The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  “I’m sorry!” I said, and waited for the poor thing to get up. But she just kept struggling as her eyes went wild.

  “Why doesn’t she get up?” I sounded as hysterical as the lamb, which had gone hoarse crying for her mom.

  “She can’t,” Frankie said. “She’s cast.”

  Why can’t these people just speak English?

  “That means she’s on her back,” Emma said, and for a horrible moment I thought I’d blurted out the question.

  “Once they land that way, they don’t stop struggling so it’s impossible for them to receive help.” Frankie put both hands under the ewe’s side and rolled her the other way. In a flurry of hooves and hay and probably poop, she scrambled to her feet and thundered across the pen to her lamb.

  Only twenty-eight days to go.

  I watched Frankie deftly hook the ewe again and get her and her traumatized lamb into the big pen with the rest of the flock. Something had better happen for me pretty soon or there were going to be a whole lot fewer than twenty-eight days.

  “I’m glad you came.”

  I turned to stare at Emma, who was coming back from closing the gate behind Frankie.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I said.

  She shrugged her perfect square shoulders. “I’m glad you came so there’s somebody to help Frankie with the sheep. That leaves me free to work with the cattle.”

  “You’re into them, then,” I said.

  “Yeah. I don’t have the patience for sheep.”

  I couldn’t help laughing, although it came out more like a snort. “And I do?”

  “I wouldn’t have tried as many times as you did to hook that stupid ewe. I was just lucky to snag her on the first try today.”

  “I don’t think that was luck,” I said.

  I felt myself warming up. Sheer loneliness will make you run to any glimmer of kindness you see. Sort of like Bathsheba.

  “You must have worked on a ranch before,” I said.

  Emma shook her head. “I’ve just always liked to be outside doing stuff.”

  “That why you joined the military?”

  Suddenly it was as if I were watching someone flash freeze. Emma’s eyes went dull and her arms stiffened beside her.

  Way to frost the room, Kirsten.

  If Joseph hadn’t called to her from the corral just then, I was sure Emma would have stopped breathing. At the sound of his voice, she visibly melted and brushed past me to go to him.

  Wow, Nudnik said.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  It was hard to get Emma out of my mind the rest of the day, unless I was thinking about the endless days I had left. They were both the same thing actually. How was being there doing either one of us any good? Emma had nightmares and turned into a pillar of salt if Joseph wasn’t around. I still wanted to cut, and even that didn’t have the effect it did before. I decided it was time to ask some questions that didn’t have anything to do with chickens or sheep.

  That night Emma stayed at the main house with Joseph after supper and Frankie walked me down to the Cloister. Being alone with her right then was the first break I’d caught since I’d been there.

  Of course, once she hooked her arm through mine and we started our walk, I wanted to wimp out, so I just blurted: “Sister Frankie, no offense, but when is my therapy going to start?”

  She was quiet as we continued down the driveway but I didn’t get the sense that she was offended, so I waited. And waited. Until we were on the front porch. She sat in one of the creaky wooden rockers and I perched on the edge of the other. This was more like how I imagined therapy to be.

  “Do you know the concept of bat kol?” she said.

  I shook my head. “Is that a psychological term?”

  “No, it’s actually from the Jewish tradition. It literally means ‘daughter of the voice.’”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I tried not to sound like I was gritting my teeth but I wasn’t having much success. My words squeezed out like they were coming through a sieve. If Frankie sensed that—and what didn’t she sense?—it didn’t even flicker in her eyes. The eyes now turning the gold of the sunset beyond the porch.

  “When you hear the voice of God indirectly, the Jews call it bat kol, the daughter of the voice,” she said.

  Look out, we’re entering the Twilight Zone.

  “It’s more like an echo that comes through seemingly chance things. Like the lyrics to a song or the way a painting speaks to you or an offhand comment from a stranger. It doesn’t take the place of Scripture, where God has already spoken. But it never runs counter to Scripture. It supports it, in fact.”

  Frankie fell silent except for the squeak of the chair as she rocked it against the porch floorboards.

  O-kay. And what are you supposed to do with that?

  “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  The words were out before I could stop them, and yet I wasn’t sorry, even as I heard my mother in my head saying, Don’t take that tone, Kirsten.

  Frankie stopped rocking. I held my breath.

  “Kirsten, my dear,” she said. “Your therapy just started.”

  “What?” I pressed my hands to my temples. “I’m sorry—I just don’t get it.”

  “Evidently you do because you’re starting to ask the right questions.”

  “What about the right answers?” I said, without prompting from the Nudnik.

  Frankie leaned across her lap, hands on her knees, face alive. “Here’s the first answer,” she said. “Here’s what to do . . .”

  Wait for it . . .

  “Listen for bat kol,” she said. “Listen and you’ll hear it. That’s where therapy begins.”

  That’s it?

  I wondered that myself as I watched Frankie take her slow, steady walk across the grass to the waiting Norwich and Undie. She’d made it sound so simple, but I couldn’t think of anything more convoluted, starting with the fact that there was no way God was speaking to me. I hadn’t given him five minutes in months.

  Maybe that’s why He’s going to do the talking through somebody else. Just sayin’.

