The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  The next morning as Frankie and I went about our barn chores I couldn’t tell whether Andy had talked to her or not, but it wasn’t long before it was apparent that someone else had.

  “I understand you confronted some anger yesterday,” she said as we let ourselves into the sheep pen.

  “Does Joseph tell you everything?” I said.

  “He told me you kicked tail up there at the fence.” Frankie smiled at me over the top of the gate. “I figured out the rest. Good work.”

  I waited until we were at the top of the hill, looking down over the flock, before I said, “You know what I figured out?”

  She absently patted the top of Avila’s head. Her brown eyes were right on me.

  “I figured out that it always comes back to me. I can vent for days about my family, but I’m the one I’m angry with.”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because most of the mess of my life is my fault.”

  “It’s your fault that your father treats you like chattel?”

  I felt my eyes widen.

  “It’s your fault that your mother disregards who you are? It’s your fault that the man you loved turned out to be a two-timing freeloader?”

  Frankie paused, but I couldn’t say anything.

  Don’t look at me. I got nothin’.

  “Kirsten, you have a right to be angry with just about everybody who has had an important place in your life.”

  “Except Lara.”

  It was out before I could stop it, and I wanted to, because Frankie grabbed on to it as if she’d been waiting for its appearance since the moment she met me.

  “But you are angry with your sister, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Sometimes. But I shouldn’t be.”

  Frankie curled her fingers lightly around my wrist. “We don’t do should here. We work with what is. We work with what we hear from God.”

  She let go of me and made her way through the flock with Avila. I stayed at the top of the hill, but I didn’t watch for sheep that didn’t get to their feet. I could barely stay on my own.

  I thought I had at least felt God. Wasn’t that Him, cushioning me in safety the night before? I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. Why was it that every time I thought I was getting it, Sister Frankie had to come along and stir it up with a stick?

  By then Frankie had the gate open and the flock was starting to move. I didn’t want to follow today.

  You know, you only have five more days and then you could leave.

  Even with the promise of Andy, that sounded better than staying here and being angry with my sister. I had no right to be angry with Lara.

  But she had every right to be angry with me. If only she could.

  I might actually have planned to leave behind the beginnings of family I’d found at the ranch if staying meant I had to do what Frankie wanted me to do. I might have, if it hadn’t been for what happened the next day.

  All five of us were cutting out wethers for processing, which I quickly gathered meant the young castrated males were going to be turned into lamb chops. I would have had a hard time with that if they’d been cute and fluffy like the bums, but they were far beyond cute. They were even rowdier than the middle school crowd.

  “They act like frat brothers,” I told Andy as we formed a line in the barn with Emma, Frankie, and Joseph to keep them from hurling themselves back into the flock we’d just separated them from.

  “That’s why it’s easier to send them off to become kebob meat,” Andy said. “By the time we’re done doing this, you’re going to want to slaughter them yourself.”

  I started to protest, but one of them chose that moment to break from the pack and try to charge through us. We all stood with our knees bent, arms out like basketball players, ready to step in the way of whoever came our way. This one came my way and bowled me over on his way through.

  “Grab him, Kirsten!” Frankie called out.

  I did my best, arms reaching up from the ground, hands grasping at wool. I was able to grab on to the now panicky frat boy but I couldn’t stop him. He dragged me all the way out of the barn and through the open gate into Bellwether Middle School. I didn’t let go until he swerved to miss an equally panicky ewe and swept me into a pile of flaked hay. Five eighth-grade lambs came over to investigate. So did Andy. He was laughing almost as hard as I was.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, no thanks to the Lambda Lambda Lambda pledge over there.”

  Andy let out a guffaw and reached a hand down to help me up, but I smacked it away and scrambled to my feet.

  “You’re supposed to keep your hands off me.”

  “Why did I make that promise again?” he said.

  When we got the Lambda pledge back to the barn, his brothers were already in the trailer, bodies pressed together as if they were absorbing each other’s fear.

  “Do they know where they’re going?” I asked Frankie.

  She laughed her husky laugh. “You’ve been working with sheep for how long and you’re asking that?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Is it ever hard for you, though? You’ve taken care of them all this time and now they’re going to be . . . processed.”

  “Our job here is to feed the world,” Joseph said. He set the latch on the trailer and looked at me with an unusual kindness in the lines of his face, as if he were talking to a young child. “We’re just feeding the world. You ready, Em?”

  She climbed into the front seat of the truck with him and they pulled away with the trailer.

  “I’m going to let the rest of these sheep back into the pen,” Frankie said. “You two just make sure I don’t leave behind any stragglers, okay?”

  I nodded, but I was staring at Andy. His dark face was ashen.

  “Are you okay?” I said when she was gone. “Andy?”

  Although he shook his head, I knew from the distant horror in his eyes that it wasn’t me he was answering. Nor was I the target of the “No!” that shot from his lips before he tore through the open gateway as if demons seen only by him were clawing at his back. He disappeared with them around the corner of the barn.

