Mercy at the Farm
The first time I met Mercy was the day I arrived at the farm. I had to pay a rideshare a crazy amount of money to get there from the bus station. Even then he couldn’t get me all the way.
“I can’t get through that,” he said, nodding up the road.
I got out of the car to look for myself. He had stopped a few feet before a wash. I could follow its narrow line up the hill to the right. There’d been some rain but it was only an inch or so of water. Still, he refused to go any farther.
“The car is on lease. There’s no way.”
I took my things out of the trunk and stood in the dirt beside my large, wheeled suitcase with two duffle bags weighing me down. It was everything I owned. I hoped the driver would take some pity on me but he turned his car around and only rolled down his window to say, “You’re really going out there.”
It was March and the wet earth smelled sweet but everything else was a desert-poor imitation of spring. I left the rolling suitcase in the dirt, leaning against a fence post, and walked with my two duffle bags down the lane. There were a handful of houses splattered about with brown pastures of animals eating and a few watching me. At the first house I passed, three dogs came sprinting off the porch. I dropped one of the duffle bags, reaching for my keys with the pepper spray I kept on them. But the dogs stopped at the edge of the property and I didn’t have keys anymore. I didn’t have anything I would need a key for.
At the end of the lane was a metal gate with a wooden sign that said the name of the farm on it. I left my bags in a pile there and I walked a bit further to get my first look at where I would now be living. The driveway extended through a tunnel of stout cottonwoods. Then the trees broke and opened to a large shrubby pasture with a few small structures, a big barn on the hill and sheep dotting the gray. The lambs would be coming soon. It’s why Camila needed the extra hands. It was an awfully barren place to be born.
I grabbed a large branch from the ditch along the drive in case the dogs at the first house didn’t stop this time. But they weren’t even out as I walked past. When I got back to the place where I’d left my suitcase, it was gone.
“Come ‘round here,” a woman’s voice called from the side porch of the nearest house, the one with the dogs. The house was like the others on the lane—small, square, adobe. Except this one had large windows and you could see into each room. On the porch, the dogs were asleep around a middle-aged woman’s bare feet.
“This is your bag?” the woman gestured towards my suitcase.
I nodded.
“You’re working for Camila?” she asked.
I nodded again.
“You’re not going to be wearing most of the stuff you packed,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong fashion sense for the country.” She laughed. “I’m Mercy.”
“Lu,” I said.
“These are good dogs,” Mercy said to me. “You don’t need to be scared. I’m a dog whisperer, as they say. I used to foster dogs for the county shelter. I never kept any. I always got them to good homes somewhere else.”
“Great,” I said.
“Except for one litter of puppies,” Mercy said. She looked away from me as she finished the sentence. I followed her eyes to a small patch of grass among the dirt beside her house.
“What happened?”
“They were inbred pitbulls. Probably bred for fighting. The mom was found running the shoulder on the highway and someone brought her in. The puppies all had congenital disorders. They couldn’t digest anything. So they were hungry all the time but no matter how much they ate they didn’t put any weight on. Most of them didn’t have stomachs. The shelter told me when I picked them up that they were all going to die. I was to take care of them until they did. I tried to give them a good life here. I think they only suffered.”
I didn’t say anything, but Mercy continued, “The last one to die was the smallest. She was a girl. Because they couldn’t digest anything their insides just filled and filled with food so they were like little pigs walking around at the end. The littlest girl actually pooped once. It looked more like vomit but it gave me some hope she might make it. But then everyone else died and she stopped eating. She might have died of a broken heart,” Mercy said. “That’s something only a woman would do, don’t you think?”
I didn’t know if she was talking about herself or the female puppy. But before I asked, Mercy nodded towards my suitcase and I understood it was time for me to leave. I carried the suitcase away off her porch, past the dogs still all sleeping, and I rolled it up the rocky lane.
I didn’t have much time to think about Mercy, except to wonder why she had admitted to looking through my bag. Camila was waiting for me on her porch by the time I got back to the farm. I had only ever talked to Camila once on the phone. She greeted me with a head nod. She picked up both of my bags from the ground and swung them over one shoulder without issue.
