The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  “Would you please go help Joseph with the body?” she said.

  The skin between Andy’s dark brows puckered, but he got up and vaulted easily over the gate. There seemed to be no need for words. He just looked at her and went.

  Another attack of the awkwards. How ya gonna smooth this one out?

  “How’s Emma?” I said.

  Frankie closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face was gentle again. “She’s resting.”

  I waited for more but Frankie just let herself quietly into the pen and squatted to look at the lamb.

  “Did her mom die in childbirth?” I said. “Or was it the bear?”

  “I might have thought she died in childbirth. The ewe was old and probably missed a couple of fertility cycles before she bred, which was why she was so late lambing. But I’m sure it was the bear because the ewe had already licked her baby clean, and I’m sure she’s the reason the bear didn’t get the lamb too.”

  “How did she do that? I thought sheep didn’t have any defenses.”

  Frankie smiled sadly. “They don’t. But a new mother will pretend to. She’ll get between her baby and whatever is threatening it and stomp her feet like she’s about to attack. I have to respect these ewes for that, you know? It didn’t keep the bear from attacking her, but she saved her baby.” She rubbed a finger along the sleeping lamb’s cheek. “If Joseph hadn’t shot in the air and scared the bear off, this little one wouldn’t have made it either. Girl or boy?”

  “Girl,” I said. “We named her—well, Andy named her—Petey. Petey Ketersen.”

  Frankie readjusted her hat.

  “If that’s not okay I won’t mind if you change it.”

  She said quickly, to avoid another Awkward Moment.

  “Why would I mind? I think it’s perfectly lovely—and appropriate, seeing how this is your lamb and you’ll be taking care of her.”

  “Me?”

  “It looks like she’s chosen you.”

  “But I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  “You’ve already fed her, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brought her fresh hay.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s basically all she’ll need for a couple of days until she’s strong enough to join the other bums in the pen. Just feed her four times a day and make sure her pen is clean. I’d say she’ll be ready for another bottle right before supper, so you can come back then. Oh, and I have something for you.”

  Frankie stood up and pulled a small red notebook out of the back pocket of her jeans. I thought it was the one she always wrote in until she handed it to me and I saw that the cover was unmarred and shiny and the pages were crisp and white like a beginning-of-the-semester notebook. A sharpened stub of a pencil followed.

  “As Petey’s caretaker, you’ll want to write down her date and approximate time of birth and how much she takes at each feeding.” Frankie gave me a soft smile. “And anything else you want to write in there.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But—did you already have this on you or something? How did you know this was all going to turn out this way?”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “I just had a God-feeling. I try to pay attention to those.”

  She climbed over the gate, and for the first time it occurred to me to watch how she did it, since it was one of the countless skills I had yet to master. She basically straddled it like she was sitting on a horse and then swung one leg to join the other on the rungs and hopped down.

  Good to know.

  “You can go have lunch,” Frankie said from the other side. “Take some free time. Petey won’t need you again until supper. I’ll put her bottle in the fridge out here.”

  “I think I’ll stay here for a few minutes,” I said.

  When she was gone I wrote Petey’s information on the first page of the notebook and fluffed up the hay and inspected her for bugs and birth defects. She was perfect.

  So perfect that a few minutes turned into several hours of watching her sleep and reassuring her when she woke up and rubbing the place between her ears where she seemed to like it.

  I had just fetched her bottle from the fridge and was about to settle in to feed her when Joseph appeared at the pen with a long-handled metal dipper in his hand. It looked like something out of the old Clint Eastwood movies Wes used to subject me to.

  “Thought you could use some communion,” Joseph said.

  “It isn’t Sunday,” I said.

  “Doesn’t have to be.”

  He lowered his eyes to the cup. When I reached out to take it from him he said, “Best communion wine you’ll ever taste. Right from the pump.”

  His spurs clanked as he walked away, leaving me in the pen with my lamb. The water shone inside its metal chalice.

  Right from the pump, huh? You think they have a filter on that thing?

  Probably not. But I took a sip, and then downed all of it.

  He was right. It was the best communion I’d ever had.

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  I just had a God-feeling. I try to pay attention to those. #TheMercifulScar

  Chapter

  NINE

  Over the next two days, except when I was doing chores and helping herd the sheep and showing up for the obligatory suppers, I seldom left Petey’s side. And Bathsheba seldom left mine.

  She found an old shirt someplace and dragged it to a spot outside Petey’s pen and slept there, waiting for me to climb out in the morning to run up to the Cloister for a quick shower. The dog was so delighted with the whole arrangement her body wagged from nose to tail tip almost every time I so much as looked at her.

  Frankie was considerably less excited than that when she discovered I was spending my nights in the pen with Petey, and she insisted I go to my own bed so I could get some “decent sleep.”

  I flopped like a flounder until four a.m., imagining Petey shivering in the corner crying for me, certain I’d abandoned her. At four fifteen I couldn’t stand it any longer and I slipped through the already gathering light down to the barn. She actually didn’t bleat until she heard me call her name. Then she tripped across the pen, lips curved around a woeful Where have you been?

