House of Mercy (22 page)

“This here is Pastor Hank,” Trey said as Hank waved and people poured off the bus with their sun hats and tote bags and hungry children. Garner quickly counted about fifteen souls. The season was winding down. A few aimed their camera phones at the post office’s weather-beaten wood sign. “Everyone in search of Miracle Mattie will want to follow him. The rest of you might want to start your Burnt Rock visit at Hank’s Hardware. While Hank’s away, the wife doles out some fantastic bargains.”

Hank guffawed as if this were the first time Trey had ever said such a thing.

A middle-aged woman dressed neatly in athletic shoes and a green tracksuit hugged her large purse to her tummy and attached herself to Hank right away. She was quiet, her eyes shaded by the visor of an overlarge sun hat. Garner noticed her because it appeared she traveled alone, which was unusual, and also because she fidgeted as if having trouble standing comfortably. She blinked hard and often.

Trey glanced at her several times as he explained where to find the nearest restrooms, when they should gather for the tour of the little mining museum, how to secure a limited saddle on the old mule train, and what time the visitors needed to be seated on the return bus if they wanted to avoid a ride back on one of those mules, which would take three days to reach the bottom of the mountain. The large-hat woman was the only one who didn’t reward Trey with a smile. Her posture was distressed. Hank kept discreetly scooting away from her; she kept not-so-discreetly matching his step and closing the gap, like a terrified child who had been refused the comfort of holding her father’s hand.

Then Trey handed the group off to Hank, and the pastor-retailer stepped out of the woman’s personal space as if he’d been freed from prison.

“This way to a great tale of signs and wonders!” he said, leading the cluster of people to a smaller bus provided by Dotti Sanders’ rafting company. “Sorry to seat you again so soon, but trust me—you’ll prefer this to the two-mile hike uphill. This way, you won’t be too tired to partake of all the blessings that await you. So if you come now with an open mind, you might leave today with a lighter heart.”

In front of Garner, a kid who had to keep hiking up his overlarge pants whispered to his buddy, “Did he say, ‘come now with an open wallet’?”

“Yes, and you’re guaranteed to leave with it lighter.” The friend smirked.

Garner stood aside and Trey joined him as they waited for the tourists to determine whether to go to church or out for coffee.

“Hey, old man,” Trey said, extending his hand in greeting.

“Hey, young pup.” Garner accepted the strong grip. “You spending your break on this sideshow today?”

Trey nodded and tipped his head toward the blinking woman. “Think I’d better keep an eye on her. She went pretty green on the way up, and it looks like she’s alone.”

“She sick?”

“I don’t know. She ignored me when I asked if she was feeling okay.”

“Women don’t like anyone to call out their weaknesses.”

“I don’t think that’s what I was doing,” Trey said. “I’ve been praying for her. And I feel the Spirit telling me she needs God’s healing touch.”

“For goodness’ sake, you didn’t tell her that, did you?”

“Of course not. I don’t proselytize on the bus. They’re a captive audience. But if someone needs help I’m not just going to leave her at the curb, because in my humble opinion, that assembly doesn’t represent anything truly Christian. It’s come so far from what it was to Mattie and Jonathan. Want to join me? There’s room on the shuttle.”

Two trips to the Sweet Assembly in one week couldn’t hurt Garner’s case before God. Money, attendance—whatever he wanted, he could have. Even if Trey was right about the place not being a legitimate church anymore.

Garner gestured in the direction of Cat’s offices. “Why don’t we take her over to Dr. Ransom’s? She’s right across the street.”

“This woman might be better off at Mathilde’s.”

Garner was taken aback. “What do you have against Cat?”

“Nothing specific. Just a gut feeling. You could try to see if the lady will go, but she’s sticking pretty close to Hank. She might have to be disappointed by him before she opens up to other options.”

Hank was waiting to board the shuttle last, and it seemed the woman was determined to do the same.

“Well, let her have that then,” Garner said. “God can heal anywhere—you believe that even more than I do.”

