The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  By the time Frankie got to me, I was on my feet, miraculously healed by lack of options.

  “I forgot to tell you to watch for badger holes,” she said.

  “Badger holes?”

  Yeah, those cute animals. Like the weasels, only meaner.

  “That’s what you got your foot caught in,” Frankie said.

  I put a speedy six feet between me and the opening, especially when she added: “We don’t kill the badgers. They take care of the gophers for us.”

  The list of cuties gets longer by the minute.

  Frankie pointed to the gate. “All right, we’re looking good.”

  Which evidently meant the large crowd climbing over itself at the red metal gate by the road was an okay thing.

  The dogs helped her move the sheep back enough for her to open the gate, and as they rushed through she opened the one on the far side of the road. I trotted aimlessly at the rear, stopping in front of the ones who had paused to graze on the grass that was right there in front of them—so why go farther, right? All I knew to do was stare at them until they turned and followed the group. Sometimes it took them as long as twenty seconds to get the message. The ones who lingered while their lambs engaged in play dates or decided they wanted to suck up some breakfast—they were harder to convince.

  “Come on,” I said to them, “you’re going to make me look bad on my first day.”

  Too late.

  But once the gate was closed behind the last of them and they immediately settled into quietly munching the rolling expanse of plants, Frankie smiled at me and said, “Not bad. You’ll catch on.”

  And this is going to happen how?

  My workday was over at noon, and the first thing I did when I got back to the Cloister was head for the bathroom to take a shower. That was when I discovered the first aid kit, a brand-new one with fresh gauze and tape and antibacterial ointment packed tidily into compartments. I could already feel relief flooding through me. First a full cleansing of the outside, then one for the inside.

  Before I could do anything I had to find the vacuum cleaner and suck up the no fewer than twenty moths that had claimed the shower curtain as their home. Once I finally got the water to run hot, I hadn’t even started to shave my armpits before I was standing ankle deep in gray water and Emma was banging on the door yelling, “Turn that off! You’re clogging up every drain in the house!”

  When I emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel, she was going after the kitchen sink with a plunger.

  “You can’t stay in there for ten hours,” she said without looking at me. “The plumbing’s old.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “Do you want me to help you?”

  “Just get your stuff out of the bathroom so I can go in there and fix this.”

  I did get my stuff, including the first aid kit. With Emma focused on the mess I’d made, it wasn’t hard at all to go into my closet, lay out the scissors and the towel and the gauze—and make a clean, shallow, beautiful incision on the inside of my upper arm.

  I leaned against the closet wall, eyes closed, and let the blood go. And with it, the pain of hating myself. That was what I’d wanted to do that night: just let it go and feel the release from the burning and the spinning and the inside hurt I didn’t understand.

  When I opened my eyes, I focused on the fine, wet, red line, just deep enough to make me sure that I’d gone far enough, but not so much that I would die. I wasn’t good enough for heaven.

  As I wrapped a strip of sterile white gauze around my arm and taped it neatly into place, I decided that Frankie was wrong. I wasn’t hurting myself. I was taking care of myself. Because clearly no one else was going to.

  I felt better now than I had in weeks. Good enough to face the late-afternoon herding of the sheep back to their pen. And good enough to tell Frankie what I’d done as we walked out to the pasture. It seemed only fair, since she had given me the freedom to do it. Maybe I wanted to see if she was going to chide me or comfort me, just so I’d know for sure.

  My money’s on chiding. Doesn’t matter who it is, this stuff is a turnoff for people.

  Frankie did neither. Before I even started to describe what I’d used, she held up her palm. Still walking, softly and steadily, she said, “I don’t want the details, Kirsten. That is your private thing.”

  Didn’t see that comin’, did ya?

  It was my private thing. I’d always protected it like it was something secret and sacred. But now that I’d shared it, willingly, Frankie’s disinterest stung me. That and the fact that she followed up by jumping from topic to topic like a jackrabbit.

  One minute she was pointing out the various kinds of grasses nodding in the wind and explaining that sheep do best in dry, arid climates but they need green grass. The next she was telling me everyone lives with some kind of paradox.

  Give me Emma’s grunts anytime. They’re way more interesting.

  One minute she was saying she had a precise plan for rotating grazing ground, and the next she was telling me everyone has a premise that guides her decisions, right or wrong.

  What the—I’m getting whiplash!

  One minute she was teaching me a rhyme: “Sedges have edges, rushes are round, grasses have joints all the way to the ground.” The next she was saying we all need a rule to live by.

  By then we’d reached the south pasture and Frankie leaned her elbow on the gate and looked at me and said, “What did you learn just now?”

  That you have ADD?

  I had no idea what she wanted to hear, so I just said, “That you love plants?”

  Why don’t you just tell her she was boring you out of your skull?

  “Perfect.” Frankie touched me lightly on the arm, right above where I had just released my shame. “Now you need to discover what you love.”

  I wanted to grab her hand and tell her I thought I did know what I loved—that it just didn’t love me back.

  But she had already turned to her sheep.

  Getting them back to their pen was infinitely easier than herding them out of it had been. Until we got them right up to it and one group decided the grazing might be good over there between the tractor and a junked pickup truck.

