The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  From the moment Frankie showed me how to slather udder balm on Hildegarde’s, well, udders, the Jersey took a disliking to me.

  Dislike? Don’t you think that’s understating the case a bit?

  “She hates me,” I said to Frankie as the cow bawled and did a two-step with her back legs while I tried to grab that third, elusive hangy-down thing.

  “She hates everybody.” Frankie perched on a nearby hay bale and reached out to take the jar from me. “She’s such an unpleasant bovine. That’s why Joseph sawed off the tips of her horns.”

  “He sawed them?”

  That’s one guy you’re gonna want to stay away from.

  “Hildegarde got him one too many times.”

  “No wonder she yells like that.”

  Frankie laughed her husky laugh. “No, she just wants her calf. I have to keep them separated at night so he doesn’t drink her dry before I can get to her. We may have to bring him in to get her started, but let’s give it a try without him first.”

  You give it a try. I don’t trust these steel bars to hold her.

  Frankie demonstrated how she held a teat and worked her fingers to pull and stretch and squeeze, all at the same time. A thin, almost blue stream sprayed weakly into the metal bucket.

  “Is that, like, the nonfat milk?” I said.

  Frankie grinned. “No, she’s just being stingy. But give it a go.”

  That was when the disaster happened. The minute I squeezed my fingers around her, Hildegarde howled like I was killing her and tried to stomp around in the chute, succeeding in knocking the bucket back far enough so she could poop right into what milk Frankie had gotten out of her.

  Note to self: refuse all dairy products here . . .

  “Hilda, honey, that was obnoxious,” Frankie said. “Okay, Kirsten, you go clean out the bucket—there’s a hose and some soap over there—and I’ll get Little Augie.”

  Here’s your chance, Kirsten. Run!

  Maybe I would’ve if my stomach hadn’t turned itself inside out while I took a hose and some disinfectant to the bucket of disgustingness. In only a little over a day I had encountered five different varieties of animal excrement—and I hadn’t even been around the horses yet.

  Yeah, I understand their patties are huge . . .

  When I got back to Frankie and Hildegarde, a black calf had joined the party. At least, Frankie said he was a calf. I’d seen ponies smaller than he was. One look at his face and I knew why they called him Little Augie. Between the massive shoulders and the forehead that glowered rebelliously above his eyes, he was a dead ringer for a mafia hit man.

  He acted like one too. While Frankie sat on one side of Hildegarde, Little Augie stood on the other side and banged his head against his mother’s udder bag.

  “Doesn’t that hurt her?” I said.

  “I don’t hear her complaining,” Frankie said.

  Hildegarde was now giving up milk so thick I didn’t see how it came out of the holes. Frankie kept two long nipples going while Little Augie sucked and slobbered and pulled at the other one. It was both fascinating and disturbing. The best part was, I wasn’t involved. I sat on the hay bale and intended to keep it that way.

  “Augie is getting a little big to be nursing,” Frankie said, “but I don’t want to wean him for at least another month. I think they both need it.” She pulled out the pail and smiled up at me. “And they sure give us some great milk.”

  I looked down at a wisp of hay swimming at the top of the bucket. “What happens to it now?”

  “I strain it and put it in the refrigerator. This will last us about a day, the way we go through it.”

  I swallowed. “You don’t pasteurize it?”

  “No, that’s why I can’t sell it. But you will never taste anything richer.”

  Uh, thanks but no thanks. I’m trying to lay off the salmonella.

  “I’m sorry I was so bad at this,” I said. “Emma seems like she just takes to everything.”

  “You’ll catch on,” Frankie said. “As for Emma, she mostly just takes to Joseph.”

  Ya gotta wonder what that’s about.

  Frankie joined me on the bale. “Part of the draw to Joseph, I think, is the military connection. Emma served in the armed forces, did she tell you that?”

  No. You can’t get that information from a grunt.

  I shook my head.

