House of Mercy (15 page)

Worse than the judgment itself would be turning it loose on her family. The news they were carrying back to their home was a fanged rattlesnake, coiled and hostile.

“What am I going to tell Mom?” she murmured.

In answer the Ford lurched, and Beth’s attention snapped to her father as the truck began to drift across the center line. Her left hand reached out for the wheel to pull them back before her mind had processed what was happening.

Her father was gripping his shirt, a fisted wad of court-worthy clean and pressed cotton directly over his heart. Pain deepened all the lines of his face, squinting around his eyes and yanking on the corners of his mouth.

“Dad?”

The weight of his own hand dragged the steering wheel in the direction opposite her efforts, with the net effect of keeping the truck square in the wrong lane.

Abel’s body slouched toward the support of his door, away from her, away from life. On the short horizon, an oncoming car was swiftly closing the distance.

“Dad, I need you to let go of the wheel.”

Her voice sounded disembodied, the confident authoritative voice of someone who knew exactly what to do, someone whose heart was not thrashing about, someone whose muscles weren’t shaking uncontrollably.

“Let go, Dad.”

Either he couldn’t hear her or he couldn’t will his fingers to obey.

His body stiffened in a spasm, and his legs tried to straighten. His foot floored the accelerator and the truck surged for an electric second, straining against the stick-shift gears. Then his shoe slipped off the pedal and the car lurched again, decelerating like a sky diver caught up by his chute, stalling the engine.

Beth’s fight against her father’s body weight became a futile competition against the entire heavy-duty vehicle. Even if her seat belt hadn’t held her at this awkward angle, she wouldn’t have been able to leverage the drifting truck.

Her prayer was an inarticulate cry as the oncoming car bore down on them and began to swerve. Beth released the wheel, and her sagging, unconscious father pulled them off the shoulder and across the dry grass. Thanks to the stalled engine, they hit the solid power line just hard enough to deploy the air bags, and then the truck bounced back. The hood was dented and steaming.

Beth had raised her arms in front of her face at the moment she let go, and the skin of her forearms took the sting of the bags’ explosion. Her mind worked quickly, hyper alert, and her body sprang into focused action the moment the car came to rest. In one smooth motion that she had never practiced, she swept the nylon bag out of her way, released her belt, found her phone, activated the speaker, dialed 9-1-1, put the phone on the dash, and had her father unbuckled by the time the operator answered. She was able to say exactly where the accident occurred—which highway they were on, which cross street they had just passed.

“My father had a heart attack while driving. He’s unconscious. He’s breathing. This is his second attack.”
Thanks to the first one, Beth knew the latest CPR recommendations. Everything the operator told her to do made sense.

It should have been difficult to get him onto his back, and yet she had no trouble standing over him within the confines of the truck cab. It didn’t occur to her to get out, to try to open his door and drag him onto the ground. Her feet found firm braces against the armrest and the gear box. Her strong legs squatted and lifted while she gripped him under the arms, locked her fingers behind his back, and turned him across the bench seat, her sticky cheek pressed into the sweat of his hair and neck. His knees angled oddly, trapped by the steering wheel. She twisted him at the waist, making his spine as flat as possible.

“He stopped breathing
,
”
she heard herself saying. She dropped all the weight of her back and arms into rapid chest compressions, knowing that there was still enough oxygen in his blood to keep his brain and body alive, so long as she could keep it moving.

Her memory pulled up his heavy sighs, his perspiring forehead, his extreme fatigue, and interpreted all these clues much differently now.

Press-press-press-press.

Was this how God would prove his goodness?

Please, don’t let him die
, she prayed. If only she understood the “healing touch” that Jacob claimed she had. If only the miracle worker could control her own gift.

The operator continued to speak to her, and she continued to answer. She heard the creaking of a distant car door and remembered that there was another driver somewhere. She feared his fury. She heard a man’s shout but didn’t know what the words were, didn’t look up until a shadow fell over the truck’s cab.

Her passenger door opened, and hot but fresh air rushed in, lifted her chin. Press-press-press-press. Beth registered that a man stood there, and that a small cut under his eye was blooming and had dripped blood onto his shirt, a green polo with an embroidered design on the right shoulder. Wolf Creek, it said. A mountain-pass ski resort west of the valley. She’d skied there before but had never paid attention to its logo until now. Between two mountain peaks, the head of a wolf looked down on her with piercing triangular eyes. The man’s blood dotted its nose.

Press-press-press-press.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“It’s stopped,” he said. “I’m an EMT. How can I help?”

13

I
n the round sanctuary of the Sweet Assembly, Garner waited for Hank to begin his message. Garner had heard it before and liked it about as much as canned green beans that tasted like their tin containers. Even so, he had felt unseated since the storm shattered his kitchen window. The glass had been repaired, but he couldn’t fix the disquiet in his heart. It was clear to him now that the storm had stirred up a need in him like sediment on the bottom of a river, and the water would not clear. He needed his daughter, Rose. He needed her to come back to him.

He needed a miracle, which is exactly what the Sweet Assembly was known for.

Garner sat in the unyielding wooden church pew with a handful of tourists who’d recently disembarked from the ten o’clock bus. There were fewer on Mondays, especially in August, when many of Colorado’s children returned to school.

In Garner’s opinion, calling the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly a church was a bit of a stretch. For one, the concept of a harbor was ridiculous in these rugged mountains of this landlocked state. He supposed it was meant to be a metaphor, but still it was absurd. For another, the nature of
assembly
was intentionally undefined, so that the hardware-store retailer-slash-minister, Hank, could offer a nondenominational, interfaith, multicultural, doctrine-free inspirational message without offending anyone who dropped in. And when desired, the facility could be used for gatherings of other types, like parties for deserving town doctors.