  I knew what panic looked like when it roared out of its cage, and I knew it was impossible to beat back alone. Anxiety rising in my own throat, I took up the chase through the gate.

  Andy was sitting up against the barn wall when I found him. His knees were pulled to his chin, arms wrapped around them, face buried. The only thing not held tightly in a ball was his hair, which stood out in startled spikes as if a hand had just raked through.

  I sank down beside him and waited. I wasn’t doing my Frankie imitation. I just knew fear like that could take awhile to retreat to its hiding place. No sense in churning it up again.

  Bathsheba joined us and sat on the other side of me, silent except for the ever-present rhythm of her panting. It might have been my imagination but as Andy’s breathing slowed, so did hers. Finally he lifted his head.

  “That was—I don’t know, it was . . . weird.”

  “You’ve not had a panic attack before?” I said.

  Andy shook his head. “It freaked me out but it wasn’t like panic. I remembered something.” He squinted with all of his face as if he were trying to peer into it again. “What did Joseph say to you?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “When you asked if it ever bothered them to take the lambs to be processed—what did he say?”

  “Um, something about our job here is to feed the world.”

  Andy squeezed his eyes closed. “He said that to me when I was little. I didn’t know it until I heard it again just now, but I saw it so clear.”

  I wasn’t sure how that could have led to the abject fear I’d seen in his eyes, but I didn’t ask. Judging from the shudder I felt go through him, he was afraid of the answer. Bathsheba whimpered.

  “We were coming up the driveway in the truck,” he said. “We’d been to the processing plant . . . and I asked him why we had to leave the guys
there . . . I called them the guys.”

  It wasn’t hard to conjure up an image of a chubby preschool Andy giving human attributes to the lambs he’d grown up with. Guys. That went beyond precious.

  “And he said the same thing to me. He said it was okay because we were feeding the world. I can see his face.”

  Kindness in the lines, just as I’d seen it, I was sure. So why—

  “And then it changed and—” Andy pushed the heels of his hands into the sides of his head. “Something bad happened. Something really bad—but I can’t see it.” He rocked forward. “I don’t want to see it, Bo.”

  My throat ached for him. “Then don’t,” I said. “Don’t go there yet.”

  He nodded and tipped sideways until his face and shoulders were in my lap. He didn’t cry. He just lay there until the memory that had seized him seemed to ebb away and leave him limp. I looked down to find my fingers smoothing down the frightened spikes in his hair.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I know. That’s what I needed you to do.”

  Having no clue what to do turns out to be the right thing to do. How often does that happen?

  True. But I wasn’t as calm as Andy now seemed to be, curled up with his head in my lap.

  “Just a thought,” I said. “But shouldn’t you talk to Frankie about this?”

  “Probably.” He sat up, but he kept his face close to mine. “But I don’t want to do that yet. I need to try to sort this out.”

  “I’m just thinking about what Joseph said about secrets.”

  “Maybe I just don’t want to know what it is yet.” A trace of his grin went through his eyes. “I’m gutless.”

  “You are so not!”

  “No, I’m serious. I don’t have the courage you and Emma have to look your stuff in the face.”

  You gonna let that one go?

  “I’m not that brave either,” I said. “I know how hard it is.”

  Andy put a hand on top of mine. “Then it’s like we said: we’ll support each other. Okay, Bo?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He squeezed the fingers he laced through mine. “That promise didn’t last long, did it?”

  “What promise?”

  “The one where I was going to keep my hands off you.”

  I met his smile with mine. “I’m okay with that,” I said.

  And again I say, Hmmm.

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  We don’t do should here. We work with what is, with what we hear from God. #TheMercifulScar

  Chapter

  FOURTEEN

  The Nudnik could hmmm all she wanted about Andy, but at lunchtime the next day as I was walking back to the Cloister I knew one thing for sure: I had learned something from him.

  I learned that it was okay to let yourself break down. I was envious of his ability to give in to his pain, even if he didn’t know what it was, and curl into a fetal position and shove his hands through his hair. With someone sitting right next to him.

  You could probably do that too if you’d been raised by Sister Frankie.

  It didn’t strike me until I was standing with the refrigerator door open, gazing at the bowl of dewy grapes and the hunk of artisan cheese and the jar of Hildegarde milk with its three-inch layer of cream, that in a way I was being raised by Sister Frankie. So why wasn’t I doing what she said I needed to do?

  Good question.

  I closed the door and leaned against it. “You are angry with your sister, aren’t you?” she’d said. And then she’d followed up with: “We don’t do should here. We work with what is. We work with what we hear from God.”

  Okay.

  But I couldn’t do it here in the Cloister. I still wasn’t where Andy was, able to fall apart where someone might see. There was only one place to go for this.

  Bathsheba—my cushion—and I reached the shepherd’s monument just after noon. Down on the ranch the air was starting to simmer but up here the wind—always the wind—blew off anything that hinted at oppression. I leaned against the tightly fixed stones with Bathsheba at my side and gazed out over the vast expanse and was once more aware of my complete powerlessness over . . . anything.

