1. The Valley, Twelve Years Ago #2
But I saw the way her shoulders tightened. I saw the way she braced herself against the stall wall, just for a second, like the ground had shifted underneath her. And when she turned back to me, her smile was the same as it had always been—warm and tired and full of something that looked like love.
But her eyes were different.
They were the same color. They had the same years. But there was something new in them now, something I didn't recognize. Something that looked like fear.
"Let's get you cleaned up," she said. "Your father's going to wonder where we are."
I let her lead me out of the stall. I let her pump water from the faucet by the door and scrub the blood from my arms with a bar of yellow soap that smelled like lye and lemons.
I let her walk me back to the house, my bare feet cold on the gravel path, my hand tucked into hers like I was still small enough to need holding.
But I didn't stop thinking about that cough. I didn't stop thinking about the way her hand had pressed against the stall wall, like she needed something solid to hold onto.
And I didn't stop thinking about what she'd said, there in the barn, with the blood still wet on both our hands.
Some people run from the blood. You lean in. That's a gift and a curse.
I didn't know then what she meant. I thought I did—I thought she was talking about the calf, about the birth, about the messy, beautiful work of helping something live. But I was ten years old, and I didn't understand that the blood she was talking about wasn't always someone else's.
Sometimes it was yours.
Sometimes it was hers.
And sometimes, no matter how steady your hands were, you couldn't stop it from spilling.
That winter, the cough got worse.
It started small—a dry hack in the mornings, a clearing of the throat after supper.
My mother waved it away when we asked. Just a cold, she said.
Something in the air. She kept working. She kept cooking, cleaning, mending fences, pulling calves, doing all the things she'd always done, because that was who she was.
She was the kind of woman who didn't know how to stop.
The fever came in February.
I remember watching her shiver by the woodstove, wrapped in three blankets and still shaking, her teeth chattering so loud I could hear them from across the room.
My father carried her to bed. My sisters took turns sitting with her, wiping her forehead with cool cloths, coaxing broth between her cracked lips.
I stood in the doorway and watched, and I didn't know what to do with my hands.
They were still steady. They always had been.
But steady hands couldn't fix a fever. Steady hands couldn't stop a cough that sounded like rocks rattling in a tin can.
Steady hands couldn't do anything but hang there at the ends of my arms, useless and clean and waiting for something they could touch.
The valley lost half a dozen souls that winter. The Andersons lost their youngest. The Parkers lost the grandmother. The Millers lost two—a father and his son, three days apart. The fever swept through like a scythe, and it didn't care who was good or kind or needed.
My mother lasted longer than most. She was strong, and she was stubborn, and she had four daughters who weren't ready to let her go.
But in the end, it didn't matter.
She died on a Tuesday. I don't remember the date. I don't remember the weather. I remember the way her hand felt in mine—thin and light, like a bird's wing—and I remember the way her chest stopped moving, and I remember the silence that followed.
I was twelve years old.
I didn't cry at the funeral. I stood between my sisters in a black dress that didn't fit, and I watched them lower her into the frozen ground, and I thought about what she'd said in the barn.
You lean in.
I thought I had. I thought I had leaned into the blood and the pain and the messy, beautiful work of helping something live. But she was dead now, and I was still here, and my hands were still steady, and I didn't know what to do with that.
I didn't know what to do with any of it.
Mercy grew into a fine cow.
She had her mother's coloring—a deep reddish-brown with a white blaze down her face—and she had her mother's temperament, too. Gentle. Patient. The kind of animal that would let a child climb on her back and not even flinch.
I took care of her. I fed her and milked her and sat with her in the barn on the nights when I couldn't sleep, and she let me rest my head against her flank and listen to the steady rhythm of her heart.
She didn't ask questions. She didn't tell me it would be okay.
She just breathed, in and out, warm and alive and present, and that was enough.
My father sold her three years later, when the farm failed.
I was eighteen. He was standing in the barn with his hat in his hands, looking at the empty stalls and the peeling paint and the hay that hadn't been fresh in months, and he said, I'm sorry, Moni. I'm so sorry.
I didn't cry then either.
I helped him load the last of the animals into the trailer.
I watched Mercy walk up the ramp, her hooves clattering on the metal, her tail swishing like she was going on a trip instead of to somewhere I would never see her again.
And I stood in the empty barn and listened to the silence and thought about all the things I'd learned in that building.
How to stitch a wound. How to birth a calf. How to sit with something while it died and not look away.
My mother had been right. It was a gift and a curse.
And I was still leaning in.