House of Mercy (47 page)
She lifted her head and returned his pleasant expression. “But I think we ought to start with a clean slate, a zero account.”
“There is no such thing. We’ve known each other too long.”
“You really ought to tell me what I owe you for that saddle.”
“Oh, I will. But now’s not the time.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not what you think.”
From the corner of her eye, she could see that his lopsided grin was playful.
“How do you know what I think?”
He refused to answer, only to tease silently.
“I’ve been wondering what became of your saddle,” she said.
“It’s not something I worry about.”
“Still, I think I should find out.”
“That’s up to you.” A warm breeze came down off the San Juans and lifted the side of Beth’s hair across her face. She turned her back to the rails and faced Jacob. His admiring expression caused her to laugh again.
“So why don’t you tell me how that saddle came to be yours. It’s got quite a history from what I can tell.”
“It does.”
“So what’s the story?”
“It’s a pretty long story,” he said.
“Now you’re making fun of me. Tell me, please. However long it takes.”
“I will. But now it’s your turn to be patient, Bethesda.”
“You’ve never called me that before.”
“Do you mind it?”
She shook her head. In fact she loved it, but couldn’t find the words to say so. “If you stare at me any longer your eyes will dry out.”
“Small price to pay,” he said. He stepped toward her and tucked her wandering strands of hair behind her ear. The rough skin of his fingertips grazed her temples. He lowered his hand to hers, and she gave it to him.
Jacob pulled her toward him and encircled her with his strong arms as protective as the shelter of trees. He gently held her head against his chest and kissed the part in her hair. The warmth of feeling safe covered Beth all the way down to her feet. His quiet sigh was full of contentment.
“Thank you,” he said.
She closed her eyes. “For what?”
“For taking that saddle.”
“What?” She lifted her chin to see his face. He was looking across the dusky corral. “I don’t understand.”
“You will,” he said.
“Explain yourself, sir.”
“Patience.” His voice teased again.
“Tell me.”
“All in due time.”
“How long do I have to wait?”
“How long are you willing?”
The lighthearted banter suddenly felt weighty. She held the question in her heart. “For as long as you’ll let me stand here like this,” she said. “With you.”
“Forever then.”
“Forever,” she repeated. “I can be patient.”
“It’s a good thing I believe in miracles.”
They laughed together.
W
hat miracle are you waiting for?
I wrote
House of Mercy
during a season of begging God for a particular answer to prayer. Instead of giving me the solution I wanted, God gave me complications, uncharacteristic calm, and a question:
Do you believe I’m good even when I don’t give you what you think you need?
My heart said,
Right now it doesn’t seem like you’re being very good to me
. And my mind said,
Hey wait—is this a trick question? If I give you the right answer will you give me what I want?
Instead of indulging my pouting, God has taken my hand and led me on a guided tour of all the ways he has proven his goodness to me across the years. That uncharacteristic calm, for example, couldn’t have come from myself. My “surprise” son is a constant source of joy and laughter. I’ve been welcomed into a community of God-fearing people who surround me with compassion, support, and kindness that I’m sure I don’t deserve. These gifts top a very long list. And all of them are from him.
The goodness of God is not a trick question. It’s a reality even more real than our troubles. As this book goes to press, I still don’t have the answer to my prayer. The answer that I want, that is. The one I think I need. And yet he has been more patient with me than I have been with him—proving his goodness again. When I seek him, I find him, no matter my circumstances.
Today, it seems that everyone I know is waiting for some kind of miracle. We’re in need of important things. We’re desperate for particular answers to our heartfelt prayers. But we are not abandoned. We hold the hand of a good God. Whatever pain, injustice, or deferred hope you face, my new prayer is that God will give you more than a happy ending (which waits for us in the next life, if not this one). May he fill you with a lasting sense of his true goodness and of his love for you.
Erin Healy
January 2012
A
couple of years ago I had a face-to-face encounter with a few wolves. I’m happy to say it was in a controlled environment and not the wild, at the wonderful Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center in Divide, Colorado. Arriving with a storybook prejudice of wolves as a vicious kind of large dog, I was unprepared for the wolves’ astonishing size, majestic demeanor, variety, and even the playfulness of their socialized ambassadors.
Kekoa is a male gray (Timber) wolf like Mercy of this novel. Gray wolves are only beginning to return to their native Colorado habitats after being expatriated from the Rocky Mountain region in the 1930s. Today they are migrating from places like Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico, where they have been formally reintroduced.
We were not allowed to stand when meeting the wolves, but if we had, and if Kekoa had put his paws on our shoulders in greeting, he would have towered over our heads at seven feet.
Shunka is an Arctic/Timber wolf mix who weighs nearly 150 pounds. It’s possible he only loved me for the meat treats I had to offer him, and for the hood of my jacket, which we had to detach and toss out of the enclosure because he was determined to make it his own. But as Trey explained to Beth, Shunka’s wet kiss marked my acceptance to his pack.
