House of Mercy (8 page)

Garner first invested in this pastime for his own physical comfort after the cancer diagnosis. Then he did it for the challenge of bringing plants to life in a pit, and then because it allowed him to stay connected to people, and to be admired for doing something important. Few things were as rewarding as harvesting rosemary and mint for a roasted-lamb supper with friends while a blizzard raged. He certainly didn’t do it for the money. He had plenty of that to last him the rest of his life.

Before his family abandoned him, Garner had been a wealthy man, and a man of faith. Not a priest or pastor or any such thing, but a successful businessman who had simple beliefs about God’s goodness and love. Today he was wealthy and skeptical. The thing that had caused Garner to turn away from the more childlike notions wasn’t the classic problem of why God allowed bad things to happen. There were plenty of viable answers for that type of question.

Instead, Garner’s crisis of faith came when first his wife and then his daughter rejected his love. He had offered it unconditionally, expecting nothing but love in return, and they treated his gift as if it was unworthy of their standards. He slaved for them, worked long hours for them, provided them with an expensive house on the most stunning piece of real estate in the San Luis Valley, and showered them with all the fringe benefits of financial security.

“You think you’re being loving, but you’re not,”
his wife had yelled at him the day she walked out. “
I don’t care about your intentions. Your results are pathetic.”

His daughter left on a similar note a few years later, when he objected to her choice of husband. When Rose announced her engagement to Abel Borzoi, an established cattle rancher, Garner couldn’t help but be concerned for his daughter’s well-being. The Blazing B was not a ranch concerned about expanding its profitability. The Borzoi clan could promise nothing but a life of toil. Besides that, Abel was far too old for her. What kind of father would approve of such a future?

Garner and Rose had not spoken in the twenty-seven years since she stormed out of his house, slamming the door so hard that she cracked all nine of its tiny panes of glass.

This is what made no sense to him: not that the human race had the capacity to do wrong, but that it had equal capacity to reject kindness and decency and all manner of goodness, even—and perhaps especially—within the bonds of family ties.

And if love was so worthless, then perhaps the God of love was even less valuable. His defining essence was being squandered on people who didn’t want it. There was no hope for such a race, nor for such a God.

But in the dustiest corners of Garner’s heart, hope lingered. At age seventy-three he didn’t have the heart to sweep it out, because he had nothing more appealing to put in its place. So he poured what love he had to offer into the lives of people who would accept it, such as Cat Ransom. And he waited for a sign that, at the right time, his daughter might return to him. He told no one about his wealth. For some reason love went further when it wasn’t connected to money.

On the late-July afternoon when the thunderstorm passed over, into, and through his house, the walls complained, and a faint smell of something burnt seeped into the blackened basement. Electrical wiring, Garner guessed, or old wood siding cooked by lightning. At an altitude of nine thousand feet, even sturdy structures cowered when thunderheads rumbled.

In the darkness, Garner felt his way around tables stacked with live plants. He reached the stairs and climbed to the main level of the house, where the hall light had survived the zapping. The red gardening clogs on his feet thumped heavily on the unfinished pine steps.

The thunder was great and his house was small, and the atmospheric vibrations always caused his windows and his inventory to rattle. In the front room, which had been converted into a small store, his glass jars of homemade herbal teas and prized recipes of tinctures and salves were displayed on neat shelves and secured behind wood rails. He checked these first, though to date no storm had ever damaged them.

Even so, a small buzzing noise in his left ear suggested that this routine summer disturbance was anything but routine. His mind filled with the idea that something was about to break—something strong that couldn’t stand up against the will of God. An oak tree, perhaps, bowed under the Lord’s thumb.

Garner entered his kitchen, searching for the electric stench. There was a window at the sink that looked out over a hillside jagged with black volcanic rocks and sparse plant life. It was a stunning panoramic view. If God had not selected this house for a target, it was possible that Garner might witness someone else’s devastation.

After making sure his house was not on fire, Garner decided to eat a snack. He wouldn’t replace those basement bulbs until after this storm ended.

He went into his pantry for a jar of peanut butter and some round crackers. They sat on the shelf above a case of empty apothecary jars and a selection of essential oils, which he needed to restock—an activity for after eating, if the electricity was still down. He tucked his meal into the crook of his elbow, fetched a plate and a knife, and took everything to the table for assembly.

A flash of light and the exploding stink of scorched tar shingles startled him so badly that he crushed the first dry cracker he picked up. The black skies became an apocalyptic floodlight that sliced through his head to the back of his solid skull. Within the very same second, even as he blinked, the lightning’s booming electrical charge clapped the humid air right into his kitchen.

The window over the sink burst like a water balloon, showering glass and rainwater across the stainless basin and the old utility carpet. The force knocked Garner off his chair, which tipped backward, and he found himself on the floor, shielded by his heavy table.

The ensuing gust swept the plate up off the table and clapped it against the wall, then released it to gravity with a clatter.

The sight of the destroyed window filled Garner with a quivering anticipation. Surely it was a sign. The sign. This spectacular breaking of glass, as theatrical as his daughter’s smoldering exit, told him the time for reunion had come. It came now because Garner had finally in his heart let Rose go, because he’d accepted another daughter to replace her—Cat Ransom, a woman who needed her own father figure. Wasn’t that always how it worked? For his years of suffering and loneliness, Garner’s life would be doubly blessed, like Job’s.

With no concern for the weather pouring in, or for the glass stuck in the carpet like glittering stalagmites—those could wait—Garner rose from the kitchen floor and found his rain jacket in the hall closet. The peanut-butter-covered table knife was still in his fist. He returned the utensil to the howling kitchen, then slipped into his mud boots, pulled up his hood, and went out into the driving rain toward Cat Ransom’s offices.

