Tender Mercies (Men of Lancaster Counter Book 2) Read online

Eddie swallowed, hating the man instantly. “Did he use a belt or something?”

  “A switch. A sapling switch.” Samuel looked deeply guilty, as if it were his fault.

  Eddie took a shaky breath, imagining how much that would have hurt. “You’ve bled. A lot. You need to have a doctor look at that. I can take you to Lancaster after breakfast.”

  “No! I don’t have no insurance. And anyways, it ain’t that bad. I looked in the mirror. I don’t need stitches or nothin’. It’ll heal all right in a week or so.”

  Eddie clenched his fists so tightly, his nails dug into his palms. “You don’t know that. You should have a professional look at it.”

  Samuel didn’t argue, but his mouth was set in a stony way that told Eddie he’d have to be dragged to the hospital kicking and screaming. Not that he could really blame Samuel if he had no insurance. Stupid American healthcare.

  “Will you at least let me look at it so I can see for myself how bad it is? I’m not comfortable ignoring it,” Eddie pressed. If it looked really awful, he’d pay for the E.R. himself, though he could hardly spare the money.

  Samuel reluctantly nodded. “It’s not that bad. But if you have some Bactine to put on it, that’d be good.”

  “All right. We’ll do that after breakfast.” He sighed. “Did you leave home after your father beat you? Is that why you were looking for work?”

  Samuel looked back at Eddie, but he didn’t answer. He took a big bite of cereal.

  “Will he come looking for you? Your father?”

  Samuel swallowed. “No. He told me to leave. He don’t care where I am.”

  Eddie sighed. Given Samuel’s reticence, he wouldn’t pry as to the cause of the beating, but he did wonder. Had Samuel lied? Played hooky from church? God only know what his Amish father would find worthy of such a beating. Eddie would love to give the man a taste of his own medicine.

  After they ate and put the dishes in the sink, Eddie took his brand-new first-aid kit—a red box with a white cross—and they went up to Samuel’s bathroom. It was already “Samuel’s Bathroom” in Eddie’s mind, which was weird.

  It was a small room, even with the door wide open. Samuel turned his back to Eddie and pulled his shirt over his head, wincing a little.

  Eddie stifled a noise with his hand. Jesus Christ. Samuel’s entire back was mottled black and purple, with tinges of yellow from all the blood vessels that had ruptured and torn under his skin. It was swollen in overlapping welts, and there were a half-dozen open abrasions, though none of them looked super deep. The wounds had clotted over and were not bleeding or seeping now. They probably didn’t need stitches, but it had to hurt like hell.

  “Oh God, that looks so painful, Samuel.” Eddie’s voice rang hollow in his ears. “You shouldn’t be working. You should be resting.”

  “No. With aspirin it don’t hurt none. I can still work. I want to,” Samuel said very firmly.

  Eddie shook his head, even though Samuel couldn’t see him. He washed his hands at the sink, loaded a washcloth with antiseptic foam, and cleaned all the abrasions carefully. He disturbed the healing and it bled, but he figured the cuts needed to be disinfected. By the time he dabbed the antibacterial cream on the cuts, the bleeding had stopped again. There didn’t seem to be much else he could do. He looked over Samuel’s back, wishing he could make it instantly better.

  What kind of a man did this to his own child? Or to anyone, for that matter? And this person was supposed to be religious? Yeah. Agnosticism: one. Fundamentalism: minus one and kiss my ass.

  “It don’t need a doctor. Right?” Samuel asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “I guess not, unless it gets infected. You should keep an eye on it. You don’t have any pain in your ribs or anything? Nothing that hurts inside? Like when you, um, use the toilet or anything?”

  “No, nothin’ like that. I’m okay.”

  Eddie let out a breath, relieved. “Okay. I’ll get you a clean undershirt you can put on. It’s an awkward area to bandage, but it’d be better to have soft cotton against your skin.” Then he recalled that Samuel had come with nothing. At least now Eddie had a good idea why.

  The thought upset him again. He clenched his jaw. “Just hang on a second. I’ll go get a T-shirt.”

  Eddie went to his own room at the front of the house and pulled a soft white cotton undershirt from a drawer. He liked to sleep in them during the winter. I’ll need to buy him some clothes, Eddie thought. The thought wasn’t burdensome. It made him feel a little better, actually. It was something he could do to help.

  He went back to Samuel’s bathroom. Samuel stood there half-naked. He reached for the shirt in Eddie’s hands.

