House of Mercy (43 page)

39

G
arner lay awake on his bed. His curtains were parted and he stared at the gibbous moon, which cast white light across his floor. He tried to sleep by first emptying his mind, but his efforts were futile. The face of his granddaughter kept popping in, followed by imagined faces of the brothers she had described. And even Rose showed up, reaching out to him.

He was cold. On this August night he was so strangely cold that he had donned socks and pulled the blanket at the foot of his bed up and over his chest, but all that hadn’t properly warmed him.

He turned his attention to filling his mind instead of emptying it. He fetched about for something worth pondering. He thought up a new tea recipe, but then Cat butted in to tell him what she thought of it. He thought up a vacation, but no matter what destination he wanted, he kept ending up at the Blazing B. He thought up a date with Dotti at Mazy’s, but when they arrived, all the tables were taken by members of the Borzoi family.

Garner finally sat up in bed and placed his stocking feet on the floor, square in the beam of moonlight. He braced his hands on the sides of the mattress and locked his elbows as he leaned forward, desperate to lose himself to the blackness of sleep. Tea did not sound good to him.

An earth-shattering crash from downstairs catapulted him off the bed. It sounded like another one of his windows had been broken. That kitchen window had been no small expense to replace, though it was one of his smallest panes.

Since giving his money to Hank, Garner thought about expenses.

He stood erect in the heaven’s spotlight, and his mind raced with possibilities. A burglar? A vandal? He welcomed the threat. It was just the distraction he needed. His blood was flowing. His brain had fired up the emergency adrenaline production line. He grabbed a heavy walking stick fashioned from a gnarled piece of western juniper and carried it out of his bedroom, hefting it like a spear, and crossed the hall like a hunter. The house at the base of his stairs was dark. With his free hand Garner balanced himself as he carefully took each stair down. His knees were less nimble than they used to be.

At the bottom, the same moonlight that spread across his bedroom floor penetrated the curtains and became a night-light on the living room. The picture windows were all in one piece.

“Hello?” he said.

Not even the summer-night insects responded. But a breeze caused the wide legs of his house pants to flutter. It seemed to be coming from the kitchen.

Walking stick still raised over his head, Garner trod softly past his showcase of natural wellness, past his cash register, and past the staircase to the basement, which glowed with the fluorescent warmth of artificial sunlight.

In the kitchen he flipped on the overhead bulb, lowered the walking stick to his side, and swore. The kitchen window—the barely three-month-old, double-paned, energy-efficient window—had been reduced all over again to a pile of glitter on the floor.

“How did this happen?” he asked aloud.

He searched for a rock, a brick, any projectile that might explain it. But there was nothing but glass to be seen. If kids had done this he would have heard the thunder of their escaping feet on the floorboards of the porch. His mind went to Beth. He had assumed she left town, but he hadn’t bothered to verify it. Could she be mad enough to cause this kind of damage? Could she be lingering, watching?

In his basement, a clay pot fell and was dashed on the concrete floor. Garner knew the sound, having accidentally smashed his share of plant containers over the years. His whole body turned toward the noise.

There was someone in his basement garden.

He repositioned his grip on the walking stick and turned to face the staircase. He paused at the head and said, “Who’s there?” in his most intimidating voice. Another pot fell over. Judging by the sound of the impact, this one was plastic, and it merely cracked.

There was a terrible rattling of his steel tables, and several foreign sounds he couldn’t pinpoint: a wet sort of clacking, a smacking of lips, a tearing of grass and leaves.

The unfinished staircase creaked slightly under his weight, but this signal didn’t give any sort of pause to the basement ruckus.

When the truth of the matter came into view, Garner thought perhaps he had fallen asleep after all and was now dreaming. Or experiencing a night terror.

A great gray wolf that easily surpassed a hundred pounds stood atop one of his stainless tables and was eating the herbs and plants. In the two to three minutes it had taken Garner to come down from his room, the wolf had already devoured a fifth of Garner’s inventory.

The creature raised its eyes to Garner and masticated a gallon of thyme as if he were a cow. Man and beast stared, gazes locked on each other. Only one of them breathed—the same one who also ate.

All steadiness went out of Garner’s legs. He sank to sit on the step he had reached, which was about halfway down the flight. There was no way he could climb these stairs again right now even if the wolf jumped off that table straight for Garner’s jugular. He lacked strength to move, yes, but he was also riveted by the scene. There was a wolf in his basement. Not just any wild creature, which would have been amazing enough, but a wolf, an endangered wolf who had, apparently, jumped right through a glass window and was eating his
plants
.

“Aren’t you supposed to be a carnivore?” he said. Each one of the dog’s feet seemed nearly as large as Garner’s face.

The wolf ripped into a patch of blooming purple comfrey and tore the fine stems off the roots. He was eating at an astonishing rate, moving within seconds from comfrey to bloodroot to the spectacular bryony vine on the wall. He leaped to the floor to uproot the vine from its six-foot-long planter box, and the table tipped over. The crash rattled through Garner’s ears. The wolf’s muzzle was coated with a lumpy clumping of soil.

Garner watched this with growing wonder. The vine, like many of the plants in this room, was toxic in large quantities. The wolf seemed to swallow without chewing, and he stripped the trellis itself from the wall as he devoured. The unnatural sight went on for long minutes. Would he choke on a tendril that caught in his throat? Would a woody stem puncture his stomach? Would the poisons finally accumulate and do their deadly work?

It wasn’t until the wolf turned his eye onto the goldenseal, which had taken four years of nurturing to reach its present maturity, that Garner’s practical side kicked in.

The canine snapped at the five-leafed stem.