  I recorded that in the red notebook—Came when she heard my voice/Wednesday, June 12, 4:23 a.m.—right below Wormed/Tuesday, June 11, 11:00 a.m.—and—Docked tail/Tuesday, June 11, 3:00 p.m.—and—Runs after me when I try to leave the pen/every day. I wasn’t sure that was what Joseph and Frankie were writing in their ranch note-books when they pried them from their pockets and jotted in them, but that was how I was doing it. I liked the clarity of it somehow.

  While my bond with Petey and Bathsheba grew, some of my relationships with the humans foundered. At least with Andy and Emma.

  Andy was quiet and stiff at suppers—which I convinced myself was because he had obvious issues with Joseph—and although he dropped by the pen now and then while I was feeding Petey, he didn’t come in and sit with us in the hay again like he did that first day. His grin was just as charming and his dimples were still intact, but his eyes never seemed to rest on anything. He curled his fingers around the top plastic slat of the pen so that his arm muscles went taut and hunky-looking—

  Seriously, does he have to do that?

  And he said things like, “How’s motherhood, Bo?” And “I hear you’re spoiling her beyond rotten.” It was just never anything I could pick up and weave into a conversation.

  Personally, I think you make him nervous.

  I decided on Tuesday there might actually be something to that, when his visit consisted of, “Just thought I’d bring you girls some fresh hay,” and then a quick exit with the bale still in his arms.

  I scrolled back through every minute I’d spent with him Sunday and couldn’t find anything I’d done that might have made him now act like I was carrying the H1N1 virus.

  Does it matter? You do only have twenty days to go.

  Not only that, but it had also been
eight days since I’d cut. I would be able to leave assuring Frankie that I’d been cured. Somehow.

  Define cured . . .

  But it did matter that Andy was shying away from a friendship with me, because any thread that had started to connect me with Emma had disappeared too. Granted, I wasn’t at the Cloister that much, but when our paths did cross, she couldn’t meet my gaze any better than Andy could. I thought she might be embarrassed about the scene on Sunday.

  Yeah, that went beyond Awkward Moment for the poor kid.

  I even considered assuring her that I didn’t think any less of her because she . . .

  What? Flipped out?

  Right. Bad idea. Besides, with each passing day I was more certain that Emma didn’t care whether I thought less of her or not. Weird as I felt it was, if it hadn’t been for Petey and Bathsheba, I might have shriveled from loneliness.

  Or taken a razor apart.

  Like I said, define cured.

  On Friday it looked like Frankie was going to take even my bond with Petey away.

  When I was feeding her that morning, Frankie joined me in the pen and as always squatted and stroked Petey’s cheek. “I think we need to try putting her in with the other young bums today,” she said. “If we keep her separated too long she won’t learn how to be a sheep.” Frankie rested her warm eyes on me. “She would have learned from her mom and although you’ve been an amazing mother to her, you can’t teach her that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel pretty sheepish most of the time.”

  She chuckled. “Good one.”

  “No, I mean, actually like a sheep.”

  “And is that altogether a bad thing?”

  “It hasn’t worked that well for me—going where everybody told me to go, doing what the person in front of me was doing, not thinking anything out for myself.”

  My voice was thick, and that was a surprise even to me.

  Only to you. Look at Frankie.

  She was looking at me as if she were savoring my face. “Is that what you’ve discovered since you’ve been here?”

  “It’s what I just discovered ten seconds ago.” I had to swallow hard. “Look, I know you’ve been giving me a lot of details about sheep that are obviously linked to Jesus being the Good Shepherd and all. And by the way, I appreciate you not preaching sermonettes on it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like I needed to. You got the connection.”

  “But what am I supposed to do about it? I mean, you told me to listen for bat kol and I tried that and all I heard, frankly, was the wind. And I’m assuming from the sheep references that I’m supposed to listen for the shepherd’s voice and follow that instead of all the other people who are as clueless as I am. But again, I’m not getting the message.”

  “Would you follow it if you did?”

  “Follow what? The message?”

  “Yes. If you heard Jesus say, ‘Kirsten, I want you to stop going for the razor for release and come to Me instead,’ would you do it?”

  “If I knew how! I’ve been here almost two weeks and . . .” I shrugged.

  “Do you want to know how?” she said.

  “I guess—”

  “Kirsten, don’t close off. Keep going with this. Say exactly what you want to say.”

  Oh, she doesn’t really want to hear this, trust me.

  “I don’t think you’re going to like it,” I said.

  “This isn’t about me. It’s about you,” she said.

  And then she waited. The Nudnik was silent.

  “Okay,” I said. “What I want to know is how you do it.”

  “How I hear God?”

  “Yeah. The other day you said you prayed about focusing on Emma and me with Andy here and then you knew what to do. And the whole thing with the ranch notebook. What did you say? Oh, you said you had a God-feeling that you were supposed to have it with you and you always pay attention to those.” I shrugged. “I don’t know how to do any of that. What is it—do you have to be a nun or you don’t get to have a connection with God?”

  All right, Kirsten! I didn’t know you had it in you.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted it out of me, now that I’d spilled my guts all over Petey’s pen.

