House of Mercy (46 page)

A pattering of paws on the undergrowth announced the arrival of five adolescent wolves, neither pups nor fully grown. They leaped over Beth’s extended legs and joined their mother’s investigation of Rose, rising to place their front paws against her thighs.

“Get them off.” Rose pulled her hands and elbows up toward her shoulders.

“People pay money for this kind of experience,” Wally said.

“I don’t care!” Rose was moving backward.

“At least stand still,” Wally said. “Garner! Talk some sense into your daughter.”

“She’s got plenty of her own,” Garner said.

“But these wolves need—Hey! I remembered your name.” Wally reached out to touch Garner’s arm. “
And
that you’re her dad. Did you notice that?” he asked Beth.

One of the young wolves tired of Rose and dashed away, ducking behind Garner and the Apache plume and into the hole where the lockbox was hidden.

Beth’s lips parted in surprise. “It’s a den,” she said.

“For the pack,” Wally said, looking at her.

“A pack of endangered species.” Garner nodded knowingly. “If that doesn’t put a kink in Levi’s plans to develop this property, I don’t know what will.”

He started chuckling, and Beth’s smile reached all the way up to her ears. The other wolves trotted into their home, except for the female, who sat down in front of Rose’s feet like a guard dog. Rose eyed her warily, all the tension still in her shoulders.

“How can you be
happy
about something like that?” Rose demanded.

“Mom, a pack of gray wolves on our land!” Beth said.

“Yes! I’m imagining the nightmare of what that will mean when the cows come home for winter!” At this, Garner’s amusement became a belly laugh.

Beth said, “Mercy won’t touch them. And if we can keep Levi from harming the pack—”

“He won’t be able to sell the land, yes, I see that. So tell me, if Sam Johnson won’t buy it, how will we get out of our financial scrape?”

No one had an answer for that.

“These wolves aren’t the same as money,” her mother went on.

“Maybe they’re something better,” Beth said.

“Better than money? What do you—” Rose gasped and put her hand on her throat. “Stars! He’s huge!”

Beth followed her mother’s gaze and discovered Mercy, who had silently arrived within arm’s reach of Beth. She placed her hand on his head between his ears. He twisted his neck to nuzzle her palm.

“Beth, don’t touch it,” Rose whispered.

Garner’s laughter became an outright fit of gasping.

“Is that funny to you?” Rose said to her father, though her fearful eyes stayed on the wolf. “He’ll eat us alive.” Except for the movement of her lips, Rose was petrified. Mercy sauntered toward her and bumped up against the female, who looked up briefly at Rose and then followed his urging into the den.

Rose put her hand on her forehead and closed her eyes. “What is happening here?” she murmured. “Why isn’t anything ever simple?”

“If we had the answer to that, we could get rich off it,” Beth said. Rose frowned. Beth got off the ground and went to her mother, then hugged her stiff and frustrated form. “Mom, only God knows what’s going to happen to the Blazing B in the next year and a half,” Beth said. “But no matter what happens, he’ll take care of us.” Her eyes locked on her grandfather’s. They overflowed with tears of hilarity, and he wiped them off his cheeks.

“God is good,” he said.

“Yes,” Beth echoed. “God is good.”

“You’ve all gone crazy,” Rose accused.

Wally said, “Bananas!”

Everyone stared at him.

He beamed at Beth. “I had bananas for breakfast.”

42

L
ater that evening, as the last rays of summer sun were slipping behind the San Juans, Beth went to the horse pasture with an apple for her father's horse Temuche. The sorrel gelding ate the juicy fruit with a great deal of chomping and then pushed at her hands looking for more treats.

“I think Hastings was holding out on me about the wolf pack,” she confided “I think that's why he didn’t flinch when Mercy saved us from the cougar.”

Temuche pawed the dirt once.

“Were you in on the secrecy too? What else do I need to know, old fellow?”

He pawed the earth another time, and something in the ground caught Beth’s eye.

The paw prints of a wolf.

Temuche didn’t seem at all troubled by the tracks cutting through their feeding ground. None of the other horses did either. Maybe the horses recognized Mercy for his true self. During her journey back to the Blazing B, Beth had decided that the appearance of that wolf was a supernatural revelation of God’s glory in one of the most natural expressions on earth: a wild animal returning to the home where he had once been driven out. Without anything but hope to give her confidence, she saw a promise in the family’s discovery of the wolves’ den—a promise that even if the Borzois were driven off this land, someday they would be allowed to return.

She followed the tracks and quickly realized that the trail was headed for the barn. The side door was wide open, and the prints headed directly inside.

The interior lights had been left on and were spilling out into the night sky. Beth rushed in.

“Mercy?” she whispered.

She heard a rustling in the tack room and moved toward it first, and as she rounded the doorway she surprised Jacob Davis, who was standing under the bare bulb of the little tack room, looking down at the corner where his empty saddle rack protruded from the rough wood wall.

He startled when she barged in, which startled her. They both stood there for a minute, she with her hand over her heart, waiting for it to settle. Jacob ran his hand through his hair and laughed lightly.

“You snuck up on me,” he said.

“Sorry. I didn’t expect anyone here right now.”

“Me neither.”

“What are you doing?” She took a few steps into the room and noted that Mercy’s paw prints crossed the dusty floor and went straight into the corner where Mathilde’s saddle should have been hanging. There was just one set of prints headed in one direction. They led to the wall and seemed to disappear into the saddle rack itself. She couldn’t stop staring at it and suddenly wished that she wasn’t here, in this room with those prints and this man and that empty rack on the wall.

