House of Mercy (10 page)

The antelope’s head was on his side in the creek. Crimson ribbons of life floated away on the current. Water teased one of the animal’s eyes and fully submerged the animal’s horns, which reminded Beth of something better suited for a prehistoric beetle: dark brown and with pincer-sharp points, they rose above the head and arced together as if trying to form a heart shape. Shorter prongs, pointing forward, branched off the main antlers.

At the water’s edge, silky mud gave way under her shoes. The creek rushed the antelope’s nostrils and then fell back. He snorted but didn’t try to lift his head. Another ripple rose all the way over his jaw. The animal didn’t flinch. If the beast didn’t drown in his own blood, he would succumb to this pristine water.

He allowed her to place her hand on his throat and try to stop the bleeding. Or was too far gone to realize what she was doing. But the gash was too great for her fingers to cover. She took off the long-sleeved work shirt she wore over a tank top and pressed the fabric into the wound, feeling that her efforts were futile.

If she’d come in her truck instead of on Hastings, she could have fetched the rifle in it and ended this creature’s misery. The weapon would help her to hold the wolf at bay too. She tried to think of a way to end the antelope’s suffering without a gun or knife.

The sun fell behind the ridge before her clothes were dry. She was shivering, but the antelope was warm.

The wolf remained in hiding. A part of Beth sensed the animal lurking, waiting—for what? Nothing prevented him from demanding this feast.

It was as if the wolf had offered it to her.

Her peaceful stroking lengthened out across the antelope’s ribs and flank, heating her hands as she calmed him. She could feel the weak pulse in his veins and the gentle rise and fall of his shallow breath as she borrowed what warmth remained in him.

A breeze stirred and rattled the leaves of the alder. The animal’s suffering seemed eerily prolonged.

The antelope groaned and began to tremble.

The wind pushed hard enough to bow the tree branches at Beth’s back and disrupt the rippling creek. The air moved upstream, against its natural course, and Beth felt it like a cold breath sneaking up the legs of her jeans. In seconds, the chill cut all the way down to her bones.

The joints of Beth’s legs and hips grew heavy with a throbbing ache. She pressed against the weak antelope and buried her face into its coat while the frigid air raced up her spine and over her tense shoulders. The atmosphere sat on her, an icy weight that bent her neck and made it impossible to move.

Really impossible. When Beth realized that the sounds of the wind would prevent her ears, sharp as they were, from hearing the wolf’s stealthy approach, her mind told her body to straighten up before he tore her to shreds and got two meals for the effort of one. But when Beth tried to move her limbs and they didn’t budge, images of a wolf crouching over the back of her neck brought tears to her eyes.

A song bubbled up in her memory about a soul being thirsty for God the way a deer was thirsty for a brook. She began to hum, and the fear hung back. The muscles of her arms twitched. The muscles over the antelope’s rib cage also flickered.

And then the icy weight that seemed to sit on her head began to melt. It came apart the way an ice cube does in the sun, pooling at the base and spreading out. A sensation of liquid warmth ran down every strand of her hair and dribbled onto her back and spilled across her shoulders onto the antelope’s coat.

Beth’s mental command to her body to sit up finally connected with her muscles. She jerked up, expecting to see that the rain had started. She was entirely dry.

The animal jerked too, as if he shared Beth’s surprise, and then his whole body was rolling toward her, nearly pinning her knees. He threw his weight forward toward the creek, and Beth feared he would crush her. Though she wasn’t paralyzed any longer, her hips and legs felt heavy and thick, and the ache in her joints had spread out into a stabbing pain that followed the lines of her skeleton. She couldn’t rise.

But the antelope’s two-toed hooves missed her, and when she looked up at him again he was standing on all fours in the middle of the water. He dipped his head to take a drink.

The gash in his neck had vanished like the wolf. No dangling flaps of flesh exposing bloody muscle, no gurgling breaths. Only a pale pink inky spot stained the water where he’d been lying a moment earlier. The current erased that evidence in seconds. But her cotton shirt lay on the rocks by her knees, soaked in blood.

All sensation and function returned to her limbs, and she jumped up, her mind making gazelle-like leaps across the plains of common sense. She didn’t understand what she was seeing.

The antelope lifted his head and flicked his ears toward a movement behind Beth. She turned. Levi stood several yards behind her.

He held his rifle, which at first seemed only natural and then seemed entirely unnecessary. Unless he’d also seen the wolf. The antelope behaved as if being in the presence of an armed man was no cause for alarm.

“Where did he go?” she asked.

“Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?” There was anger in Levi’s tone. For all of Beth’s life, as she remembered it, Levi had stooped in a posture of resentment as if his spine were a frown. He seemed to regard his little sister’s birth as a conspiracy to thrust him into the demanding role of firstborn son and assassinate his privileged life as an only child. None of this had ever made sense to her. But she checked her tone.

“The wolf,” Beth said. “There was a wolf.”

“You were supposed to be home an hour ago, and we’ve all been out all day on the fences. We could use your help with all the stuff that had to be put off for that. I don’t have time to chase you down.”

“Sorry.”

“Your apologies aren’t worth much these days.” He was eyeing the pronghorn.

“That antelope was injured. I was trying to figure out . . .” She didn’t know how to explain.

Levi turned away. His truck was likely parked in the narrow flat around the creek’s bend. Beth took a sweeping look around once more for the wolf. For Hastings.

“Levi, there was a wolf here,” she called out. “I saw it. It attacked the antelope.”

“The buck looks fine to me.”

“We should keep an eye out.”

“You go ahead. I’ve got the rifle.” He turned away and headed back to wherever he’d parked.