I was staying in Camila’s guest house. Her son had been living in it last. It was a mess. There were things everywhere, clothing, dishes, books, as if someone had run out the back door as I walked up. But there were also spiders living in thick webs in every corner. I put my things in the bedroom. There were even more spiders there. I lay down in the bed still made up. I didn’t care about the spiders or smell or the stiffness of the sheets. I thought of my old home and how difficult it would be to fathom such a place from there. I slept for the first time in a long time, through the whole night.
I didn’t see Mercy again that first week. It was almost lambing season. Most of the sheep were pregnant.
“Can’t you tell?” Camila asked me that first morning.
I couldn’t. We watched the sheep for a while. They moseyed out of the barn. They ate the grain Camila dumped in troughs for them or the hay Camila threw down in large stacks. I liked the sheep right away. There’s something honest in how empty their eyes are.
We spent that first day preparing the other pasture for the rams to move into. The fence needed to be repaired and it was overrun with thistle. By lunch my hands had formed blisters that had already popped.
“I told you to wear gloves,” Camila said. I didn’t remember her saying anything about gloves.
After lunch I dug up the thistle. By dinner my hands were bloody and aching and I was so tired I could barely talk. Camila and I ate with a baseball game playing on the radio. The season hadn’t started yet; it was just practice.
Back at the guest house, I thought about cleaning up but I was too tired. Instead, I lay on the couch and brainstormed strategies for getting rid of the spiders. I could trap them one by one in a jar. There had to be hundreds. I couldn’t imagine how long that would take. I could kill them with a broom, swinging wildly at their webs in each corner. But I guess I hadn’t really killed much before. I had always asked my ex to deal with spiders or bugs or mice or anything that scared me. And I never asked him what he did with all the things I was scared of.
That night I dreamt of spiders in my suitcase, on all of my clothes. Except each time I touched one it split apart, its eight legs from its body, its pedipalps from its head and each segmented part of the spider stayed alive burrowing deeper into my things. I wasn’t even trying to kill the spiders in the dream. I was just reaching for a clean pair of socks.
My days went by like this. The first then the next and several more fell just the same. I helped Camila with the fence in the morning, battled thistle in the afternoons. There were no lambs born yet. There was a sort of calm to those first few days while everything held its breath waiting for spring, for births, for anything new and squirming.
After work each day I was too tired to clean the house. I lived among Camila’s son’s dirty clothes and moldy dishes. I told myself I’d get to it eventually and the spiders as well. I kept dreaming about the spiders. They were always multiplying in some exponential and disturbing way. I didn’t understand how Camila’s son had lived like this. But now I was doing it too. Pulling thistle gave me lots of time to think. I thought about Mercy and that story. I wondered why the shelter wouldn’t have just put them down, whether she was the type of person to lie.
At the end of the first week Camila gave me $200. That was the deal. Room and board and $200 for five days of labor. It wasn’t possible to think of all the work I had done for that money. I slept all day Saturday.
On Sunday I saw Mercy again. I had slept so much I woke up just before sunrise. The farm looked so beautiful in the dim light of early morning, so I decided to go for a walk. I walked through the pasture, ducking under the electric line of the ram’s new fence. I walked up the hill past the barn and the sheep still sleeping.
Over the hill I followed the wash until I spotted a path. There was an open gate so I walked through it onto a rough back road. It was probably one Camila used for hunting. She likes hunting deer when she needs the meat. Though she told me most years the yearling rams give her more than enough.
I walked until the sun was almost up. Then a bit further down the road in a steep valley between two hills I saw a truck stopped. Immediately I had an uneasy feeling about it. There was no reason for anyone to be this deep into the desert on what I was fairly sure was Camila’s property.
As I got closer the truck didn’t look abandoned. It was clean and the tire tracks on the trail were fresh. No one was in the truck cab but there was a coffee mug in a cup holder and keys on the driver’s seat. I was breathing hard at this point and trying to hear between my pounding pulse anyone that might be coming towards me.
The truck bed had a tall shell on it with windows, one of which was cracked. I peered in. It was dark but I could make out two bodies. They were naked on a bare mattress with covers thrown to the side. It was Mercy asleep with a man’s head resting on her bare chest. I jumped back from the truck. I knew I should leave. It didn’t seem like anything was wrong.