  “Joseph did two tours in Vietnam back in the sixties. When he got out of the army, he was only twenty and came here to help my parents run the ranch. And that was fortunate because they had no earthly idea what they were doing. They had both dropped out of Montana State to escape the Establishment, they said, but Joseph was a serious student of agriculture before he was drafted.”

  Frankie picked up the milk pail and led the way out of the barnyard toward the pump where she apparently always left the milk while we herded the sheep.

  Reason number two not to drink that stuff.

  “We were just babies when he came, so I grew up with Uncle Joe, as we called him then.”

  “But he was actually your cousin,” I said.

  “Technically, but he was always so much more than that to us. And to my parents.” Her smile was wistful as she set the pail down. “They were basically hippies who had this pastoral idea about keeping sheep when they inherited the ranch from my mother’s parents. If it hadn’t been for Joseph, we probably would’ve starved to death.”

  “So he’s been here ever since?” I said.

  Frankie tilted her head, and I watched a decision being made in her brown eyes.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” she said finally. “All right, let’s go get the woolies.”

  It wasn’t another day of feeling totally inept that made me want to cut again that night. I did still feel like I couldn’t do anything right, but I was almost getting used to that. I actually found myself being a little amused by the sheep that evening as we were herding them back from the south pasture. I could almost laugh at the way they’d head straight where they were supposed to go, but then suddenly trot off behind some teenage-looking wooly and head up a hill or come to a complete halt to graze on spiky clumps of grass when the thick, silky stuff awaited them just ahead.

  At least, I was amused, until I watched a particularly desperate ewe take off after the one and only black sheep in the flock and suddenly saw myself in her. How much different had I been when I followed Wes around for three years, going to church and campus ministry because that was what he did? Or making his friends my friends when I had nothing in common with them?

  You mean you never actually dug online alternative rock . . . fusion food . . .

  But it was really Bathsheba who took me into I-have-to-cut territory that second day. Every time I went into the barn area, she leaped down from the tower of hay bales as if she’d been waiting there for my arrival her whole life. She never jumped around like the other dogs, but she deposited about a cup of saliva on my hands and then capered along at my side, tongue hanging out, eyes gazing up at me like . . .

  Like I’d always gazed at Wes. Just like Bathsheba, I’d waited for him to show up, and I was always there with the affection and the adoration and the downright sickening devotion. That night when Frankie and the rest of us had tucked the sheep into their pen and were headed up to the main house for supper, Bathsheba stood behind the barn gate and whined as she watched me go.

  “Does that dog actually do anything around here?” Emma said to Frankie.

  Frankie gave me a sideways look. “I think she does now.”

  Oh, good. Now you’re going to have that hound panting after you wherever you go.

  That was the image in my mind that night when the sun finally went down around ten. Emma was in her room—I assumed she was asleep, although, “Good night, Kirsten,” didn’t seem to be in her repertoire—and it was dark enough that I didn’t have to go into the closet with my instruments and my first aid kit. I was still stunned that Frankie had provided not only scissors
but fresh disposable razors that were a snap to disassemble. But as I laid out a sharp piece on a clean towel on the dresser and opened the first aid kit, that didn’t feel like trust to me.

  Nah, it feels more like, You’re gonna do it anyway so here’s the stuff. Have at it.

  That wasn’t it either. I couldn’t name it. But when I made the delicate cut just below the one from the day before, the perfect trickle of blood took no pain away with it. The ache I didn’t understand was still in there, still in me.

  Maybe it’s time to go deeper. Use some elbow grease.

  I tightened my fingers around the blade, but I stopped just above the skin and stared at yesterday’s wound. It was still pink and tender. It hadn’t even begun to scab over yet.

  That one didn’t last you long, did it?

  I could feel bubbles of fearful sweat break out on my upper lip. Again I squeezed the blade tighter between my fingers. I might have gone deeper. I might have—if Avila hadn’t barked.

  I jerked my hand back and let the blade fall onto the dresser.

  You think she’s barking at you? You’re an idiot—she can’t even see you from up there!

