House of Mercy (16 page)

She rode in on her stomach, slung over the gray-dappled white hide like a pile of trapper’s furs, unconscious and dangling but alive, her unbound hair sweeping the dirt. Fine beads made of pottery, along with three eagle feathers, were woven into the horse’s fine mane.

If she hadn’t been so near death during the ensuing week, she might have been more overtly mocked when she finally told her story of how the horse presented itself. Mathilde claimed that on the morning of the third day, after hours of begging God for death had morphed into disoriented dreams, the sun woke her. She watched the white beams turn blue in the morning air, and then she saw them touch the ashes of the fire that had died the first night. The sun’s blue rays were like the spoon of her stew pot on the hearth at home. It stirred the remains into a dusty whirlwind that gradually produced the physical forms of the horse and a man, a Native man with coarse dark hair, clothed head to toe in winter buckskins that rattled with decorative beads. He was tall and thin, formed like a runner, with a narrow jaw and kind eyes. He was spectacularly tall, well over six and a half feet, and had slender fingers that were also noticeably long. A peace pipe was tied at his waist.

He lifted her onto the horse and spoke to her in a language she didn’t understand. And though she didn’t know the words, her soul heard them as the words spoken by Jesus to the paralytic at Bethesda:
Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee
. Then the man slapped the animal’s rump, and the horse’s gentle sway rocked her back to dreams.

The horse was touched, fed, watered, and sheltered by several witnesses before it disappeared from the mining settlement, which made it difficult to dismiss Mathilde’s story entirely as a fever-induced hallucination. Still, there were theories about where the horse had really come from. It was wild, some said, in spite of its decorated mane. It was the lost and wandering property of a nearby tribe. It was offered by a Ute hunter who took pity on the injured woman and sent her home, expecting neither recognition nor compensation for his good deed.

It was this last theory that seemed the most reasonable to Mathilde’s husband, and it was supported by the eventual discovery of the campfire site where she’d spent her precarious days, two miles above the Burnt Rock settlement. There they found the shredded bloody petticoats she’d used for bandages, and a peace pipe made of willow.

The Ute tribes of the region were known as a peaceful people, and Mathilde’s husband wanted to show his gratitude to them with a gift. With Mathilde’s consent he withdrew from their stores the most valuable possession they owned: a fine leather saddle tooled with mountain flowers and overlaid with pure hand-hammered silver. The fenders, the skirt, the housing, and more were heavy with the precious metal. Mathilde had made the saddle for him as a wedding gift while they were still in Germany, in anticipation of their new life together in the Wild West.

He went with a fellow miner who knew the languages of the Utes, and the interpreter made a path for him. All of the nearby villages insisted that their horses and warriors were accounted for and knew no story of a white woman hovering between this world and the next.

One tribal elder, however, claimed to recognize the willow pipe when it was shown to him. He said that the man Wulff sought lived apart from the tribes and had come to the region with white missionaries years earlier. The elder didn’t know where the man could be found, but offered to accept the saddle until his next appearance. In exchange they provided Wulff with a horse, not knowing he no longer had one, and then they loaded the mule he’d borrowed from a neighbor with heavy bear furs and tightly woven baskets filled with food.

Mathilde never engaged in any debate about the believability of her story, and she never altered her account of the man and horse rising from the ashes like the mythical phoenix. She told the story once publicly, then never again, and her experience might have been forgotten in time if her grandson hadn’t taken interest in the crumbling journal written in her fading hand.

In the early 1920s, Jonathan Wulff came to Burnt Rock after a season abroad in Egypt, where he’d become caught up in the excitement surrounding Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The young archaeology student participated in little more than the grunt work associated with the great find, but that didn’t dampen his plans to pursue a career in antiquities. They were temporarily interrupted, however, when he fell from a ladder into an excavated tomb and broke his left leg, which subsequently became infected. As his condition worsened he was sent away to Paris so that grumblings about the pharaoh’s curse would have no reason to spread among his colleagues.

Though Jonathan improved in France, his full recovery was expected to take months. And so he chose to recuperate among the family that had enthusiastically funded his education and career with the profits of their successful mining operations.

During his stay in Burnt Rock he was gifted with his grandmother’s journal and the peace pipe that had remained in the family. His father thought that Jonathan would appreciate the romance of Mathilde’s tale, which by that time had devolved to the status of family folklore. Jonathan did like it, and found the journal entries to be good entertainment in the chilly spring evenings. They were written in German, but he had the education to translate them. While his broken femur healed by the warmth of the hearth fire, Jonathan concocted his share of jokes about the ashen Spanish horse and its dusty warrior, and regaled his nieces and nephews with ghost stories of dead men who hunted recalcitrant Wulff children.

But each night, after the family had gone to bed, he’d stay up by the light of the family’s one electric lamp and part the aging hand-stitched papers, searching for a certain page, a particular paragraph that humbled his academic cynicism. At age twenty-three his grandmother Mathilde, the same age as he when the journal was given to him, had written:

It does not matter what anyone has to say of my experience, or that the preacher would rather I tell it different. Christ Jesus my Lord saved my soul when I was a girl, and He saved my body now that I am a woman. That He did it as a man breathed up of the ash the way Adam must have risen on the Sixth Day is not for me to examine.

It is no matter that I lack the preacher’s schooling, or that the men fear I be guilty of cavorting with the dead, or that the wives look at me from the tops of their noses as if I am addled by sickness. Whatever the explanation for my salvation, I am no senseless creature. I credit my life only to the Lord, Who numbers our days. Today I live though tomorrow I may die. But since I live when I ought to have passed on, I am bound to Truth, which is this: it is not for me to prove what God did, nor how, but only to remind all that He did it. There is no point in a miracle except that it expose the glory of the Lord, and so I’ll not try to cover it up. Look at what God has done!