I peeked again, soundlessly. It was very dark inside the truck and hard to make out details. But the man on Mercy’s chest looked young. Younger than me. Mercy looked older in that lighting, lying like that. Even in the dark I could see how freckled her chest was and the folds of her wrinkles on the side of her breasts, under her arms. I realized I hadn’t seen an older woman naked before in real life. I hadn’t ever looked at a woman’s body and found it so unfamiliar.
Then suddenly Mercy’s eyes were open. She didn’t move her head at all but her eyes blinked and shot to the side at me standing there peeking in at her and the man. She winked. I stepped backwards and stumbled over some rocks. The man woke up.
“What was that?” he asked loudly, still sleepy.
“Just a deer, dear,” Mercy sang back to him. I could hear the truck creak as they adjusted their positions and I ran back the way I came.
I asked Camila about it later. I told her I went for a walk and saw a truck parked down there.
“Oh, it was just Mercy. I let her gather prickly pears down there.”
I didn’t see Mercy again for another week. Still no lambs had been born. Camila was worried about one ewe in particular. Her name was June. It was her last lambing season. She was getting old. Camila noticed her vulva was swollen and turning towards the darker pink that warns a lamb is on its way. Camila thought she might lamb in the night so we took turns checking on her every few hours.
When I woke up for my second shift to check on June it was one in the morning. Everything was quiet. Except when I opened the barn Mercy was there on the milkcrate in front of the lambing pen where June was sleeping.
“Didn’t Camila tell you? I’m going to take over the rest of your shifts tonight. So you can get some sleep,” Mercy said.
“She didn’t mention that,” I said. “Well since I’m up, how is she doing?”
“She seems good. Not quite ready yet, though.”
I didn’t know if I should bring up the truck. I stood beside Mercy and watched June sleep. Her belly did look different. Her sides were hollow as if the lamb was already starting to fall out of her.
“So I never finished my story the other day,” Mercy said. “About the litter of puppies I helped die. It’s an important story because for whatever reason afterwards I started to hear dead people.”
“Oh,” I said.
“They come to me when I’m sleeping. In dreams. And they give me messages for the living,” she said.
“What sort of messages?” I asked.
“It’s a range. They give me messages for others. You should leave him. I’m sorry. Stop sinning. It depends.”
June stirred from her sleep. She eyed us both and we looked back at her. She shifted her weight and closed her eyes again.
“I’m telling you this for a reason,” Mercy said. She was staring up at me from the milkcrate where she sat but I didn’t move my eyes from June.
“Do you know the reason?” Mercy asked.
“No.”
“There are so many different types of deaths a person can endure. They don’t all mean that our souls leave the earth. Sometimes only a part of us dies. Do you agree?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Sometimes a person becomes capable of things they would have never done before. How else do you explain that, besides a part of them has died?”
“They changed. People change,” I said.
Mercy shook her head. “There’s a part of him that is dead now and that part of him that has died wants you to know something.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Never go back to him ever again, Lu. Stay very far away from him for the rest of your life. It’s for your own good.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“I think you do,” Mercy said and she walked out of the barn.
Camila woke me up a few hours later asleep with my head leaning on the rail of the lambing pen. I told Camila about Mercy coming by and the things she had said.
“She’s an odd lady. Not everyone’s cup of tea,” Camila said, but she didn’t tell me if Mercy was supposed to cover my shifts. That part felt important.
Back at the guest house, I fell asleep on the couch and slept until the sun was up. I dreamt again of spiders. I hadn’t killed any of them. Still, they were haunting me. When I woke, I went to the ram’s pasture to work on the thistle. I let the pain of pulling mesmerize my mind away.
In the early afternoon I heard Camila yelling my name. It took me a while to find her. She was in the lambing pen with June.
“It’s breached,” she said when I entered the barn.
“What does that mean?”
“The lamb is backwards with its legs tucked under,” Camila said. She demonstrated by bending her own wrists. “Poor June.” She scratched the sheep’s face. “Will you come kneel on her? I need to push the lamb back and get its legs out.”
I knelt on June and tried to pet her cheek but her ear twitched like it was swatting me away.