  “There’s not even any grass there,” I said to one ewe headed that way.

  She stopped and looked at me, sort of, and I took a step closer to her in the hope that she would back up and we could get this done. When she didn’t move I took another step, and instantly something warm was leaning against me, cutting me off from the clueless ewe. Avila was stronger than she looked. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I love it!” Frankie sang out.

  You have strange taste, lady.

  “Avila’s telling you to give the sheep space,” she said as she joined me. “We give them enough so they’ll see where we want them to be and they’ll follow, but we can’t push them. We can only lead them.”

  You coulda told me that about twelve hours ago.

  I had a feeling she wasn’t just talking about the sheep, but I was too flustered to unpack that. I just followed Frankie on to my next task, which was locating the eggs the hens had laid in various places throughout the barn and its attached pens.

  “They don’t have nests?”

  And then I wanted to bite my tongue off because Emma chose that moment to appear on the scene, smelling like a horse and, of course, curling her lip.

  I’m waiting for it to go up her nostrils.

  “Wherever it’s dark and soft, that’s where they lay,” Frankie said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good luck with that,” Emma said.

  I decided to start as far away from her as possible, so I went for a bale of hay that had broken open in the back corner of the barn. I hadn’t taken two steps before I realized I had a companion. Bathsheba, who had been banished from the herding, brushed past me and dug her nose straight into the pile of errant straw I was headed for. I knew nothing about dogs outside of watching Marley and
Me with Wes about six times, but I assumed the fervent wagging of a tail had to mean something.

  Sure enough, when I stuck my hand in where Bathsheba was sniffing, I pulled out two brown eggs. A third one was in the dog’s mouth.

  “I’m just guessing here,” I whispered to her, “but I don’t think you’re supposed to eat them.”

  It was too late to salvage that one, but from then on I stayed no more than a step behind her and every time she poked her nose into a hole of hay, I rescued the eggs before she could chow down on them. She never seemed to catch on.

  Must be why she doesn’t get to herd sheep.

  I was starting to like this dog in spite of myself. We had a lot in common.

  I planned to beg off from going to the main house for supper, but Frankie didn’t offer that as an option. She just linked her arms through Emma’s and mine and walked us both up the driveway and through the main house gate. Once within the shade of the two old man cottonwoods, I was at least grateful for the break from the openness. All day I’d felt exposed and vulnerable. Now I just felt vulnerable.

  Well, one out of two ain’t bad.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised by the inside of the long, low ranch house, but I was. My imagination had painted a picture of a farmhouse kitchen with a hitching post as a towel rack and a living room with a cracked leather sofa and a cowhide rug. I’d known some aggies at MSU, and their places always had that kind of décor.

  Frankie was obviously no aggie.

  We entered through a kitchen that seemed to be drenched in gold light, some of it absorbed by polished wood cabinets, the rest dancing on dark shiny countertops. There was no busy clutter. Only a row of pottery jars and a fat candle that burned by the sink. Yet clearly someone had cooked a meal, because the aroma that came from the spotless stove made even my mouth water. It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten for over twenty-four hours.

  “Joseph made his potatoes,” Emma said.

  That was the second time I’d heard the name Joseph mentioned, and I still didn’t know who he was. The cook maybe? If so, Emma was getting off easy working with him. Why hadn’t I been offered that gig?

  That theory fell apart when Frankie nodded me out of the kitchen and into a dining area. A tall, bony, sinewy man with smoke-white hair straightened from placing a crusty loaf of bread on the table and showed a weather-beaten face. Not that many chefs walked around in leather suspenders with binoculars swinging from a neck strap that had been knotted back together so many times it was basically nothing but knots. His face was weathered and taut across the cheekbones and I couldn’t find a smile in his small blue eyes. No wonder Emma had been assigned to him.

  Can’t imagine a cuter couple.

  “Joseph Maxwell,” he said, in a voice low and crackly as a fire.

  “Kirsten Petersen,” I said.

  “Figured as much,” was his reply.

  Nice to meet you too.

  I pretended to be interested in the room, which was as polished and spare as the kitchen except for one of those crosses with the circle in it—Celtic maybe?—that hung on one wall and a stiff-looking painting of three primitive figures at a table on the other. I couldn’t look away from it.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Frankie said at my elbow. “I’m not much for icons but I had to have that one.” She bent her head toward an area that stretched from the dining room. “Look around if you want to. We’ll be just a few minutes.”

  I wandered away from the once again silent Joseph, who was now lighting a pair of candles on the table, and into another room in which even the air was clean and simple save for the faint scent of incense. I suspected it had soaked into everything: the cherry shelves peopled with books and the four tweedy earth-toned chairs, each with its own generous throw. A thick round table in the middle of it all invited both propped feet and folded hands. Above the fireplace was another print, this one done in rust and brown and golden hues in a style as real as the other was abstract. A young woman sat on the edge of her bed, wrapped in an ancient robe, looking at the light pouring into her stone-floored room as if it were speaking to her. The confusion in her eyes was all too real.

  Frankie materialized next to me in that way she had, an ironed and folded linen towel draped over her arm. “I see you like art too.”

