House of Mercy (29 page)

“I don’t believe the antelope lived either.”

“What?” she sputtered. “That’s your answer? Do I have a gift of healing or not, Wally? Does God work miracles through me or not? Does he even
do
miracles, or is everything arbitrary? Are good and evil just flukes? I mean . . . my
father
. This is the most unfair punishment. For one mistake.”

The rising sun behind the gambel oaks cast long shadows over her shoulders, but their dark and elegant fingers were swallowed by the light of the campfire. They couldn’t touch her companion.

“What seems like punishment might be God’s redemption,” he said.

“I’m going to go back to sleep, Wally. You’ve been no help to me at all.”

He smiled at her again. She lowered her head onto Herriot’s back as if it were a pillow.

“Will it help if I tell you how to get to Burnt Rock from here?” he said.

“I thought Mercy would lead the way.”

“No. I’ll give you a map.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“But once you reach Burnt Rock, you must follow the wolf.”

“I’ve
been
following the wolf.”

“Only very recently. Herriot figured out that part a long time before you did,” Wally said. “The time to follow the wolf is when it seems like you don’t need to anymore.”

Beth was quite ready for this dream or visitation or whatever it was to end. She had simple questions and was tired of the complicated answers.

“He’ll lead you to your grandfather,” Wally said. “He’ll protect you from the predators. There are more predators. More cougars.”

The promise of mountain lions and the sound of a spade penetrating the ground jarred Beth’s sleepy mind. She heard dirt like a waterfall pouring into a container. It was a hollow, wistful sound.

He said, “And I’ll give you one last tip.”

Beth felt this dream-like meeting slipping away beneath her heavy head. “What?”

“Take a bath before you go. Use this dirt I’m digging up for you. Mix it with the creek water. Put the mud on that burn. It’ll wash right off.”

“Sure. Whatever you say.”

“Nothing’s arbitrary,” Wally said. “No matter what you think you see.”

The second time Beth woke, the sun was higher and the towering shadow of Ash Martin was shading her tired eyes.

“Sleepin’ hard for a gal who’s drunk all the joe,” he said, lifting the empty pot off the charred remains of the fire and shaking it. Beth pushed herself up. Herriot had wandered off, and Beth’s neck was strained. The inside of her thigh felt scorched and raw.

“Wally drank it all,” she said, not expecting him to understand. “I got one sip and a bad burn.”

Ash examined the pot with renewed interest.

“You met Wally?” he asked, and Beth felt her stomach drop.

She looked around for the man she didn’t believe was real. Her hand bumped something on the ground at her side. She picked it up. It was an old coffee can topped with a red plastic lid. She peeled it back. The can held about two cups of dirt.

“You know him? Where is he?”

“Dunno. I didn’t know he was here.”

Beth’s throat was thick and dry. “I guess he just got in last night, then. Uh, how do you know him?”

“He’s an old mountain man. Lived here in the San Juans his whole life.”

“Does he travel with you?”

“Now and then, on his terms.”

Beth’s mind was whirling. “He likes his terms.”

Ash chuckled. “That he does.”

Beth stood and reached for her backpack with her free hand. She was trying to remember the details of their conversation, but the content was already elusive. In the top of her bag, poking out from the unzippered compartment, a hand-drawn line of red ink traversed her neatly folded map, and several protein bars wrapped in silver foil were tucked behind her change of clothes. She fingered the food, and it was no imagination. She thought of the dirt and the mud, and wondered if it would also be real.

“Back in a few,” she said absentmindedly, and she carried her belongings and the coffee can toward the creek, walking stiffly to prevent the denim of her jeans from chafing her inflamed skin. Riding Hastings was top on her list of things she didn’t want to do right now. But she had to get to Burnt Rock.

Ash must have noticed her limp.

“Going after some mud?” he asked.

Beth stopped and turned around. “How is it that two guys so far from civilization seem to know every little thing about me?”

“Just do whatever he told you to do,” Ash said. “Don’t ask me to explain it. Cuts, bug bites, sprains, bruises, heck—broken bones. All I know is it works every time.”

“Magic mud? Maybe you ought to bottle it. Make some extra bucks.”

“It’s not the mud that works. It’s Wally’s digging that does the job. Can’t bottle that.”

26

T
he men were right about the mud. Hidden by a dense stand of alders, Beth carefully stripped off her jeans. The hot coffee had left a bright red imprint on her thigh that looked a little bit like a hand with long fingers. The shape brought to mind Wally’s unusually lengthy digits, like a pianist’s.

She tossed her jeans onto a rock, then waded into the water that gently lapped its sides. The chill to her toes was knife-like, nerve-severing. She tipped the edge of the coffee can into the clear water and took in enough to turn the dry brown dirt into pasty goo. Water bugs skittered out of her way, and she returned to the bank as she stirred the contents with her fingers.