As this book goes to press, Kekoa and Shunka are still important ambassadors for the CWWC. A live webcam of their enclosure, as well as virtual tours and photo galleries of the rest of the pack, can be accessed at
www.wolfeducation.org
. But if you have the chance to visit in person, I think you will never look at wolves the same way again.
With humble gratitude to
My wise editors, who seem to have bottomless wells of wit and insight: Ami McConnell and L. B. Norton.
The savvy fiction crew of Thomas Nelson, who devote their days to excellence: Allen Arnold, Ami McConnell, Amanda Bostic, Natalie Hanemann, Becky Monds, Katie Bond, Eric Mullett, Kristen Vasgaard, Ashley Schneider, Ruthie Dean, and Jodi Hughes.
My intrepid Creative Trust agents, who boldly navigate the waters of industry change: Dan Raines, Meredith Smith, Kathy Helmers, Jeanie Kaserman, and Kevin Kaiser.
My early readers, who remind me of all the reasons I should keep writing: Mike and Lynn McMahan.
The real-life Colorado ranchers who helped me tend to details: Joyce and Merrill Bond. (Any enduring errors are mine, all mine.)
My savior in the sea of social media: Leah Apineru.
My precious family.
My Lord, my hope, whose mercies are new every morning.
An Excerpt from
The Baker's Wife
March
The day Audrey took a loaf of homemade rosemary-potato bread to Cora Jean Hall was the day the fog broke and made way for spring. Audrey threw open the curtains closest to the dying woman’s bedside, glad for the sunshine after months of gray light.
Audrey moved quietly down the hall into the one-man kitchen, where she sliced the bread into toast, brewed tea, then leaned out of the cramped space to offer some to Cora Jean’s husband, Harlan. He refused her without thanks and without looking up from his forceful tinkering with an old two-way radio. Over the past month, his collection of CBs and receivers had overtaken the small living room. His grieving had started long ago and was presently in the angry stage. Clearly, he loved his wife. The retired pharmacist dispensed her medications with faithful precision but didn’t seem to know what else to do. If not for the radios, Audrey believed, he might have wandered the house helplessly and transformed from smoldering to explosive.
As Audrey arranged the snack on a tray, one of her earrings slipped out of her lobe and clattered onto a saucer, just missing the hot tea. She rarely wore this pair because one or the other was always falling out, but Cora Jean liked the dangling hearts with a rose in the middle of each. The inexpensive jewelry had been a gift to the women of the church on Mother’s Day last year.
She put the earring back in her ear, then carried the tray to Cora Jean’s room, settled onto an old dining room chair by the bed, and steered their conversation toward happy topics.
Cora Jean was dying of pancreatic cancer, the cancer best known for being unsurvivable. Audrey sat with the woman in the late stages of her illness for many reasons: because she believed that people who suffered shouldn’t be left alone; because she was a pastor’s wife and embraced this privilege that came with the role; because Cora Jean reminded Audrey of her own beloved mother.
She also went to the woman’s home because she couldn’t
not
go. In the most physical, literal sense, Audrey was regularly guided there, directed by an unseen arm, weighty and warm, that encircled her shoulders and turned her body toward the Halls’ house every week or so. A voice audible only to her own ears would whisper,
Please don’t leave me alone today
. It was no pitiful sound, and Audrey never resented it, though from time to time it surprised her. In these moments she thought, though she had never dared to try it, that if she applied her foot to the gas pedal and took her hands off the wheel, her car would take her wherever God wanted her to be.
This five-years familiar experience had not always involved Cora Jean, but others like her, so Audrey had long since stopped questioning how it happened. The why of it was clear enough: Audrey was called by God to be a comforter, and she was glad for the job.
Audrey had a knack for helping people in any circumstance to look toward the brightness of life—not the silver lining of their own dark cloud, which often didn’t exist—but to the Light of the World, which could be seen by anyone willing to look for it. In Cora Jean’s case this meant not dwelling too long on the details of her prognosis, but in reading aloud beautiful, hopeful, complex poetry, especially the Psalms and the Brownings and Franz Wright. It meant watering the plants (which Harlan ignored) and offering to warm a meal for him before she left. It meant giving candid answers to Cora Jean’s many-layered questions about Audrey’s personal faith—in particular, about sin and forgiveness and justice.
And about the problem of so much suffering in a world governed by a “good” God. Cora Jean seemed preoccupied with this particular question, and her focus seemed to be connected to the yellowed family portrait hanging on the wall opposite the bed.
There were two brunette girls in the thirty-year-old picture. Audrey judged the age by Cora Jean’s bug-eyed plastic-framed glasses, Harlan’s rust-colored corduroy blazer, and the children’s Dorothy Hamill hairstyles. Audrey had a similarly aged childhood portrait of herself with her parents. She guessed the daughters to be nine, maybe ten, and they appeared to be twins, though one of them was considerably chubbier than the other.