  I rubbed my thumb over the two new wounds under my arm.

  “That somebody better show up soon,” I whispered. “Real soon.”

  The next day, I experienced no bat kol or bat mitzvah or batlava—

  I think that’s baklava . . .

  Nor was I able to strike up another conversation with Emma or get more than the occasional bark out of Joseph. Although Frankie talked to me when we were together, it was about all the things sheep couldn’t do. That included biting, kicking, scratching, spewing venom, running fast, or even looking up.

  “They’re basically lost without a shepherd,” she’d told me. “That’s why I feel like what I do is sacred work.”

  At least she didn’t take me right to the Twenty-Third Psalm. Emma was wrong about me having patience.

  Frankie and I did have one conversation I could get into. Just as Joseph had ordered, she now carried her gun with her whenever we left the barn—hung casually over her shoulder like a Coach bag. I asked her if she would use it if we met up with a bear.

  “It would depend on whether she looked like she was going to attack us,” Frankie said as if we were talking about locating the cosmetics aisle at Macy’s. “By law you’re not allowed to shoot one unless it’s going after a human.”

  “You couldn’t shoot that grizzly if you caught her killing your sheep?”

  “Nope. Our only recourse would be to call the wildlife people and they’d come and shoot her with a tranquilizer gun, basically. Then they’d take her off someplace and let her go.”

  Let’s get back to what to do if Mama Grizzly is about to kill you.

  “So if we met up with her . . . ,” I said.

  “Well, first of all, the best thing to do is back slowly and quietly away. They aren’t usually aggressive with humans. Grizzlies are really fairly reclusive. On the other hand, a grizzly
can move at thirty-five miles an hour, so you aren’t going to outrun it. Just a calm, slow, backward walk is what you need.”

  “Why do you need a gun, then?”

  Frankie’s face winced. “As I said, they aren’t usually aggressive . . . unless you have food, which we don’t usually walk around with. The problem with this bear is that she has the cub. If she thinks you’re endangering her baby, all bets are off. Were she to actually attack to protect that cub and our lives were clearly in danger, I’d have to try to take her down.” Frankie tapped her gun. “With a thirty-thirty, I’d probably have to shoot until the gun was empty, and even then it would have to be in her neck or head.” She stopped herself as my face went pale. I could feel it. “I’m a good enough shot that I could at least slow her down enough for us both to get away.”

  “And what should I do?”

  Frankie grinned. “Run like your life depended on it. Because it would.”

  I can’t believe you just had that conversation with a nun.

  Nah. By that time, I could believe just about anything.

  Still, my loneliness swelled. Except for Bathsheba. She greeted me every morning at the barn like I was arriving just in the nick of time with a kidney for her transplant, and no matter how hard I tried to ignore her, she followed me everywhere, including into the outhouse behind the horse corral. It was difficult to pretend she wasn’t there when the thing was only three feet square. She all but fetched the toilet paper for me.

  I finally gave up and let her climb into my lap when I sat on the hay bale watching Frankie milk Hildegarde, and I got permission to take her with me when we moved the sheep. She was absolutely no help, but she wasn’t really in the way either. Most of the time she got bored with the whole thing and took off to chase some low-flying killdeer. Fortunately the sheep never followed her, and Norwich and Undie only looked at her with complete disdain and went back to doing their thing. When Joseph commented that Bathsheba was about as useless a dog as he’d ever seen, I decided the two of us might as well stick together. From then on, she slept on our front porch, curled up under one of the rocking chairs like a cozy ball of yarn. I was under strict orders not to let her in the house, which was fine. I was, after all, the woman who didn’t like dogs.

  Day Five dawned hazy and gray, kind of like my mood. That didn’t get any better when, after we took the sheep out to the south pasture, Frankie announced I needed to learn how to buck hay.

  I don’t know what that is but it can’t be good.

  Yeah, one more thing I was going to stink at. That prophecy was fulfilled when both Bathsheba and I were standing on top of a skyscraper of hay bales, where I was barely managing to hold one against my hips the way Frankie instructed me from the bed of the pickup truck below, and she said, “Okay, good. Now toss it to me.”

  Laughter exploded straight out of my gut.

  “Toss it?” I said between snorts. “You want me to toss it?” I snorted again. “I can hardly lift the thing and you want me to toss it.”

  Funny. That’s exactly what I was going to say.

  Frankie said something but I couldn’t hear it over my own guffawing. All I could do was stand there with my arms full of hay bale and howl. And try not to wet my pants.

  “I’m glad somebody thinks this is fun,” a male voice said.

  I was surprised—okay, astonished—

  I’ve always wanted to use that word—

  —to see a dark-haired youngish guy standing beside the pickup. Make that an attractive, wavy-dark-haired guy with shoulders that looked like he’d bucked a fair amount of hay in his twenty-something years and intelligent black eyes that said he’d never done anything but disprove the Theory of Relativity. Or something.

  It was in my favor that those swarthy good looks didn’t fall under my type. I also benefited from the fact that I wanted nothing to do with men ever again. Otherwise I would have dropped the bale of hay the six feet between me and the ground—and possibly dropped with it.

