Where Mercy Flows (11 page)

I raised my chin from the mud and gazed up at the disfigured hillside. “Holy macaroni,” I whispered in awe. This was too amazing
to keep to myself. Taking an alternate route, I scrambled up the hill. My muddy nightgown felt as heavy as chain mail, slapping
and chafing my legs, but I didn’t care. I pulled myself up with roots and branches, sometimes crawling, until I reached the
top. I took the pasture in a minute flat, arriving breathless beneath Lindsey’s bedroom window.

My sister slept with her window shut. I jumped with the grace of a leaping sea cow to tap the pane. When that failed, a branch
from my mother’s hydrangea became my window scratcher. “Lins!” I whispered loudly, tapping and scratching until she opened
the window and stuck out her sleepy head.

When she saw me, her eyes bugged out. “Samantha Jean! Oh, my, what have you done now?”

“Shhh. Come on, Lins! I’ll show you. It’s absolutely fantabulous!”

She just stared at me, shaking her head. “You’re really going to catch it this time, Sam.”

“It’s not my fault. It was a mud slide. Now come on!”

“It’s Saturday, you know. We have chores.” She began to unbutton her nightgown.

“There’s no time for that if you want to be back before they wake up.” I nodded toward our parents’ window at the other end
of the house.

She sighed. “Okay.” She hoisted herself onto the sill. “But I’m not getting dirty.”

That gave me an idea. Lindsey’s bare legs dangled from the window momentarily before she dropped to the ground. I led the
way across the field, stopping behind the barn for my snow saucer. She followed me, the hem of her nightgown pinched together
in her fists, stepping cautiously as she watched for the slugs that cruised through the dewy grass, leaving slime trails behind
them. At the edge of the hill, she paused. “The trail is all muddy.” I kept going and she eventually followed. Her jaw dropped
when she saw the gaping hole where our hillside had been. “Oh, my! Oh, Samantha. It looks like someone took a gigantic bite
out of it! How did this happen? What if it had happened while we were here on the trail? We would be dead right now. Buried
in mud. And no one would ever know where we went.”

I leaned the saucer against a stump for Lindsey, who still surveyed the damage in shock, and then poised myself like a proud
circus performer about to execute a dangerous stunt.

“Aren’t you going to use the saucer?”

“Bombs away!” I hurled my body past her. The slick clay slid me off its back in a wild ride as I whooped with glee. I picked
myself up at the bottom and spat mud. “Your turn!”

“No way.” Lindsey’s arms were crossed and her feet firmly planted on solid ground, but I saw the look of envy in her eyes.

“Get in the saucer and hold on. You won’t even get dirty!”

“Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious,” I called up to her. “Think about it. Pretend it’s snow. You can just sail right over the top of it!”

Her head cocked slightly to one side. I was getting through.

I crawled up the hill, my nightie too heavy for me to stand erect without great effort. My next run was feetfirst, which was
a mistake. The heavy gown dragged behind me and my panties scooped mud like a shovel. I peeled them off and dumped them. Even
so, walking became extremely uncomfortable. I didn’t let on to Lindsey. “Are you coming or not?” I shouted. “You’re going
to be sorry if you miss out. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you know!”

Finally, she picked up the saucer, setting it tentatively just above the edge of the slide. “Will you catch me at the bottom?”
She placed her feet daintily in the saucer and sat down slowly like an Indian princess. “Okay, here I come!”

Where she went wrong was her takeoff. The saucer sort of dragged over the lip of the slide. I yelled to her to give it a good
push, but she refused to get her hands in the mud. There was a good slick spot in the middle and she started to get some momentum.
The saucer spun and tipped to one side and she screamed bloody murder. I couldn’t see why. She was still just crawling down
the hill compared to my speed runs. I positioned myself strategically at the edge of the mud pile, but stopping her proved
unnecessary. The saucer came to a rest in a little dip right smack in the middle of the mushy earth deposited by the slide.

Of course, Lindsey blamed me for this. I explained to her that she should have made a running jump onto the saucer and now
that she hadn’t, she was just going to have to get a little muddy and wade out of that pile. She started crying about her
new nightie getting ruined, which Grandma Dodd had made with her own two hands.

“Take it off and throw it to me,” I suggested.