He said, “Do these mysterious wolf friends of yours walk through walls?”

“Mercy opened a door by himself once, but walls—I don’t think he walks through walls.”

“Huh.” The response was half impressed, half skeptical. Jacob crossed his arms and joined her in staring at the corner where the prints stopped so inexplicably.

“Where do you think he went?”

“He goes wherever he wants,” she says.

“Maybe you can tell me more about him.”

Beth nodded but didn’t know where to start.

Jacob kept his eyes on the empty rack and said, “I was going to ask if you’d mind me tagging along when you and your grandfather take the car back to Burnt Rock. I can drive the trailer for Hastings. I’d like to hear the whole story.”

“It’s a pretty long story,” she said.

“If the drive’s not long enough for it, we can find something else to do until you tell it all. However long it takes.”

“Okay,” she said.

He said, “It took guts to do what you did. Going after your grandfather like that.”

“Nothing turned out the way I wanted it to,” she said.

“In my experience it almost never does. But do you regret what happened?”

“No,” Beth said. She didn’t even have to think about it.

He took a deep breath. “Many times everything comes out better.”

“Even when we don’t get what we want?” she said, suddenly needing to know he agreed with her view.

“
Especially
when we don’t get what we want. Not always, but I mean, what do we know about what we really need?”

Beth laughed. He was looking at her with a serious expression, and her laughter seemed inappropriate. She cleared her throat.

“Well, who knew I had guts, huh?”

“Oh, I’ve always known it.”

“You have, have you?”

“Yes, ever since the night when you turned that calf around inside its mother, because the vet couldn’t get here through the snow.”

The memory came back to Beth like a rush of pleasure. “I forgot about that. A little something I thought I could do just because I’d read James Herriot’s books. When was that?”

“The coldest February night in a decade.”

“I was like, what?”

“Fourteen,” he said, and she was startled by the swiftness of his memory. He finally turned away from the saddle rack and faced her. He held up his big hands and turned them over. “You were the only one with hands small enough to fit through that cow’s narrowness. You didn’t even wrinkle up your nose.”

“You coached me, if I remember right. Mr. College Grad, Expert on the Herd.”

“You didn’t need much coaching.”

He was regarding her with a look of admiration that made her uncomfortable. Her heart was thumping harder than it needed to for a person just standing around.

“I thought you were angry with me then,” she said.

His admiration turned to surprise. “Why would I have been angry? You were a crazy success.”

“I don’t know. I was so happy—that calf, staggering around alive because I’d pulled it out. But you didn’t have much to say about it. You kind of wandered off. I just thought I’d done something wrong but you didn’t want to say so, me being your boss’s daughter and all that.”

Jacob smiled then. “Oh. That.”

“Oh that what?”

Now his face reddened, she could see it clearly even under this wicked incandescent glare, and his embarrassment so embarrassed her that she didn’t dare press him to explain. She tried to rescue him from the awkwardness she’d caused.

“Mom said she’s asked you to take on some of Dad’s old duties. Congratulations. You are so right for that job.”

“I guess Levi didn’t want it.”

“That would be an understatement.” She pushed her fingers into her pockets.

“What do you think he’s going to do?” Jacob asked.

“Look for a way around those wolves.” Beth sighed. “I feel sad for him.”

“One day at a time, Beth. You never can tell how God can turn a thing around. Or a person.”

“This is true.” She was reminded of God’s promise to heal her family. Did the promise include Levi? There were so many questions unanswered still.

“I’m sorry you won’t get to attend vet school as soon as you’d planned,” he said.

“Me too.”

“But I’m also glad you’re staying here.”

She liked the sound of his voice, the meaning of his words.

“I’m glad you’re glad.”

That awkwardness between them was back again. It could only be that tension rooted in the wrong that she’d done. She hated that it was there, preventing them from being the friends they were. And because it seemed that the only way around it was to go directly through it, Beth said the only thing to pop into her head, which was probably not the best thing she could have picked:

“I learned a thing or two about your saddle while I was up in Burnt Rock.”

Jacob cleared his throat and glanced back at the vacancy where it should have been. This simple motion filled her with a great need to leave the room, to step away from Jacob’s closeness and from the discomfort of the choice that she couldn’t undo, even though her sin had been redeemed. Mostly redeemed. She turned away and started to walk out. She might as well get this whole thing over with.

“You said you were going to tell me what I owe you for it,” she said over her shoulder.

She heard him following her out of the tack room and out of the barn and into the fresh air, where she could breathe a little more easily. She went to the metal corral gates and propped her foot on the bottom rail. He came with her but kept enough space for a horse between them.

She refused to fill the silence this time.

After a few beats he said, “When we were here that day and you were hosing down Gert, you asked me why I came back here after I finished school,” he said.

Beth tried to think of how that conversation connected to his missing saddle.

He said, “I just figured there wasn’t any place I’d rather be while I waited for you to grow up.”

His words were like eyeglasses that instantly sharpened a fuzzy perspective. Their history took on a new light: his lack of girlfriends since that February, his aloof but brotherly treatment of her, his outspoken confidence in her abilities. She bowed her head to the rail and began to laugh softly. It was amazement running through her now, stronger than any guilt or regret or fear. “Really?”

He wrapped his fingers around the corral rail and nodded once.

“You are a patient man, Jacob Davis.”

“Yes, ma’am.” His smile was cockeyed and endearing.