  Eddie had managed to ignore the broad strength of Samuel’s back when he was tending the injuries, but Samuel had turned, and the sight of his smooth, hairless chest, brown nipples, and the muscles bunched in Samuel’s biceps and shoulders slipped right past Eddie’s defenses. He felt a flush of desire, and he turned quickly to face the hall.

  I have beautiful man living in my house. One I can’t touch. Great.

  “Thank you,” Samuel said. “You didn’t need to doctor me like that. But thanks all the same.”

  Eddie put his mental guards firmly back in place and turned. Samuel was putting his bloodstained shirt back on over the undershirt, his face unhappy. Eddie wanted to say something to take that worried frown away.

  “Look. I want you to know that as long as you are on this farm, this farm, no one will ever raise a hand to you again. Because if anyone tried, I would f—well. I would freaking kick their ass, that’s what. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Samuel’s met his eyes with surprise. One corner of his mouth quivered as if he were tempted to smile. “You don’t gotta defend me, Eddie. I’m a grown man. But… thank you. I can tell you have a good heart.”

  Eddie sighed. Did he? He wanted to be a good person, murderous impulses toward Samuel’s father and lustful urges notwithstanding.

  One thing was certain. He was damned lucky Samuel seemed to be a decent worker. Because Eddie would never kick him off the farm now.

  III. How the Pig Comes To the Farm

  Being small does not equate to the amount of impact you can have in the world.

  Chapter 6

  April

  Eddie sat in his office and forced himself to open up the farm sanctuary’s email. He hadn’t looked at it in a week, but he couldn’t put it off any longer.

  There were fifty unread messages. Most of them said something like: I found you online while looking for farm sanctuaries. Many of them had attached photos. Eddie made himself read the emails and look at the photos because, if he couldn’t do that, if he couldn’t at least give encouragement and advice, then his farm sanctuary didn’t even deserve the name.

  The first email had a photo of a black-and-white Holstein cow chained in a milking stall among many other cows. The email said: This is Lulabelle. She was my calf when I was little, but she’s been a dairy cow for the past ten+ years. She had a mastitis that dried up one teat and can’t earn her feed now. She’ll be sent to the slaughterhouse in a couple of weeks. Thought I’d just take a chance I could find a place for her somewheres else. Respond if you can take her. Franklin Ramsey.

  Eddie shut his eyes. The email broke his heart, but he couldn’t take Lulabelle. He just couldn’t. He forced himself to read on. He read about Simon the donkey, George the horse, Mephy the goat, and a dozen more.

  Eddie had been crazy about animals since before he could walk. He got his first gerbil at age five. Eddie was always very diligent about cleaning the cages and feeding and watering all the animals that came and went in the small menagerie in his parents’ Brooklyn brownstone. They depended on him just as he depended on them. When Eddie came home from school lonely and upset, the animals were there for him. They loved him unconditionally.

  When he was thirteen, he got his first dog. That’s all he’d wanted for his bar mitzvah. His parents were both non
practicing , but they allowed him to have the ceremony because it was a tradition that meant a lot to his grandparents . Eddie found the classes at the Reform synagogue interesting. But mainly he did it to get the dog.

  Only he hadn’t anticipated the heartbreak of going to the animal shelter knowing he could pick only one of the many dogs who begged him with their barks and paws on the cage doors. The dogs pleaded with their eyes: Please take me home. I’m a good boy! By the time Eddie chose Snowball, a small beagle-corgi mix with the sweetest disposition ever, he was traumatized for life.

  Someday, he’d promised himself on that day and a million days since. Someday I’ll have the space and the money to take you all. Even at that young age, he knew “all” wasn’t practical. No one could shelter all the rescues in the world. But he could take care of a lot.

  Then life happened. High school. College. Boys. An exciting job as an editor for HarperCollins. For five years he dropped off Othello, a lovable and rambunctious black boxer, at a Manhattan doggie day care on his way to his high-rise job. God, Eddie adored that dog. Othello died of lymphoma, crushing Eddie’s heart. By then Alex had been pressuring him for some time to move in to his no-pets apartment. With Othello gone, Eddie agreed. But that was just temporary, he told himself. Someday not only would Eddie have a dog again, he’d run a rescue. Someday.

  A year later, when Eddie was twenty-six, he won a contest at a vegan restaurant and got a free weekend at a famous farm sanctuary in Watkins Glen , New York. He took Alex with him. That weekend, touring the incredible property, taking in the magnificent views of pastures and trees and distant mountains, seeing the cows and pigs and sheep and goats and turkeys and ducks, watching the videos of the horrendous abuse in the meat and dairy industries, Eddie’s heart shattered and peeled open, revealing vast new territory he hadn’t known was there.

