re trying to impress you.”

“Yeah,” Mira agreed with a sigh. “It still took me way too long to wake up. But at least,” she went on more strongly, “I
did
wake up. And at least now I’m making more informed decisions.”

“Because Gabe hasn’t been trying to impress you,” Kevin said dryly. “Yeah, right.”

“Hey,” Gabe protested. “Way to cut a man down.”

“Nothing wrong with trying to be a better man for a woman’s sake,” Stanley put in. “If it wasn’t for that, we’d all still be living in caves.”