The mud was silky smooth when she applied it to her burn, and the chilly texture gave her immediate relief, calming down the raw discomfort. It felt so nice that she opted not to wash it off right away, but stood there at the bank letting the brownish trickle of water trace the shape of her legs and drip off the bones of her ankles. She closed her eyes and turned her face up to the warming sun, the new heat of the day mingling with the cool salve and creating peace.

This was mercy, that all the emotions that scalded her soul like boiling coffee—her grief, anxiety, and fear—could be so easily masked by a handful of mud, if only for the moment. Beth stood there, not wanting the peace to go away any sooner than it had to. She stood there until she felt the mud begin to dry and tug on her skin, and she allowed herself to imagine that the warm sun on her head was the steadying, strengthening hand of God.

Beth opened her eyes and Mercy was on the rock, stretched out atop the jeans, head resting on his front paws. It was no surprise that he could be so stealthy; the shock came that Herriot, who never before had approached Beth without a greeting, seemed to have learned his tricks. She sat beside him on her haunches, panting happily with her tongue hanging out one side of her mouth.

“Come to see if Wally knows his stuff ?” she asked them. The wolf yawned.

Beth waded back into the stream, finding the cold water more pleasant this time. She stooped and scooped the water in the cup of her hands, ladling it up over the mud on her leg, rinsing and rubbing and half expecting the process to hurt, half knowing that it would not.

When the mud was gone, her skin was smooth and clear.

She regarded this fact with a strange mixture of awe and acceptance, the kind of expectation she had that the sun would rise every morning, though the event was uniquely beautiful every time. Deep within, she knew that this couldn’t have happened if Wally hadn’t said it would.

A tiny rebel in her thought she ought to test this.

Beth climbed onto the bank and returned to the rock. She pulled at the jeans under the wolf’s belly, and he neither objected nor moved to get off of them. She tugged them against his body weight until they were free, then used them like a towel to dry herself off.

“That kind of thing is just an everyday occurrence for you two, is it?” she asked the dogs. Herriot’s happy tail started whapping the rock and Mercy as it flopped back and forth. When had the canines started getting along?

She changed into the fresh jeans she’d stuffed into the backpack, then rolled the cuffs up to her knees and sat down beside the dogs. She lifted her foot onto her knee so she could see the cut she’d received while going after these two at the ranch. The glue she’d used to seal the wound held well, but the injury remained tender and red.

It’s not magic mud
, she reminded herself. But didn’t she have . . . a talent?

She scooped more mud out of the can and applied it to the bottom of her foot. Then she propped it on the rock to dry a little in the sun, as she had the coffee burn.

A small amount of mud coated her fingers. Using Herriot’s demeanor to gauge Mercy’s, Beth assumed that the wolf’s docile behavior would continue. So she held the mud under his muzzle and let him sniff it.

“I don’t suppose you would explain this to me, however it is that you talk,” she said. “How does the healing work? Why can’t I make sense of it, what gets fixed, or what lives or dies, or how, or when?”

She reached out and rubbed the tiny bit of mud into one of the scarred groves running down the wolf’s back. His head snapped back and he nipped at her wrist as if she’d hurt him. She snatched her fingers out of his reach. The moment lasted half a second and was like a gunshot that launched her heart into a hundred-meter sprint.

The wolf got up and stalked off the rock. Herriot looked at Beth, accusing her of stupidity, then followed Mercy.

Some of Beth’s confusion returned. Alone on the rock now, she stuck her mud-caked foot back into the stream and let it dangle there. Maybe it didn’t matter if she didn’t understand what was happening to her. Her journey to Burnt Rock was what she needed to be doing, and she couldn’t wait for clarity on everything before she did it.

She took the map out of the top of her pack and opened it up. With a red marker, Wally had marked out a trail that appeared to cut several miles off the journey. If she left within the hour, the map promised, she should arrive in the small town by nightfall. She wondered if she could trust the route not to put her in harm’s way, or if Wally’s lines would lead her to insurmountable cliffs and chasms that couldn’t be crossed.

When Beth took her foot out of the water, her toes had no feeling in them, and the wound on the bottom of her foot was also numb. But it remained inflamed at the edges and ghostly white down the center. She sighed, not sure what she’d been expecting, or even simply hoping for. But then, Wally hadn’t said anything about fixing her foot, had he? All he had promised was a route to Burnt Rock, and a leg that could endure the saddle on the way there.

She prepared to leave.

Dotti parked her 4x4 right in front of Garner’s shop to make it look busy. Busyness drew more business these days. She’d do him proud while he recovered and would try not to worry in the meantime. Worry was exhausting, and a body needed stamina in order to be helpful.

She left her keys in the ignition, just as everyone left their front doors unlocked. More efficient that way for all the running around and car-swapping one did in a town this size. She bipped up the stairs, crossed the porch, and shook her head when she saw that the door was actually open, leaning into the house by three or four inches.

Dotti gripped the doorknob and burst in, the better to shock the thief who might think he could walk off with a few bottles of salve while the shopkeeper had stepped out.