“Seriously, Levi—”

“Seriously, you might think you can redeem your sins by meditating with the wildlife, but I don’t have time. C’mon now, or I’ll let the wolf hunt
you
.”

She took a couple of leaping steps after him, her bloody shirt wadded in her hands, trying to get off the slick bank and onto drier ground. “I’m doing everything I can to get the family off this hook,” she said.

Levi spun back to her and raised both hands in the air the way their easily exasperated mother was prone to do lately. But the rifle in his hand made him look more like an inflamed insurgent than a cattle rancher.

“It’s your hook!” he shouted. “You ought to be dangling there all alone!”

She stood up under his accusations and just nodded.

“When that judgment comes down, you’re the one who’s going to pay. I’ll make sure of it.”

“If I could take back everything, I would. I’m so sorry.”

“You’ll need a miracle.”

“Maybe God will—”

“Shut up. It was a figure of speech. There are no miracles, Beth. There’s only sweat and blood.”

“But hear me out. I’m not lying to you.” She pointed to the antelope. “I don’t know what it means, but that animal was dying, and I . . . and I . . .”

On this side of the spectacular moment, the scene looked unremarkable. Her story sounded outrageous. She was trying to find a way to put it into words that Levi could hear when he lifted the rifle to his shoulder.

“No. Levi.”

He leveled the sight at the antelope’s shoulder. Air caught in Beth’s throat.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t.”

Her brother took the shot even while Beth was moving toward him and lifting her hands. She recoiled at the rifle’s great kick. She heard bones shatter and sensed the buck collapse before she could cover her ears. Under the ringing in her head she heard the body splash down. Her mouth was open to gasp or scream, but she didn’t hear herself do either.

“No miracles. See? End of story.”

She dropped to her knees, and her brother stalked off.

A rumble of thunder rolled overhead, and she felt the first raindrops on her bare arms.

As her brother’s footsteps faded, the wolf returned. The canine trotted so close to Beth that its tall shoulders brushed hers when he passed, but she hardly registered the sensation. He padded directly for the fallen pronghorn.

Shaking, frightened of what Levi might do if he saw the wolf too, Beth rose and followed her brother. And she didn’t look back when she heard the wolf finally help himself to his meal.

8

G
arner’s plans to catch a ride down the mountain as soon as the storm yielded to morning light were thwarted by the stomach flu.

He had left Cat’s office near four in the morning after warm tea and pleasant conversation, feeling reassured that he would see his long-lost daughter in due time, in the most pleasant of circumstances, which included blue skies and sunlight. All that was left of the storm by then were a few sloppy puddles that didn’t interfere with his brisk walk back home. The fresh air rejuvenated him, and he considered skipping sleep altogether.

Against such optimism, he woke on the floor of his bedroom late the following morning, unable to recall having gotten out of bed. Perhaps he had never climbed into it. He still wore yesterday’s clothes, and the odor of sickness that oozed out from the nearby bathroom was witness to events he was glad to have forgotten.

As a soldier battling liver cancer, Garner was familiar with illness, but this affliction was different. Within an hour of waking, the aches that pooled in his joints spread to his muscles and then to his stomach. He groaned aloud.

There was a pounding on his front door that matched the throbbing in his head. He wished it away. Whoever it was would have to come back later, because he was in no condition to sell tea. He didn’t even know what to advise himself to take.

He cursed under his breath when he heard the front door open anyway. This was the problem with small-town life in which everyone was more neighborly than average; there was no need to lock doors in a place where everyone looked out for each other.

An icy draft swirled into his bedroom and poked him on the floor where he lay.

“Garner?”

The voice belonged to Cat. He had a vague recollection that she’d agreed to pick him up at eleven thirty for the long drive into the valley. Was it so late already?

“What on earth happened to your kitchen window? The carpet’s soaking wet! Garner? Where are you? It’s freezing in here.”

It was terribly glaring too. He hadn’t drawn the bedroom curtains when he came in, and the east-facing window was brilliant with laser-beam sunshine that bounced off the glossy paint on his walls.

Hadn’t he told her about that window? He was sure he had.

Garner said, “Up here,” but the sounds that came out of his mouth sounded like an alien language.

Long seconds like hours passed before the doctor, who had seemed so smart until now, found him lying there in the unwelcome spotlight.

“What took you so long?” he demanded when her youthful figure materialized at his feet. Her bobbed hair from this angle looked like a tortoise shell. He thought she was frowning at him. He wasn’t sure. The glare made him squint. “Move any slower and I’ll be dead before you cross the room.”

“Oh, Garner! What happened?” Cat knelt beside him and started acting like a doctor of the most irritating variety, touching his forehead and his wrist and asking him questions with a tone and vocabulary suitable for a kindergartener. He answered her clearly, but she kept saying,
“What? What?”

“You got wax in your ears?” Garner demanded.

Doctors, of course, were not obligated to answer their patients’ questions. She rose and stepped over his body and strode to the window with such authority that her stomping boots seemed to come down right on Garner’s temples. She yanked the curtains’ cord, and the fabric obeyed the order to close.

The relief of a dim room took the edge off his annoyance.

“There will be no trip to the ranch for you today,” she said.

“The dead aren’t in a hurry,” Garner murmured.

“Abel’s not dead, Garner.”

“Yes, he is.”

“No, he’s not. I’m sorry.”

The apology confused Garner. People didn’t apologize for someone kicking death in the teeth. But on second thought, he wasn’t too pleased by the news.

Cat said, as if he hadn’t computed her meaning, “Your daughter is not a widow.”

“I heard ya.” Garner gripped his head with both hands. He thought he might throw up again. “He’s not dead, says who?”

“Says a friend of mine at the county medical examiner’s office. I called this morning.”