“Don’t even think about touching me or my nightie! You look like a swamp monster.” The Indian princess sat there and pouted.
“Why don’t you come up here and push me out?”

The idea had occurred to me, but the mud and clay at the bottom of the slide were too deep and loose. Even at the edges my
feet sank deeply before meeting the bottom. Another good idea overtook me. I was full of them that morning. “Wait here,” I
said.

All I needed was a rope. The journey up the hillside was laborious until I got smart and shed the two-ton mud nightgown. Then
I was a gazelle, bounding up the hill and across the field to the barn. Sunshine warmed my shoulders and baked a crackly clay
crust onto my skin. Inside the barn, my pupils adjusted slowly to the deep shadows. Hay scattered on the dirt floor smelled
sweet and prickled the bottoms of my feet.

The barn was our huge playhouse. Our family did not keep animals. Well, we had chickens once—five banty hens and an obnoxious
rooster that pecked noisily on the metal garbage can by the side of the house and had a sickly crow like someone trying to
scream while being strangled. I hated him. He always chased me and I threw rocks and cherries at him. Lindsey could walk right
up and pet him, though. It was the weirdest thing. The chickens roamed free during the day, laying eggs wherever they pleased.
Our daily egg hunts turned up speckled brown eggs from beneath bushes and in the garden. They were so petite it took four
of them to bake a cake.

I found the rope where I had left it, up in the hayloft. My father had made me undo the rope swing I tied to a rafter. He
said only a monkey could have climbed up there, and if a monkey tied the knot, it might not hold. It would have, though. I’d
been tying knots since I was a little kid. I coiled the rope and wore it like a bandolier, climbed down the ladder and was
about to make the dash back to the woods to rescue my sister when I turned and saw a large figure looming in the doorway.

My father. I suddenly felt small and very naked.

“Samantha Jean!” The thunder of his voice rolled and echoed from every recess of the barn. I stepped behind the ladder, which
proved to be poor cover. “Where are your clothes? Where is your sister?”

I pointed.

“What is that all over you?” I looked down and saw the mud-smeared body of an Aborigine right off the pages of
National Geographic
. Thick clods hung from my head like strings of beads.

“There’s a mud slide, Dad, and Lindsey’s in it. I was just going to save her.”

“Where?” He sounded overly alarmed. “Show me where she is!” I hesitated. In a corner of the barn, Lindsey had set up housekeeping
with a table and chairs, a plank counter full of dishes and empty cereal and cracker boxes in a neat row. My father strode
to the window in quick, determined steps, yanked a cherry-patterned curtain off its nails and tossed it to me. He clapped
his hands. Smack! It resounded like a gunshot. “Let’s go! Move! Move!”

“Okay!” In one motion I wrapped the musty cloth around my bare body and bolted for the barn door. He grabbed the rope I had
dropped and we headed for the woods, my father barking at my heels if I slowed down, until we heard a distant intermittent
cry like that of a baby crow in distress wafting up from the ravine.

“Sa-man-tha!” Lindsey’s pathetic pleas sounded hollow and hopeless. She seemed surprised when she saw us working our way down
the steep trail. “Daddy! Help! I’m stuck here and the mud is too deep and squishy!”

He quickly surveyed the damaged hillside and Lindsey’s dilemma. “Stay put, baby.” He circled the mud slide, gingerly descending
the slope using branches of undergrowth for anchors. Finally, he positioned himself adjacent to her. She was about five yards
beyond his reach. He poked a long stick into the mud to test its depth. The stick disappeared up to his fist. I caught a swift
sideways glance from him like a slap. Like all this was my fault. Like I had caused the days of incessant rain and had somehow
sabotaged the hill, dumping tons of earth onto our valley floor.

“Lindsey,” he said, “I’m going to toss you this rope. I want you to tie it around you and make a real good knot. Can you do
that?” She did it, still sniveling, a tear dammed up on each lower lid. “Good job. Now stay low and hang on tight to the saucer.
That’s right. I’m going to give you a little pull now.” He crept downhill a bit. “Don’t let go, baby. Okay.” He tugged gently
at first and then a little harder until the snow saucer broke free of the pothole. It was an easy, uneventful glide to the
bottom.