“Put some more weight on her,” Camila said. “I need her still.”
Camila was back inside June. I could feel the resistance of June’s ribs under my shin bones. It was taking forever. June’s breathing was haggard. I thought she might be dying but Camila seemed calm.
“God this is annoying,” she said. “I think their limbs are tangled.”
Eventually, Camila let out a small sigh. She had one of the lambs’ back legs. Its tiny hooves were visible just beyond the edge of June.
“When they’re front feet first it’s easy. You can just tug them out. But you have to be really careful with their spines when they’re breached like this,” Camila said.
Slowly, as if Camila was pulling the slightest of scarves from a magician’s hat, the lamb was there. Camila pulled mucus away from its tiny mouth and tossed the lamb towards me.
“Put it by June,” Camila said.
I laid the little lamb by June’s nose and she licked its face clean of the yellow stains from within her.
The second lamb came faster. It was a ram. Camila put him beside his sister but June didn’t even seem to notice him. I watched the ram lamb struggle on his side. He was trying to stand or breathe or suckle or see or something. The yellow mucus on him turned brown in the dirt. I worried he might roll onto a goat head or cactus spike. And it must have been so cold, coming from inside June to the world out here. Still, June wouldn’t lick him.
“Why—” I started to ask.
“It never makes sense,” Camila said. “They just have preferences sometimes. Or maybe she knows something we don’t. The ram is smaller for sure.”
We set up a heat lamp over the pen and cleaned off the ram. But after a few hours June still hadn’t taken to him so we had to start bottle-feeding him. First the colostrum. Then every two or three hours after that for his first few weeks. It’d be a long few weeks. And all that just to sell him or eat him in a year.
Camila asked if I wanted to name him. She was doing trees for this generation.
“Linden?” I said.
Camila laughed. It was an odd choice but she liked it. I didn’t even know if they had linden this far west. It was the street I had lived on with my ex.
That night Camila and I alternated shifts feeding Linden, like we’d done for June. He would live in the back sunroom of Camila’s house under a heat lamp on hay and blankets until he was big enough to get reintroduced to the flock.
The first time I checked on him, it was eleven. He was asleep in the hay right under the lamp. He was so small. His joints were knobby and the little tendons holding him all together looked like they should snap. I felt bad for him. But mostly I realized I was angry at June for the extra work she was making me and Camila do.
Linden finished his bottle and he fell asleep again immediately. I knew because his breathing slowed and one of his hooves twitched a little as if he was running through a field, even though he never had before.
It wasn’t fair to be mad at June though. She didn’t have a say in it either. Why would she love him? Maybe men can be cruel because not much depends on them. They can hit and take and kill and leave and it hurts but the hurt gets buried in a woman. When a woman is cruel it is too destructive. If women were cruel, it would destroy too much.
That’s what I was thinking about when I heard the faintest scream from far away. I let it ring for a moment. Then I was on my feet running towards it. The screaming continued but I wouldn’t have needed it to. I knew where I was going.
I ran up the wide dirt path into the hills, tripping on rocks. And then I was running down the road into the small valley to where I’d seen the truck once before. The moon was bright that night so the brown of everything was closer to lilac. The screaming didn’t slow or change. It stayed exactly the same until I was there beside the truck. I figured it would be too late. I didn’t think I could save her. I just needed to see him on her, hurting her so I could hurt him back.
But Mercy was completely alone sitting on the tailgate of her truck.
“I heard screaming,” I said, panting.
“Have you ever tried screaming, Lu?’
“Is someone hurt?”
“You should try it. It feels good.”
I was angry enough it did sound nice. I turned away from Mercy and towards the wash and the lake of dark that was the desert around us. I screamed one long note without any attempt at the shape of a word. I screamed another and another until I was empty. Mercy, still sitting on the tailgate, patted for me to join her. I could hear the coyotes yipping not too far away. I wondered if Linden could hear them too, if he was scared, if he knew of coyotes yet. Useful fear should come ingrained, but I don’t think it often does.
Veith Coleman is a writer from Pennsylvania. She just finished her MFA at New Mexico State University and will be starting a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in Small Packages Press, Cathode and Surely.