“Hey!” Garner rose off his step. “That’s valuable!” All of it was valuable. This was his livelihood now, not just some hobby. “Stop that!”

He brandished his walking stick but stayed where he was on the steps. He was no physical match for this wild animal, whose strength might be as abnormally great as his appetite. Surely the wolf would swallow Garner as easily as he could put down a mandrake.

The wolf polished off each one of the precious goldenseal roots and turned toward the cannabis. Garner wasn’t growing it legally, though he had been using it legally for medicinal purposes. Cat had prescribed it for him. They had developed a wonderful marijuana-candy recipe.

“I
need
that!” he shouted, and at this outburst the wolf turned his head lazily in Garner’s direction.

This is not what you need
, Garner thought. But the thought seemed to belong to someone else. It was true enough, though. He knew in his knower that he didn’t need that particular medicine any more, except that the candy was a lucrative asset.

As the wolf devoured every last ounce of his fan-leafed painkiller, Garner wondered about the granddaughter who had dissolved his cancer. With a skill like that, who needed to ask for money?

How had she healed him? And why? More than any other question in the world, why?

Garner couldn’t bear to watch the rest of the garden’s destruction. He turned away feeling quite old again, and chilled in every extremity. He used the juniper stick to fortify his defeated walk back up the stairs. The loss of Cat, the loss of his family dream, the loss of his savings, of his income—it all bore down on him at once, so that he didn’t even care about the mystical wolf.

But Cat would have liked him
, Garner thought.
And Nova will be amazed
.

As he stepped up onto the main level of his home, Garner felt the cool air coming through the shattered kitchen window. It caused him to shiver. He turned down the hall toward the other flight of stairs and climbed them, heart-mind-and-bone weary.

The short walk to his bedroom stretched out like an unbearable hike. Somehow he returned to his bed and lay down on it. The moon had risen an inch in the sky. The moonbeams on his floor had shifted by degrees. He stared at them and was able to watch them creep. He wondered how long it would take for the wolf to eat everything and finally leave.

Would he turn on the jars of tea next? Would he cast them off their shelves and lap up the broken glass with his tongue?

When Garner heard the weight of those tremendous padded feet loping up the stairs to the bedrooms, he knew the wolf did not plan to leave. Garner closed his eyes and waited. He was calm. He was ready to face his fate.

The graceful dog leaped up onto Garner’s bed, depressing the mattress and pinning the floppy legs of Garner’s house pants beneath his paws. The animal sniffed around the bedspread, and then his hot breath poured over Garner’s face, taking in the old man’s scent. His tail swept the surface of the bed, brushing across Garner’s knees. The man lay still, preparing for death.

The canine opened his mouth and panted, and Garner could smell the aromas of all his finest herbs and medicines on the wolf’s tongue. They were worth nothing now. He braced himself for violence.

Instead, the wolf stretched out his long body next to Garner and released a sigh. Then he laid his huge head across Garner’s chest, so that the man’s drumming heart seemed to leap into the wolf’s throat rather than his own. In a very short time, his heart began to settle down. The dread slipped away. Their breathing found a synchronized rhythm.

Peace overcame Garner. He finally felt warm.

He slept.

He dreamed of waking in his daughter’s home, where she had made him breakfast. Breakfast with a capital B, topped by a tongue of flame. Bacon and eggs and hash browns. And not an herb or a vegetable in sight.

40

B
eth had said her good-byes to Trey at Mazy’s after they shared a dish featuring meat of a questionable texture. He lived at the bottom of the mountain in Salida, which was an easy drive from the Blazing B. She suggested that he ought to visit the ranch before it changed into something unrecognizable, and he promised to. She promised to start keeping records for him of Mercy’s appearances.

Nova had shown Beth to the laundry where she could wash her stiff clothes, and then she fed Beth dinner. Afterward she pressed Beth’s blouse and told stories about Burnt Rock and the people who populated it, including Mr. Remke, who was one of Nova’s favorite people. Beth was touched by this chance to see Grandpa Remke in a different light, and she felt sad rather than angry about her lost opportunity to know him.

So the following morning when she left Nova’s home in fresh clothes, with a backpack full of food over her shoulder and Herriot at her heels, she wasn’t expecting to see Garner standing in the middle of the dirt parking lot with a light-blue hard-sided suitcase at his feet.

He looked down at it when she emerged, as if it might contain what he wanted to say.

“Hi,” she said. Herriot ran up to Garner and sniffed his shoes, then his suitcase.

“Dotti said I could find you here.” His eyes moved around her, landing everywhere but on her face.

“Everyone has been really hospitable,” she said.

“Almost everyone. Every small town has to have its crank.”

She smiled and tipped her head to one side. “I know I was a shock.”

“The last several days have been a shock,” he said.

She adjusted her backpack on her shoulder and silently agreed.

“You headed out?” he asked.

“I am. I was aiming for the stables just now. My horse is there. Where are you going?”

“I am going . . . I was thinking . . . It’s really true that I don’t have any money.”

“I know.”

“I feel bad about that. If you knew how short a time ago I lost it—”

“Garner, I’m the last person you need to explain yourself to.”

He wrinkled up his nose. “I’m a stubborn old man, Beth.”

“You’ll fit right in, then.”

Now Garner looked her in the eye. “Right in where?”

“At the ranch. That’s where you want to go, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “I really miss . . . Do you think your mother will be glad to see me?”

“I really don’t know.”

“It’s been a lot of years, a lot of bitterness. I’d rather be going down there with money lining my pockets.”

“We do what we can with what we have,” Beth said. “Even if it’s nothing. I’m starting to believe God can work with that.”

“You sure came a long way for nothing,” he said.

“Not if you come back with me.”