These were shortcomings that Garner could easily overlook. Considering his present feelings about God, he didn’t believe anyone who visited the Sweet Assembly needed some hard-hitting message of deliverance from sin. That wasn’t why the tourists liked to come. Over the years, enough folks had claimed to have received miracles that a few people came with expectations of their own, though most seemed merely curious, hopeful of nothing except that they might be entertained by the freakish faithful among their number. Pilgrims brought prayers on papers that they tossed into the central fire pit, which burned round the clock. Some brought relics of loved ones who couldn’t make the journey. A collection of abandoned canes and walkers and pill bottles and other such symbols of healing were left behind in the circular aisles.

Then Hank and his wife, Kathy, transferred these “proofs” to an attractive display in the foyer, a showcase of the many healings that had taken place at the site of Mathilde’s Miracle.

In April of 1877, before Burnt Rock was even an official town, Mathilde Werner Wulff had built the original fire in desperate haste within the same ring of granite stones. Mathilde was the young wife of a German gold miner, a talented woman admired for her leatherworking skills. On a routine trek between the Wulff home and the mine, Mathilde and the Wulffs’ packhorse were attacked by a famished mountain lion, whose hunger was all but insatiable so early in the spring. It chased her some distance before one great and terrible leap struck her in the left thigh, punctured her skirts, skin, and muscles, then tore her off the horse.

The first miracle, she said afterward, was that she managed to keep hold of both her head and her husband’s pistol while the animal dragged her off in its yellow teeth. She withdrew the weapon from the waistband of her skirt and took a shot that might have taken off her own leg as easily as the cougar’s head. She avoided inflicting further injury to herself, but she also failed to strike the snarling cat, though she spent the entire contents of the pistol. How could she not have hit it, she later berated herself, when she could have grabbed its ears in her fists? She never had an answer for this, but the ruckus convinced the wildcat to drop her and turn its attention to less hazardous, meatier prey. The terrified horse thrashed some twenty yards off, its reins tangled in the grasping arms of a fir tree.

By the time the horse was dead, Mathilde had stumbled away.

From near death to near death she fled: the mad chase, the escape, and the bleeding leg conspired to disorient her, and as night fell she knew nothing about where she might be except far away from home, and well off any trails her husband would be able to explore before daybreak. She tore up her petticoats into bandages and then went in search of shelter, counting on her dead horse to save her now. If it was possible the wild cat might still be hungry, she had no way to separate her body from the stench of the sticky blood.

She collapsed against a pile of rocks at the base of a cliff so steep that no human of the day could have scaled it. With any luck, she surmised, neither would any wild animals be dropping on her from above. Next to her was a fallen tree, an evergreen made brittle and brown by disease, its exposed roots caked with long-dried earth. Using the dry needles, the decaying bark, and slim branches she could break off with her own hands, Mathilde assembled a tiny pyramid of materials that looked, according to her simple journal sketches, strangely like a miniature wickiup, a shelter of twigs and branches favored by the region’s Ute tribes. Patiently, with weak and quavering fingers, she generated enough of a spark with her flintlock to bring the little pyre to life.

When the bleeding from her thigh finally stopped, when the glinting yellow cat eyes did not appear in the light of her campfire, and when her body overpowered her mind, Mathilde gave in to sleep.

As the story went, she woke at dawn, cold and hot and delirious, but of sound enough mind to know that death would likely find her before her husband did. The fire in her pit had gone out, but the fire in her leg was an inferno of infection, and her will wasn’t enough to get her on her feet. She had no hope of gathering wood or retracing her bloody steps of the day before, and her mind filled with images of all the wild animals who might bring fate to her in their teeth: grizzly bears, mountain lions, wolves, and lynx.

She asked God to send death swiftly, and without fangs.

As she lay with her cheek on the dirt, breezy fingers stirred the dry ash of her fir trees and levitated tiny pieces. They fluttered like tiny attention-starved insects in front of her eyes, which gazed on her predicament from a despairing, sideways vantage.

It was a blessed distraction, a mesmerizing dance of nature, until some of the soot floated onto her face and stuck to the tears that wet her cheeks. When she reached up to wipe it away, the ash smudged and left a greasy gray residue on her fingertips. The stain reminded her of the purple stains left on her hands when she applied iodine to her husband’s mining injuries.

Mathilde had no iodine with her, but the ash smudges brought to mind a distant idea that the ash might have similar effects. And this lent her some hope.

Even for a woman of her predicament, hope would rear its head. Garner supposed this was part of the story’s allure for him.

She reached into the burned-out pile and scooped out a handful of warm ash. Spitting into the flyaway flakes, she made a muddy poultice and plastered her slashed leg with it, making several small batches in her palm until she had covered her wounds and packed the pasty goo deep in her muscles.

Historians speculated that this simple procedure probably extended Mathilde’s life long enough for the surgeon who eventually treated her to do her some good. The antiseptic properties of ash had long been recognized and in her case, in spite of the unsanitary way it was prepared, managed to slow down the infection.

But Garner and others had always considered that part of the story a simple tale of good luck and quick thinking, though Mathilde’s journal claimed it was God’s hand that stayed the infection.
That
was not the miracle that drew people to the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet assembly.

The real appeal was rooted in what happened next: after three days in the wilderness, without food or water or fire or the ability to walk; after the limited search-and-rescue skills of the other miners gave out; after her husband collapsed of despair, having found the awful remains of her mount, Mathilde was carried into the tiny settlement on the back of a lovely Spanish horse that no one had ever seen before—and after three more days, never saw again.