Jonathan found her simple thinking to be endearing, a relic of an earlier time when faith was still hanging on to reason by the skin of its teeth. But he couldn’t deny that this last line of her journal touched his heart in a deep place that was hidden from everyone who knew him. He had fond memories of his grandmother, because she had lived until he was ten, and he had heard the story of her miraculous rescue long before he was aware of a journal.

If he had known her writing first, before he knew the person, he might have expected her to be austere and dogmatic, closed-minded and stern. But his memory could only recall a woman of great softness—in the eyes, in the jowls, in the hands, in the belly—whose arms and heart were always open, and whose hugs smelled of the metal-heavy mountain water she bathed in. She would greet him by cupping his chin in her hand and approving of his good health by exclaiming, “Look what God has done!” so that he sensed his very existence was a good thing.

But something more than sentiment held his eyes on the page, night after night. It was the possibility, however slim, however ludicrous, that his grandmother knew something important about this life, in this world, that he did not. And to a man of learning who respected all people of the past, this possibility was unbearable.

So on a warm day toward the end of April in 1924, when he thought he was strong enough, Jonathan gathered his cane and a rucksack and a small shovel and a canteen full of water. Not wanting to impede his healing, but knowing he couldn’t make the hike on foot, he cautiously rode his father’s most gentle horse uphill to the site of Mathilde’s Miracle, which until that day had been her miracle alone.

The area was not preserved as anything special, and fifty harsh winters had eliminated the ashes and altered the shape of the vegetation. But the cliff that had sheltered Mathilde was identifiable by its outcroppings, which she described in detail in the journal—she’d even drawn a picture. And some months after her recovery, before the next winter set in, Mathilde had returned and placed a small ring of broken granite rocks around the spot where God had “breathed.” It was her version of a monument. An altar.

When Jonathan arrived and saw the rock ring, long anchored to the ground by snow-soaked mud and durable mountain grasses, a breeze passed over him that caused him to shudder. He would tell his family later that he thought of the apostle John’s account of the angel that stirred the waters at the pool of Bethesda, though no doubt Mathilde’s journal entries had given him this idea. Whether the breeze was divine, Jonathan couldn’t say. Still, he was compelled to show his respect for God, regardless of what modern science had to say, by dismounting his horse, cane in hand.

He planted the tip of the cane in the firm ground next to his strong leg and leaned on it for support. The carved stick snapped in two and the bottom half toppled away, and as he overcompensated for his sudden imbalance, his full weight came to bear on his injury.

It didn’t stagger under the weight of the surprise. He felt no pain. Instead the wasted muscles of his unused legs seemed to coil and hum, waiting to spring him into long-awaited action.
Look, you are well again
.

The tip of the broken cane was like a pharaoh’s staff in Jonathan’s fist. He raised it to the sky and tilted his face to the sun and began to laugh.

“Look at what God has done,” he chuckled. “Look at what he has done.”

14

I
f you hadn’t paid good money to come on this outing,” Hank said in his booming voice as he leaned against the rim of the fire pit, “I might be able to make you a promise that your very own prayers will be answered here at the sight of Mathilde’s Miracle, but both God and the state of Colorado frown on that, so all I can guarantee you today is a good story.”

All the boom of his voice seemed to come from the depths of his large belly. He was a jovial man, which Garner had always thought accounted for some of the assembly’s popularity.

“Nevertheless,” Hank said sagely, “I can say that many people who come here leave as changed people. I’ve seen sick people get better and sad people made happy. It’s a simple thing, they tell me: they believe that anything’s possible.”

Hank’s version of Mathilde’s tale was the “simpler” and “more sensitive” one, he’d often boasted to Garner. He left out the “stop sinning” part, because who ever said such a thing anymore, especially of a person like Mathilde, who was as pure as the Rocky Mountain air? And who would know or care what such a command meant, or tolerate the threat that followed it? Wasn’t being attacked by a ferocious wildcat enough terror for an innocent soul to bear?

Garner didn’t mind. He knew the full story—it had been published in a book sold at Nova’s store, and it was posted in a classy museum format out in the foyer for anyone who was interested. He wasn’t sure how many people had read the full text of the placards. But this slant toward sugarcoated entertainment was one of many reasons why Cat Ransom refused ever to attend services with Garner: “Even if Mathilde Wulff wasn’t a complete crock,” she would sniff, “the people who want to make money off the tourists sure are. It’s best not to believe any of it.”

Garner was more willing to give Hank the benefit of the doubt. Who would give up a half hour of his day seven days a week all summer long for a sham? There had to be something worth believing in here, however commercial it had become.

He listened attentively to Hank’s version of the story. Years of repetition had refined it to a very entertaining point, and he even found himself rewarding Hank with amused laughter on cue.

But his smile fell with the long hand of the clock to the bottom of the hour. Hank was wrapping up, and Garner still had not heard the thing he had hoped to hear, even though he couldn’t say exactly what that was.

“The power of belief is a great force in the universe,” Hank said. “Belief has given feet to terrible evils, but also to even greater good. What do you believe about the miracle you seek? Do you deserve it?”

Yes
, Garner thought.
I never forced Rose to go. I respected my daughter. She was the one who ran away. I’ve waited patiently for her return
.

“Will the fulfillment of your miracle bring others goodness—happiness, peace, and joy?”

Yes
, Garner thought.
To the whole family
. He wasn’t so sure about Abel.

“Then believe and you will receive,” Hank said. “Believe and receive. This is the true beauty of a miracle, its magnificent simplicity.”

Garner didn’t remember if this was something Hank had drawn from the pages of the Wulff journals or from Hank’s own brilliant mind. Something about it didn’t sound right. Some missing element made it insipid. Garner couldn’t put his finger on it.