  “I’m looking at the arches painted behind her,” I lied. “I guess that’s the curse of being in architecture.”

  “Henry Tanner had a wonderful eye for setting. You’re familiar with his work?”

  I shook my head.

  “This one is The Annunciation.”

  “So that’s Mary,” I said.

  “Right.”

  I wish I hadn’t asked. Until then I’d started to feel a connection with that girl.

  “We’re ready,” Joseph said from the dining room.

  I was expecting dinner, but when I took the seat Emma pointed me to, I learned not to have expectations in this place. None. At all.

  “We would normally have our communion tomorrow night, Sunday,” Frankie said, even as I gazed over the glazed pottery chalice and the matching pitcher of water and the bread and the linens. “But we thought since this is your first supper with us we’d celebrate it tonight.”

  “The Last Supper for your first supper,” Joseph said.

  I looked at him, surprised, and decided I’d just imagined that. His face showed nothing as he stared across the table at Frankie. I couldn’t decide whether Emma was taking lessons from him, or she just gravitated to him because he was practically her mirror image.

  “Blessed be God: our Father, His Son, the Holy Spirit,” Frankie said, and began a communion like none in any church I’d been to. I hadn’t read the story of the Last Supper in a while, but this was like a reenactment of it, only without Jesus.

  If He shows up, you’re in big trouble. ‘Hey, Kirsten, haven’t seen you lately.’

  Despite the guilt, I took the hunk of bread Frankie passed me and dipped it into the cup I then handed to Joseph. At one point I glanced across the table at Emma. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth moved, soundlessly repeating the words Frankie was saying.

  Is that the same mouth that laughed in your face earlier?

  Yeah. Whatever was happening here was something sacred. But for Emma it only seemed to be happening here. As for me, I said the amens and helped clear away the communion things and bring on the platter of steaks and the enormous bowl of whipped potatoes and the covered dish full of roasted asparagus. I had to eat or I was in danger of passing out there on the terra-cotta-tiled floor. The first bite of meat that went into my mouth was so good it made me moan.

  “You like elk, then,” Joseph said.

  I tried not to choke.

  “A lot of people don’t care for wild game,” Frankie said, eyes twinkling in the candlelight.

  “I guess I do,” I said. “I never had it before.”

  I expected a guffaw from Emma, but she hadn’t taken her eyes off of Joseph since we started eating. If there was anyone else at the table, she seemed unaware of it.

  At least there’s that.

  I chowed on everything on my plate, even though I had never been a fan of asparagus, while Frankie and Joseph bantered across the table.

  “Did she meet Hildegarde yet?” Joseph said.

  Emma grunted.

  “You get much out of her today?”

  I couldn’t tell which her he was talking about. It didn’t seem to matter what he was saying or who he was saying it to, Joseph looked only at Frankie. Nobody, thankfully, was looking at me as I shoveled in the food.

  “Not much more than a bad attitude,” Emma said.

  “She’s nothing if not aggressively unreliable,” Joseph said.

  I tried not to stare.

  Who’d a thought, huh?

  “I’m going to have to bring Little Augie in tomorrow,” Frankie said. “If you’ll keep the heifer et al out of the way.”

  “Et al,” Joseph said. “The brother to
et cetera.”

  Expectations were definitely useless here. The conversation went on like that, yet just when I was getting used to the fact that this man who could pass as a cattle thief had a more sophisticated wit than most college professors, he stood up, announced he was walking Emma and me back to our place, and slung a very scary-looking rifle over his shoulder. With Frankie left behind, he said nothing all the way down the driveway and only mumbled a good night at our door before he strode down the hill. I watched from the porch as he let himself into the old bunkhouse.

  “Where does he stay?”

  “There,” Emma said.

  Charming digs. I think we got the upgrade after all.

  Even though I didn’t anticipate an answer, I still asked, “Who is he, anyway?”

  Emma surprised me. “He’s Sister Frankie’s cousin. His uncle, her grandfather, owned this ranch before Frankie’s parents took it over right before she was born.”

  “So why is he here now?” I said.

  That was evidently pushing it, because Emma shrugged and disappeared into the house.

  Not that it matters, Kirsten, the Nudnik said. You’re only going to be here for twenty-nine more days.

  That was suddenly the most depressing thing I could think of. I went inside and crawled under the quilts.

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  Now you need to discover what you love. #TheMercifulScar

  Chapter

  SIX

  My second day on the ranch went much like my first, with one exception: Emma left before chores to ride out on horseback with Joseph.

  Yes!

  “What do they do all day?” I asked Frankie as the two of us and the dogs walked down to the barn.

  “Joseph handles the cattle,” she said. “Emma took far better to them—and to him—than she did to the sheep.” She smiled faintly. “And me. Anyway, they’re going out to check the steer we have grazing in a pasture we’re leasing from a neighbor. We won’t see them for a while.”

  That would have been fabulous news if not for the fact that with Emma not there, Frankie parked me on the detached tractor seat beneath Hildegarde’s intimidating udders and tried to teach me how to milk a cow. That was one expectation that was met: I was a complete disaster.