House of Mercy by Erin Healy

gently and noted that its neck was broken. The bundle of crushed feathers was disordered and weightless. Its back still held the warmth of the hot summer sun.
    Beth cradled the tiny carcass and stroked its feathers with her forefinger, hoping for the impossible: a quickening of its heart and lungs, a sudden fluttering of wings. She tried several heartfelt prayers. She tried several songs. She closed her eyes and buried her nose in the little body just as she had done with the antelope. She had such expectation!
    She waited a long time, walking circles around that cottonwood tree.
    Jacob’s waiting for you. Gert’s waiting , her conscience muttered as she clutched the dead bird to her pounding heart.
    What can I do for Gert?
    More than you can do for this little guy .
    More than nothing? That doesn’t promise to be much .
    Beth could usually accept a creature’s death. Animals lived and died on the ranch, in spite of the most experienced vets’ efforts to save them. But today the fury of powerlessness overcame her. Rotten luck and the whims of God would hold her responsible for the death of Joe, of a pronghorn antelope, and now of this tiny bird. She would never have the opportunity to be a licensed vet, let alone a supernatural one.
    Beth let loose a yell of frustration that came up from the bottom of her belly, and she hurled the dead bird like a baseball into the cottonwood’s thick trunk. She wished the bird back the moment it left her fingers. This was not the behavior of a compassionate human being. But the airborne body was beyond her reach in an instant.
    The sparrow bounced off the grooved bark, and then after a shocking, flapping, noisy tumble through the air, it flew away.
    Beth watched a feather float down onto the exposed roots of the tree and didn’t believe what she had seen. She must have startled another bird out of the branches overhead. That was all.
    When she finally uprooted her feet from the earth, she searched for the evidence of her involuntary birdslaughter. She examined the nooks of the cottonwood’s roots. She ran her hands up and down the rough trunk. She covered the ground in a widening spiral.
    She couldn’t even find any dead leaves on the ground.
    When the path of her spiral took her to the base of another tree, Beth stopped her search. She placed her hand on the grooved bark because it was real and tangible. Above her head, a bird chirped once. She looked up and was not surprised to see a brown house sparrow.
    Beth tried to read nothing into it. The common birds flocked together. They all looked the same to her. Avian species were not her specialty. Still she couldn’t stop sweat from breaking out across the palms of her hands.
    The bird chirped again and eyed her with a cocked head. She had no idea what this might mean.
    But her heart said, Go. Gert’s waiting for you .
    She had to figure out how this worked. She left immediately.

10
    T he horse pasture and the house where generations of Borzois had lived since the late eighteen hundreds were on the north end of the Blazing B. Here the property tapered to a narrow boundary between the county road and the creek that poured out of foothills littered with black volcanic rock. Several horse shelters protected the animals from the stiff weather of the wider landscape. A horseshoe-shaped line of ninety-foot cottonwood trees offered further protection and privacy.
    Beth hurried to the barn, her head full of flying sparrows and elegant antelope and expectations for Jacob’s horse. God would make everything clear. He would do it before the family lost everything, in the nick of time. Miracles always came in the nick of time.
    Throughout the summer, the female trees dropped their fluffy seeds like fairies in wedding dresses onto the horses’ backs. Gert was lying on her side next to the barn, covered in a veil of cottonwood white that mimicked the snowflake pattern of her lovely mottled coat. The horse’s lungs worked as if she’d just