Lindsey hardly got in any trouble at all. She just had to weed a garden in addition to her usual chores. My father switched
my behind with an alder branch, but I didn’t cry. On the inside I was screaming, but I didn’t let on. It wasn’t fair. Then
I had to endure his science lecture about what happens to a human body that gets swallowed up by mud. He sent me back for
the wad of mud that was once the nightie Grandma Dodd made for me. It had been identical to Lindsey’s except the ribbon on
her bodice was pink and mine was blue. Grandma insisted on calling us “the twins” even though I was a full four months older
than my sister and we had nothing in common but that we were the same sex.

I hosed my nightgown off and Mom washed it three times before it came out an acceptable shade of gray. Lindsey’s, of course,
survived pure white with perfect little pink rosebuds that are probably unfaded to this day.

M
Y TROUBLES were temporarily forgotten on the Fourth of July. They burst into tiny manageable fragments like the brilliant
chrysanthemums of colored sparks that would soon fill the night sky over the field. I basked in the smell of the sweet corn
boiling and the hickory smoke from the barbecue, the hot sun on my hair and shoulders, the laughter of the river as it winked
between the wild huckleberries at the edge of the yard, and TJ’s squeals of delight at catching a young cutthroat in the creek.
The fish was too small but ended up on the barbecue anyway because it had swallowed the hook so deep—and because TJ was not
much for the silly rule that said a keeper trout had to be at least six inches.

Dr. Matt brought his sons. They used to play with Lindsey and me sometimes, though they were younger. We didn’t see them often
because they lived with their mother in Tacoma. Sweet little Kevin turned out to be a bruiser, a Big Mac away from two sixty
and none of that was fat. He played linebacker for the Huskies. His older brother, Jess, arrived wearing slacks and a pressed
shirt, looking ridiculously out of place among the rest of us in our shorts and T-shirts until Lindsey’s husband, David, showed
up.

Donnie brought his parents and a load of horse manure from the Appaloosa Ranch. Old Chester had insisted that as long as they
were coming over, they might as well make the trip count, though they lived less than a half mile down the road. Donnie backed
the truck to a spot behind the barn, and while the Judge passed out shovels, David ducked into the kitchen.

I followed him in from the deck. “Hey, David. Dad wants you.”

“He does?”

“Yeah. He wondered if you could help get that pile of poo off the truck out there,” I lied.

“He did?”

I snuck a spoonful of potato salad from the serving bowl and glanced over my shoulder. “That’s what he said.”

David walked tentatively onto the deck and peered around the corner of the house, where he could see Chester and Donnie leaning
against the tail of the pickup, talking to the Judge, who had a shovel in his hand. I watched David saunter across the field
slowly, as if hoping the other men might heave to and get the whole stinking pile of recycled hay unloaded before his arrival.
I was laughing when Lindsey came up behind me.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, just your husband. He’s about to suck up to the father-in-law. Shouldn’t he be over that stage by now?”

She shaded her eyes and peered toward the barn. “Is he . . . ? He’s not going to get in that . . .”

“Yup. There he goes. Dockers and all. What a trooper. What a great guy.” I couldn’t stop grinning.

Lindsey shook her head in disbelief. “That’s so unlike him.”

“I think it’s a male bonding thing.”

As it turned out that’s exactly what it was. After unloading the truck and hosing out its bed, the men attempted to spray
the gourmet worm food off each other’s feet. The hose got away from someone and it turned into a water fight. By the time
they joined the rest of us on the deck, laughing and punching and tossing insults, we were all wishing we had shoveled manure.
Even David seemed undaunted by his dripping clothes and scrambled hair. He carefully placed his socks and leather loafers
on the edge of the deck to dry in the sun, not with remorse but as proudly as if they were trophies, and then stretched out
on a canvas deck chair, wiggling his bare toes. I had done my good deed. Not intentionally perhaps, but just the same I felt
good inside. One less stuffy person in the world—at least for today.

Chester limped up and nodded to me. A bee buzzed around his weathered face and lit on his bare arm, but he didn’t seem to
mind so I didn’t mention it. “Hello, Mr. Duncan. It’s nice to see you again.”

He nodded again. “Samantha. You kinda grew up on us, didn’t ya?” The bee crawled around on his wrinkled and mottled skin.
Maybe he couldn’t feel it. “Don tells me you worked on a ranch down there in Arizona. And here I always thought you didn’t
like horses.”