“True, but I’ll say it again: that place up on the hill isn’t exactly a paragon of holiness.” Trey locked up his bus while Garner waited.

“Does it matter? Jesus didn’t do any of his healing in a church, did he?”

“Or in a doctor’s office, now that I think of it.”

Garner laughed and clapped Trey on the back. “Okay, okay.”

The blinking woman in green held her hat down atop her head, though there was no breeze to blow it off, and studied the steps of the bus as if they were Mount Evans. Hank offered her a hand, and she accepted his assistance with effusive thanks.

During the bumpy, jarring two-mile ride up the mountain she stared at the floor, though the stark ridges and sharp blue skies captured the attention of everyone else. Garner and Trey sat together in the back, bumping shoulders as the shuttle hit ruts and rocks. Garner felt pretty confident that Trey was spending the journey in prayer.

As they disembarked at the path that passed under latticed shelters and into the Sweet Assembly foyer, Trey said, “Got a favor to ask you, Garner.”

“The cannabis I have is designated for legal medicinal use only—just so we’re clear.”

“You have a strange sense of humor.”

“It is from a different generation.”

“After my shift ends Saturday, I was hoping to head out for a short expedition. Want to check in on a pride of mountain lions that live up over the ridge. I’d head out before dawn Sunday, plan to be back Tuesday night. But I want to make the most of the days—any chance I can crash at your place Saturday night and Tuesday night? I can sleep on the floor, bring my own food.”

“Nonsense, I’m glad for the company. In fact, I’m having dinner with a friend Saturday night. You should join us. She said I could bring someone.”

“Sounds great. Wouldn’t happen to be at good old Dotti’s, would it?”

Garner winked at him. “Cat Ransom,” he said.

“Sweet. Tell her I’m a gluten-intolerant vegan who only eats organic macrobiotics. Maybe she’ll disinvite me.”

“I couldn’t allow it,” Garner said.

In the bright foyer of the Sweet Assembly, the solitary woman in the hat paused to regard Mathilde’s portrait, a photograph of her taken around 1911, when she was well into middle age. In fact, Garner noticed, she was about the same age as the woman, who reached out to touch Mathilde’s cheeks with her fingertips. She stood there, lost in her own mind for quite a long time, and Garner had the uncomfortable feeling that he was intruding on the woman’s private hopes in the very same way that the tourists who came here intruded on his—even if they did buy herbs at his tea shop afterward. But Garner didn’t want to be guilty of that kind of invasion. And so he turned away from her and focused on the images on the other side of the room, several photographs of a Southern Ute tribe taken in the 1920s.

These people were the reason why all the details of Mathilde’s spiritual perspective weren’t that important, Hank had once said to Garner. What was truly miraculous about Jonathan Wulff’s encounter with his grandmother’s fire pit—in Hank’s opinion—was that it eventually led to an amazing archaeological discovery: Mathilde had built her fire and scooped her ashes right on top of a Southern Ute burial ground, where a man of significant rank in his tribe had been buried along with his favorite horse, according to custom. The Ute people had graciously cooperated with Burnt Rock’s efforts to preserve the place, because their chief at the time had said that it was clear the spirit world hadn’t barred the Wulff family from its blessings.

“You know that’s how Burnt Rock got its name,” Trey said at Garner’s shoulder. He’d left the door to peer at the photograph of several men with their horses, the lineage of which they had acquired centuries earlier from Spanish explorers.

“What? How?”

“The Ute burial customs.”

“I know they killed the man’s favorite horse,” Garner said. “More than one, if he was important enough.”

“Imagine that in our celebrity-crazed culture. Can you imagine what a rock star’s memorial service would look like?”

“Young man, that is cynical and wrong.”

“I apologize. The Utes also burned down the man’s home and torched his possessions. Some of the rocks in the area still bear the scorch marks. Hence, Burnt Rock.”