  But Frankie’s face took on a glow in the always-dim light of the barn. “I don’t have my connection with our Lord because I was a nun—and still am in many ways. I have it because I have immersed myself in who I was made by God to be, and that happens to be a sister. Finding that true self and embracing it is how anyone connects to God. That’s how Joseph does it. That’s how your David Dowling does it. That’s how every girl who has lived with us has begun to learn to do it.” Frankie drew her face closer to mine. “And every time, that starts with a deep longing, a hunger and a thirst, and that’s where you are now. You want God.”

  Frankie went beyond waiting then. She became so still I would have wondered if she was still breathing if I hadn’t gone into a stunned silence of my own, where even the Nudnik left me alone with Frankie’s words.

  I did want that. I did want the peace. I wanted to know that I would have a God-feeling to show me what to do. I wanted to be something besides a sheep who hadn’t even found the flock.

  “I’m tired of being lonely,” I said.

  Frankie put out her hand and touched me on the cheek, just as she always did Petey. “You never have to be again,” she said. “The Lord be with you.”

  I’d heard her say that every night before we shared a meal. The response was always the same from Joseph and Emma and Andy. Now I said it too.

  “And also with you.”

  Frankie prayed then. I couldn’t remember every word even moments after her amen. But the essence of it stayed with me, like the sweet scent of the hay I slept in with Petey. I was loved, and all I had to do was talk to God in whatever way was true and right for me. I already believed in God. Now I had to accept that God believed in me.

  The Nudnik didn’t give it thirty seconds after Frankie left the pen before she whispered: We’ll see how that goes.

  “Just this one time,” I whispered back, out loud, “I want you to shut up.”

  I didn’t have time to ask God to let Petey stay in her pen with me for at least a few more days. As soon as we came back from herding the flock, we started the process of introducing my lamb to the other bums.

  “As her surrogate mother, do I get to give my opinion?” I said before I deposited her tiny self into the fray.

  “Of course,” Frankie said.

  “I think it’s too soon. Look how little she is, and they’re such bruisers. You can’t even see her with them all over her.”

  That wasn’t an exaggeration. The rest of the bums were on her like she was a fresh pan of pellets, all of them expressing their views on the newcomer.

  “They’re just checking her out,” Frankie said. “Thanks to you she’s strong. She’ll be fine.” She started back into the barn. “Let’s go clean out her pen.”

  “That’s it? We’re just going to leave her here to fend for herself?”

  I got the husky laugh. “You’re reminding me of me the first day I put Andy on the bus for kindergarten. I cried all day. He was fine. I was a basket case.”

  “But they’re all nudging at her. Human kids don’t do that.”

  “Really.”

  I turned to see Frankie giving me a wide-open look. “I think that’s one of the reasons we all end up with false selves to begin with. Petey’s blessed. She has a good shepherd and she knows it.”

  It still took everything I had to peel myself away from the bums’ pen and follow Frankie into the barn.

  “I’ll be back to check on you, baby,” I said over my shoulder.

  I kept that promise, especially during feeding time. At first Petey seemed clueless about the nipples on the vats that her new family all vied for like women at a 75-percent-off sale. Frankie finally let me go in there and guide her to an empty one and get her sucking on it. Of course, ten seconds later, the en
tire rest of the group discovered she had a nipple all to herself and they shoved her out of the way and glommed onto it, one after the greedy other.

  “I’m telling you, she’s going to starve,” I said.

  “All right,” Frankie said with an exaggerated sigh. “You can give her one bottle a day, just until she gets acquainted. And she goes back in there when you’re done.” She grinned at me. “You’re turning into a helicopter mom.”

  Yeah, who’d a thought, huh?

  Not with the mother I had. I hadn’t thought about Michelle much since I’d been there, and I smirked to myself thinking about what she’d be saying right now. I was in the same jeans I’d been wearing for a week, and there was so much barn goo pressed into the soles of my boots I’d stopped even trying to dig it out.

  No, I was definitely a different kind of mom. Hanging around the bums’ pen during my free time. Praying for Petey, since I was still self-conscious about praying for myself. And writing down my observations in the red notebook. On Saturday at noon, I recorded: Petey’s looking thinner. And a little lethargic?

  Or maybe you’re neurotic. Just a thought.

  Maybe so, but I tucked the notebook in the pocket of my sweatshirt that I’d hung over the main gate and headed to the back of the barn for some fresh hay, the really sweet stuff. The other bums were all inside their shelter sleeping, so hopefully I could sneak some into the corner for Petey and get her to eat it.

  Once I got back with a few chunks—what Frankie called flakes—I decided the best thing to do would be to drop it into the pen from the horse corral side, where they kept Hildegarde. I wouldn’t have even considered it but the cow was currently standing in a far corner of the corral letting Little Augie nurse while he was lying down.

  Oh brother.

  The cow didn’t even look my way as I dropped the hay in, got over the fence the way I’d learned from Frankie, and picked the hay up again.

  Y’know, that whole scene with her and Augie is like a metaphor for your past relationship, don’t you think?

  No! Okay, yes, sort of. But right now it seemed like that had happened to somebody else. Some other Kirsten who wouldn’t have tossed hay into a lamb’s pen and tried to climb in with it if—