  I just hadn’t heard her bark like that the nights before. Long and insistent. Urgent.

  Nor had I heard the sounds that were coming through my bedroom wall, on the side it shared with Emma’s room. Sharp cries cut through the wallpaper and then a scream. And another.

  Pressing my hand against the blood on my inner arm, I ran through the first living room and then through the second to Emma’s door.

  “Are you okay in there?” My voice shook.

  No answer. Just the kind of crying that made me think whatever Avila was barking at was right now attacking Emma in her bed.

  “Emma!” I said, and then tried the doorknob. Locked.

  Okay. Okay. Think. Go get Frankie? No, Joseph was closer.

  I was headed, barefoot and still bleeding, toward the living room, when Emma’s cries suddenly stopped. She moaned softly and then all was quiet. Outside, Avila was still carrying on as if an entire regiment of coyotes was descending on the sheep pen. Surely Joseph was going to go investigate—

  I ran through the house and flung myself out the front door and stumbled to the end of the porch that overlooked the bunkhouse below. Joseph was just coming around the corner, long gun in hand.

  “Joseph!” I called out.

  He barely turned his head my way. “Get back inside.”

  His bark was not that different from Avila’s, and I was sure the bite would be just as bad, but I leaned over the railing and screamed at him, “It’s Emma! She’s being attacked in her bed and I can’t get in!”

  He strode toward me and stopped halfway to the porch. “It’s a nightmare,” he said.

  “I know!”

  No, moron, he means an actual nightmare.

  “She’ll go back to sleep,” Joseph said. “Now get inside.”

  He didn’t wait for me to obey before he resumed his march toward the sheep pen and a now frenzied Avila. I crept inside and went back to Emma’s door and tapped with my knuckles.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered.

  A sleepy moan was her reply.

  I crawled into bed without wrapping my arm and listened until Avila stopped barking and all was silent again. Then I hugged the quilts and envied Emma the sweet sleep of release.

  The next morning (Day Three of thirty, the Nudnik reminded me) as Emma walked with Frankie and me down to the barn, she showed no sign she’d wrestled with her demons the night before.

  What are you thinking? She never shows a sign of anything.

  At least not until Joseph showed up at the barn about a minute after we arrived. Then it was as if she’d just taken two shots of espresso. I let myself into the bum lamb pen to fill the pellet troughs, but I could hear the three of them in the corral that bordered it where Joseph kept a few horses. I could also see Emma astride the top of the fence taking in his every move.

  “That mother grizzly and her yearling cub killed thirty-four lambs and ewes at Cunningham’s last night,” Joseph said.

  What mother grizzly and her cub?

  “With the five rams they took out at McAllister’s the other night, that brings the damages up to ten thousand dollars.”

  Joseph’s voice was flat. Frankie’s was not.

  “Not to mention the grief and frustration,” she said thickly.

  I paused with one hand in the pellet-filled trough and wondered if I could feel grief for sheep. Frankly, I was having trouble feeling anything but fear right now.

  Ya think? Grizzly bears?

  Something larger than a lamb’s nose nudged my hand. Joseph apparently saw at the same time I did that it was not one of the bums who was hocking back pellets as fast as he could, but Joseph’s large, star-faced horse who had poked his muzzle between the rails.

  “Don’t let him eat that,” Joseph barked at me.

  How do you not let him? That thing is a Clydesdale!

  I gave the horse’s nose a timid push but he continued to chomp. Emma slid off the fence, popped him in the face with her hat, and plunked it back on her curls.

  “I haven’t spent much time around horses,” I said.

  As in none.

  “Merton is not your typical horse,” Frankie said.

  She was the only one laughing. I didn’t count the snickers Emma was covering with her hand.

  “Why aren’t you carrying, Frankie?” Joseph said.

  I didn’t have to ask what it was she was supposed to be carrying. Joseph hitched the ever-present gun strap up on his shoulder and put his hands on his hips. He really was just bones and sinew.