“Is that so? I’ve seen those black rocks, but I didn’t know what caused it. Why did they do that?”

“It was believed he’d have more use of those things in the afterlife than his family would have in this one. There were others to provide for their needs. A community.”

“Still, that’s an unfortunate custom for the wife and kids.”

“I was thinking the horses got the worst end of the deal,” Trey said.

The woman at Mathilde’s portrait gave a little gasp as if she realized that she’d been left behind or had been pricked by an invisible pain. The dry climate might have resulted in an unexpected shock when she rubbed her fingers across the image, which she wasn’t supposed to touch. Whatever it was, she hurried into the sanctuary, hand on hat, purse on stomach, and Garner thought he saw pain line her face. She stumbled at the threshold but recovered her balance quickly and went on.

“Maybe she’s not sick at all,” Trey said. “Just odd.”

“No,” Garner said, because he recognized something wrong with the way she had stumbled, something that told him it couldn’t be blamed on a wobbly shoe or frayed carpet. “I think your first instinct was correct.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Trey said.

The pair moved quickly to follow the woman inside.

Hank’s voice was flowing in the theatrical manner so familiar to Garner. He told exciting anecdotes of other visitors who had come to this site and experienced deliverance from all kinds of ailments, be they of body or soul. People of all faiths had experienced the love of God in whatever manner was most meaningful to them, and this love was available to all.

The woman in green stood in the aisle listening to his words, enraptured. She began to sway, but Garner couldn’t reach her before she collapsed on the floor and finally lost hold of her hat.

When her whole body went into terrible, non-spiritual convulsions, the teenage smart-aleck with a chain through his nose wondered aloud what a tabloid might pay him for exclusive photos of this miracle, and his friend suggested a YouTube video might be more lucrative.

The mortified parents dragged them by fistfuls of T-shirts out of the sanctuary.

Trey knelt beside the woman and asked if anyone present was a doctor.

“I’ll fetch Cat,” Garner said, and he hurried out through a rear door where he knew he could find a phone.

20

B
eth’s path to Garner started in the family graveyard.

She wasn’t looking for him when she went there with Danny to clear rocks from the site that would be hollowed for their father’s coffin. She expected to find only Levi there, working and cursing her for not coming sooner.

Danny walked along beside her. He had spoken less than a paragraph’s worth of words, big or small, since their father’s death. He didn’t speak to her now either, but his silence toward Beth was quite different from her mother’s and Levi’s, which felt more like a shunning. Though Danny had given up expressions of physical affection—hugging, kissing, even wrestling—back when he was ten or eleven, today he grabbed hold of his big sister’s hand and held on to it until they reached the cemetery.

Every step on her injured foot felt like a walk across inhospitable ground, stabbing, stabbing. The glue held her cut together and showed no sign of infection, and yet the pain reminded her that she had no legitimate role in this land that couldn’t abide foolishness.

Danny released Beth’s fingers as they passed between two boulders, the closest thing the cemetery had to an entrance.

“It’s just wrong to put someone you love in a hole,” Danny said. “I mean, I get it, the whole dust-to-dust thing, but still, it’s just wrong.”

The private cemetery was the only disordered spot in the expanse of the Blazing B. When it came time for them to go, family members picked their sites under the shelter of mature Wasatch maple trees, whose leaves would turn fiery red in the fall. It was for these trees that the original Borzois had named the ranch. The dead inserted themselves between or beside (and in a few cases, as far away as possible from) other long-gone family members. There were no neat rows of markers here, but a gathering of marble slabs and arched granite headstones and metal crosses as eclectic as the family personalities.

Rusty wire on stakes, and sometimes short garden fences—here a white picket, there a decorative black plastic—marked the coffin locations so that no errors would be made in digging. The siblings’ grandfather was here, and their great-grandfather, and the wives and children, and some of the aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, first and second and third cousins. That is, the ones who had chosen the ranching life over an easier one. A few beloved employees had also earned spots on these history-rich acres.