  Besides, if I was astonished by this guy’s appearance on the scene, Frankie was obviously flabbergasted.

  Another word I’ve always wanted to use.

  She leaned both hands on the sides of the truck bed so that her face was level with his and she just looked at him. I could almost feel her soaking him in with her eyes.

  “Andy,” she said finally, in a voice I’d never heard her use. It was almost motherly, though nothing close to it had ever come out of my own mother.

  “Do I get a hug or what?” he said. And then he grinned. I’d only seen one genuine, tooth-filled, cocoa-warm smile to match it—and that was on Frankie herself.

  She gave him her replica as he held out his arms and she fell into them, right off the side of the truck. He lowered her by the waist like she was made of air and engulfed her against his chest.

  Meanwhile, my arms were starting to shake as I stood there holding a hay bale that wasn’t getting any lighter. I raised one thigh to try to balance it. Big mistake. Hay and I teetered sideways and headed for the ground. Fortunately the bale made it there first. Then me. Then the big handsome grin and the square, muscled hand that reached down to help me up.

  I scrambled up without it and felt the spontaneous combustion on my face as I looked down at the hay that no longer qualified as a bale.

  “How do you put it back together?” I said. It was the only thing that came into my mind.

  The guy, whose name, apparently, was Andy, laughed. It was the same husky sound Frankie made. “Not even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

  “I thought Humpty Dumpty was an egg,” I said.

  You have completely lost it.

  Andy dimpled. Despite the complete difference in coloring, there was no question that he was related to Frankie.

  “Actually,” he said, “there’s nothing in the rhyme itself that indicates Humpty was an egg. We just assume that from the picture books. I personally have him pegged for a bale of hay.”

  “Kirsten,” Frankie said as she nudged herself back under his arm, “this is my nephew, Andy DeLuca.”

  Yeah, I knew he was Italian.

  “Andy, Kirsten Petersen.”

  My newest resident basket case.

  “Hey,” he said, then winced. “Bad word choice. Bad.”

  “Speaking of hay,” Frankie said, “get yourself up there and help Kirsten. I need to get sixteen bales in before it starts to rain.”

  “I’m here five minutes and you put me to work,” he said.

  “Yes, I do.” She reached in the cab of the truck and produced a pair of gloves she slapped into his hands. “And then we’ll talk about what you’re doing here.”

  Her look went sober and so did his.

  Awk-ward.

  I climbed back up on the stack and Andy climbed up behind me.

  “You slide them out and I’ll grab them and toss them,” he said.

  He could have done the whole job with one arm in a sling, but I didn’t argue. Somewhere in that look he’d exchanged with Frankie, the easy charm had been sucked out. We bucked the rest of the hay without a word.

  When it was all loaded in the truck, Bathsheba leaped on top of it and I followed her. The tension was so thick by then there wasn’t enough air in the cab for me, Andy, and his Aunt Frankie.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do,” I said to Bathsheba as Frankie ground the gears and eased the truck through the gate. “But I’m going to hold on and keep my mouth shut.”

  She seemed to agree.

  When we arrived at the back of the barn, it was obvious from the way Andy slammed the passenger door that all had not gone well in the front seat.

  “We’ve got this,” Frankie said as I jumped down to the tailgate. “Why don’t you go get cleaned up?” She gave Andy’s back another long look. “And he and I will bring the sheep in tonight. Give you some free time.”

  Translation: You don’t need to see this.

  I
was more than happy to leave them to it. Family conflict wasn’t my area of expertise.

  Emma, too, was apparently shooed back to the Cloister an hour later. She spent the first five minutes she was there staring out the window at Joseph as he hurried toward the main house, body leaning forward like a ladder.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” she said.

  Since there was no one else there, I assumed she was talking to me.

  “No,” I said. “Frankie’s nephew showed up this afternoon. I don’t think she was expecting him.”

  Emma turned away from the window and raised an eyebrow at me. “Andy?” she said.

  “Yeah.” I tried not to sound too eager, but this did have the potential for an exchange of more than three words. “Do you know anything about him?”

  “No. Just that he’s getting his master’s at MIT.”

  “Impressive.”

  “I guess. If you like the brainy type.”

  “I don’t,” I said. Too quickly. “I don’t think Frankie is all that happy that he’s here. I mean, she is, but I got the impression—”

  “It’s none of my business,” Emma said. “I’m going to get washed up for supper.”

  Shot down again. What are we, four for four now?

  A half hour later we were about to walk out the front door to go up to the main house when Joseph took the porch steps in one long-legged stride, carrying a platter covered with aluminum foil.

  “You’re having supper in tonight, ladies,” he said. “Watch out, the bottom’s hot.”

  I didn’t even attempt to take it from him. My track record for dropping things was way too good. He handed it to Emma, who, as always, couldn’t seem to take her eyes off his face.

  “Is everything okay?” she said.

  I thought it was none of her business.

  “We just need a little family time,” Joseph said, although he didn’t look like this was a reunion he was going to enjoy.

  He looks like he’d rather have a colonoscopy, actually.

  When he was gone, Emma carried the platter into the kitchen and I followed her. The food was a good excuse.