  “I don’t think the grizzly will barge into the barn,” Frankie said. “Has anybody seen my hook?”

  “You’re not going to take her out with a hook.”

  “Not the bear—the ewe I need to get back into the flock. She’s getting a little lazy back there with the big bums. She’s played the I-have-a-delicate-lamb card long enough.”

  I had no idea what either of them was talking about.

  Shocking.

  But it was clear what Joseph had in mind as he took his gun off his shoulder and hung it on Frankie’s.

  “I don’t need to lug a thirty-aught-six around all day,” she said.

  “You need something.”

  “I’ll get my thirty-thirty before we take the sheep out.”

  Joseph gave her a long, steely look that would have gone right through me—and nearly did when he turned it my way. I jumped and sent several bums cowering into the corner.

  “You make sure she does it, you hear?” he said.

  His eyes went immediately back to Frankie but I nodded anyway.

  “All right,” he said. “Emma, give me fifteen minutes and then you and I’ll go do some real work.”

  “Yes, sir.” Emma’s dark eyes gleamed as if she were waiting for the response she knew was coming.

  “What did I tell you about calling me sir?” he said. “I work for a living.”

  That was apparently what she thought she’d hear because Emma smiled. Big and broad and sure. It made her pretty.

  “Good,” Frankie said. “I need your help back here, ladies—both of you, if you will?”

  I wasn’t sure anybody needed my help around there but I followed Frankie to the other bum lamb pen and mentally named it Bellwether Middle School.

  “So, Kirsten,” Frankie was saying, “the best way to catch a sheep is by one of its back hooves.”

  I could feel paralysis setting in.

  “And the best way to do that is with a hook.”

  Gee, what a relief. I thought we were going to have to wrestle it to the ground.

  I stood, arms folded, against the ubiquitous stack of hay bales and watched as Frankie picked up a six-foot, maybe longer, metal pole with a hooklike contraption on the end, walked over to a rather plump ewe, and snapped the thing around her back hoof before the ewe even seemed to register
that Frankie was after her. I guessed sometimes it was a good thing that sheep were stupid.

  Great. Hooking lesson over.

  But Frankie let the ewe go and handed the hook to Emma.

  Uh-oh. Looks like everybody gets a turn to play Little Bo Peep.

  At that point the ewe was somewhat wise to what was going on—as wise as a sheep gets—and she ran clumsily across the pen. Emma walked slowly after her and the moment one of those back feet was airborne she snapped the hook around it and the ewe went down on her side.

  “Perfect!” Frankie said.

  By then the ewe’s equally as chubby lamb was bleating her curly head off and her mother was burping back at her as if to say, If they take me out, run for your life!

  I was about to run for mine when Frankie unhooked the ewe yet again and walked toward me with the hook.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “It’s not actually that hard.”

  I looked, dumbfounded, at Emma. Her eyes weren’t taunting and her shrug was actually a little reassuring. Only that made me take the hook from Frankie—and then look hopelessly at the ewe who was now pacing frantically up and down the pen, trying to get to the hysterical lamb Frankie had barricaded into what looked like a playpen.

  “Do just what Emma did,” Frankie said. “Wait until you get a clear shot at one of her back hooves and then grab it with the hook. Let the hook do the work.”

  I can’t describe what happened next because it all went down so fast I don’t even know what happened. After about ten tries and misses, both the ewe and I were so frustrated, I was sweating like a pig and she was peeing all over the pen.

  “Give her a minute to calm down,” Frankie said.

  I didn’t know whether she was talking to the ewe or me, but I was sure it wasn’t going to happen for either one of us. I just wanted to get the whole thing over with, so I took a huge breath and moved slowly, with exaggerated strides, straight at the ewe. She was between me and the fence so there was no place for her to go. She tried to jump over another playpen, which meant a foot came up, and I lunged for it. The hook didn’t catch on her hoof. The whole pole knocked the ewe completely over and left her on her back with all four hooves pawing the air.