He hoped the marriage had finally tanked. It wasn’t that Garner thought Abel was a bad man. His daughter’s husband was, from what Garner could tell, decent and hardworking and descended from tough Russian stock, the kind that could survive Siberian winters with only a pocketknife and a bearskin and a bottle of vodka. The problem was simply that Rose’s marriage to him was beneath her. The Blazing B was a millstone on her neck. She had within her the brains, if not the will, to be a fine doctor. As a girl, that had been her dream. It wasn’t too late.

He still had the means to fund her opportunities if she would accept his willingness to do it. He would give her whatever she needed to start over.

Garner walked to Dr. Ransom’s offices briskly, ignoring the storm. The anticipation of his daughter reentering his life after two and a half decades filled him with optimism and fresh energy. She would need him again. Finally. The fast rain poured onto the leathery earth with too much impatience to be absorbed. On the dirt path between his house and the town’s only paved road, where Dr. Ransom’s building was located, Garner’s boots splashed through puddles that had been mere depressions in the land that morning.

It took Garner less than five minutes to reach Dr. Ransom’s offices, which had been a medical office since miners first settled Burnt Rock in the late eighteen hundreds. The flat-roofed, box-shaped building was wrapped in horizontally mounted tongue-and-groove siding and painted white. A second-floor balcony supported by turned-wood posts and decorative bracings provided a covering over the walkway.

Garner thought the place looked eternally ready to stage a fight between drunken gunslingers. But there wasn’t a cowboy in sight. Electrical lights installed under the balcony swung from their chains in the gusty air and threw grim shadows around the ineffective shelter.

Cat shared her building with Nova’s bookstore. It was an eclectic pairing, but the entire town was that way. Across a gravel driveway was a twin building that held Mazy’s café and Hank’s hardware store. On the opposite side of the road, the only paved road in all of Burnt Rock, was a drugstore that doubled as a post office, the town hall, and a gift shop that sold polished rocks and tiny bottles filled with gold leaf. Two zigzagging miles up the mountain behind the gift shop, hidden now by dense clouds, was the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly church-slash-museum-slash-monument.

Garner pounded on the glass window to which gold letters had been applied in an arc. “Catherine Ransom, M.D. If the Doctor Isn’t in, Dial:” And her cell phone number was listed beneath this. Publishing her cell phone number saved Cat the expense of having to hire an office assistant to take appointments and man the office whenever she wasn’t there.

The door-pounding was only an announcement of his presence, not a request to be let in. Garner entered without waiting and brushed water off his slick jacket onto the dry floor of the doctor’s waiting room.

“Cat, girl! Have I got news!”

Catherine Ransom emerged from her back office holding a cup of something steaming. She set down her drink and came around the counter quickly to take Garner’s coat.

“Garner! Are you all right? Why are you out in this mess?”

He held the coat closed at his neck, intending to talk her into taking him out of Burnt Rock as soon as possible. “I need a ride.”

“You should have called. I’d have come and picked you up.”

Garner laughed, because the very sensible idea of calling this woman, who was more like a daughter this past year than Rose had ever been, hadn’t occurred to him.

“I can’t keep up with that kind of common sense, can I?”

“You’re not sick, are you?”

“Oh no. It’s my daughter.”

A shadow flitted across Cat’s face as one of the lamps outside moved through its wind-tossed arc.

“Rose is sick?” she asked.

“No, no. Rose is, well, I don’t know exactly
how
she is, but it’s time. I need you to take me to the ranch. I need to see her.” Garner didn’t own a car, though he could have afforded whatever private transportation he wanted. He preferred to walk to wherever he needed to go, and when that wasn’t possible, to pay others for their wheels and their company. He never had need to make the hair-raising drive down the mountain alone when there were so many kind souls willing to do it for him. People seemed to find noble purpose in getting a cancer-riddled man to his various medical appointments down in civilization. Cat, especially, was never too busy for such a thing.

But tonight she didn’t seem to understand Garner’s urgency.

“Why do you need to see her right now?” she asked.

“Because something has happened!”

Cat’s eyebrows rose expectantly. She seemed to want him to explain.

He said, “My window broke,” and heard the inadequacy of the words. “She needs me. I don’t know exactly why yet, but she needs me now. It might be that she’s finally seen the limitations of her marriage, or that she’s . . .” Overcome by a troubling possibility, Garner’s mind shifted gears. “Heaven help me, if that man filed for a divorce—”

“If she’s anything like you, I suppose she’d be the one to do it,” Cat said. He saw in her light smile that she meant to calm him, though she knew he hadn’t been the one to torpedo his own marriage.

“Right. True.”

“In which case her situation might not be as dire as you think it is.”

The lightning, the shattering, the force that knocked him off his seat were all quite dire, Garner thought. Indications of something big and devastating. An oak tree uprooted from the earth.

“Oh my,” Garner murmured.

“What?” Cat laid a warm hand on his arm.

“Abel must be dead. I think he died.”

Cat did not offer him any calming answer to this. He thought he detected her sigh.

“Do Abel and Rose have children?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not—I’m sorry. Garner, let’s call the ranch. We can find out the truth right now.”

“No. No, I wouldn’t know what . . .” Did he have grandchildren? It was an overwhelming thought at the moment, though he’d often wondered. It was better that he focus on the object of his own resentment, Abel. “I don’t know how she’d react. All these years, Cat. I need to see her. Plain and simple. Her husband is gone. I know it in my soul.”

Instead of making a grab for her coat and keys as Garner expected, she suggested they wait to drive down into the valley until the next day, after the storm blew over.