  As much anger as I’d let out, jamming my parents into the holes with the soil, they were never going to change. At least I couldn’t change them. Maybe that was why I hadn’t jammed Lara. She couldn’t change. Frankie may have been right that it wasn’t my fault my mother and father treated me the way they did. But where Lara was, that was my fault.

  “I don’t have the courage you have to look your stuff in the face.”

  I startled, setting a small landslide of loose pebbles in motion. Had Andy followed me?

  Nah. You’re just freaking.

  Andy was nowhere in sight, but I’d heard his voice so clearly in my head, like an echo of yesterday’s conversation.

  “Courage?” I answered him now, out loud. “I don’t have the courage to face hidden memories.”

  But they’re not hidden. Your skin never forgot.

  That made me want to run, just like Andy did. Maybe I would have, if Bathsheba hadn’t pressed her head into my lap and sighed. Then I could only sit there and remember.

  Remember how one night I talked my irrepressible, silky-haired eleven-year-old sister to sleep like I always did, with a story about a princess named Lara who was the favorite of her father the wise king and her mother the loving queen. And how it seemed like she woke up the next morning and said, “I’m twelve and I’m going to have my nose pierced.”

  Overnight the clever charm I’d always admired turned to cunning. Overnight the laughter that kept our household from being a morgue transformed into contemptuous secret snickers at all she was getting away with. Overnight “Please tell me a story, Sissy,” was replaced by “You’ll cover for me, Sis.”

  “And I did,” I said to Bathsheba.

  For a year I made sure our parents never knew that she was smoking in the gardening shed no one ever went into except the landscapers. Or that she did get a friend to pierce her nose and put in the tiniest of studs she could cover with makeup at home. Or that she stayed up until two every morning chatting with pubescent boys online.

  It wasn’t all that hard to keep it from them. They might not have noticed even if I hadn’t sprayed the inside of the shed with Lysol and bought Lara makeup out of my babysitting money and rolled up a towel and put it in front of the crack under the door so no one could see the light from the computer at one a.m.

  Even if you’d told Mother and Dad . . . would they have cared?

  Maybe I could have rationalized it that way if Lara hadn’t turned thirteen and entered my sacred space: the church youth group.

  I shifted my weight from one sitting bone to the other, but Bathsheba showed no signs of moving. I scratched behind her ears and elicited a deeper sigh.

  You’re not going anywhere. You might as well continue.

  Pointless as it seemed, I remembered me at fifteen, driven to perfection in school and at home.

  Somebody had to make up for Lara. Right?

  All right, so now it seemed stupid, but what else was I supposed to do? The thing was, that youth group—they called us the Hugh Crugh because our youth pastor’s name was Hugh—was the only place where I had ever been allowed to be what my mother would have called silly, and yet at the same time ask questions (“Does God expect me to be perfect?”) and own up to the fact that I was afraid (“What if God does and I’m not? What then?”). There, as a member of the Hugh Crugh, I came as close as I had ever come to being a me I could like.

  And then Lara became a teenager and burst on my scene and took away my freedom to be that person.

  Can I just mention that you have never actually put all this together before?

  “It must be your influence, ’Sheba,” I said.

  She snored in a most unladylike fashion and dug her muzzle further into my lap.

 
; At that point I had seen just how charismatic Lara could be. Within two weeks she had all the kids in the Crugh with even a flicker of rebellion in their spirits following her around like she was the Pied Piper of Hellions.

  If Lara wanted to turn a skit about Hosea and Gomer into an R-rated performance, they were right there with her. Until I intervened before they took the stage.

  If Lara got it into her head to roll up the waistband of her skirt after her arrival so that the hem hit her just below the butt cheeks, she had ten other girls in the restroom with her following suit. Until I stood in the doorway and made them all unroll.

  If Lara got up a petition for allowing guys and girls to “show physical displays of affection” during prayer circle, she had promises for twenty signatures before she even got the thing printed out. Until I tore it up and told her that next time I would make her eat it.

  You should have.

  Yeah. Frankie could say all she wanted to about not doing shoulds, but I was so loaded down with them I wasn’t sure I could ever get out from under.

  I should have told Hugh when Lara decided to forget the petition and take matters into her own hands and sneak out during movies to make out with whoever behind the church and then sneak back in before the credits rolled. The only one she left alone was Ralph. She didn’t overlook him because she knew I had a terminal crush on him. It was because he was, as she put it, too Christian for her.

  The shoulds continued.

  I should have told my parents when I smelled alcohol on her breath after one of those rendezvous. I should have told them before—

  “I can’t.”

  Don’t stop now. You’re almost there.

  “I can’t! Bathsheba, get up. Please!”

  I all but shoved her off my lap and somehow got to my feet and ran. Behind me Bathsheba whined but she followed me, down the slope on the far side of the monument, down where I stumbled to a stop and cried out, “Why did you listen to me, Lara?”

  My voice was stolen as always by the wind. But this time something came back.

  Bat kol? Could it be?

  But it was Bathsheba, now back up the slope behind me, barking. Furiously. Like Avila.