  In other words, Eddie found the final pieces of his calling. It swept over him with the strength of a spiritual hurricane.

  There were hundreds of dog and cat shelters in the world. Of course, there could always be more, would never be enough. But so little existed for farm animals, and the need was so great. Meeting the animals at Watkins Glen in person was incredibly touching. Cows and pigs and chickens were as personable, as open and friendly, as any dog or cat. Yet instead of being coddled like an indulged pet, they were treated as objects, kept in confinement, abused, and killed young by often brutal and horrifying methods. Eddie had been vegetarian since he was in high school, but seeing the videos at the Watkins Glen center made him vow to go vegan and do anything he could to help farm animals.

  Eddie should have known that weekend that Alex wasn’t on the same page. Alex was visibly disappointed their “weekend away” didn’t include more sex. He was interested in the animals, but in not the same way Eddie was. And during Eddie’s rambling, excited, passion-filled daydreaming on the drive home, Alex didn’t offer up much except practical considerations.

  “If you could get enough regular donors to pay the mortgage on a place, that would be great,” Alex mused.

  “You don’t start a sanctuary to pay for your mortgage,” Eddie pointed out, the lesson fresh from his talk with the owner at Watkins Glen. It was a hard road, she said, but definitely worth it.

  “I know,” Alex agreed amiably. “But you need to at least take in enough to pay for the feed and vet bills. And if it also paid for some of the property, that’s a win-win. That’s only fair, right? Because a lot of the property would be occupied by the animals.”

  At the time Eddie thought Alex’s levelheadedness was a good thing. His business sense would be perfect paired with Eddie’s devotion. Between brain and heart, they’d be able to keep a farm sanctuary afloat.

  So much for that idea. Eddie mourned their relationship. He mourned the future he’d imagined, the two of them growing old together. But Alex’s desertion also undercut his confidence in his dreams and left him frozen like a man facing a firing squad. If the farm was meant to be, why would Alex have left like that? With the mortgage, utilities, property taxes, vet bills, feed, groceries, and Samuel’s modest salary, Eddie was running at a negative outlay every month. He only had a small amount of cash left after buying the farm. He’d burn through that in less than a year. And then what? His income was good but unlikely to suddenly increase enough to cover all his bills.

  He couldn’t bear to take in a bunch of animals and then have to rehome them a year from now. He couldn’t look into an animal’s big, trusting eyes and say, This is your forever home; I’ll take care of you, and then break that promise.

  For the same reason, he really hadn’t pushed the farm sanctuary on social media. He had a Facebook page for the Meadow Lake Farm Sanctuary, where he posted some photos and had a donate button, but he hadn’t yet made a big effort to get the word out there. What if he made a big deal about the sanctuary, and then he folded? That would be a very public failure, embarrassing and shameful.

  The farm was also supposed to be supported in part by donations. But how that was supposed to happen wasn’t clear. It wasn’t easy for Eddie to ask others for money. His father, practical Joel Graber, had given Eddie one key fatherly piece of advice, and it had nothing to do with condoms. Stay out of debt. Eddie’s granddad, and his dad after him, would rather starve outside a restaurant than ask for a bite of food. They were proud men. And Eddie felt more than the usual pressure to live up to this standard of “manliness” because he was gay. He might be queer, but at least he was self-sufficient, by God.

  He hadn’t taken a dime from his parents since graduating college, and he hoped he would never have to. They’d left Manhattan a few years ago for a modest home in Florida. They were financially secure but not “wealthy,” and anyway, that was their money.

  That being Eddie’s makeup, it was hard for him to justify asking friends and strangers to help him live his sanctuary dream on a gorgeous Pennsylvania farm. So a discreet Donations button and a few mentions of it were his only fund-raising efforts so far. Which was probably why his donations averaged less than a hundred dollars a month.

  He forced his fingers to the keyboard.

  Simon looks like a very sweet donkey. I wish I could take him, but we are currently at capacity for our budget. I hope that by this fall….

  I can’t provide a place for George right now, but I will put him on the list in case we have an opening.

  By the time he’d gone through all the emails, Eddie was stressed out and depressed. Maybe he wasn’t cut out to run a rescue. He was too much of a bleeding heart. Oxymoron, that, but it was true.

  Eddie spent an hour on social media, posting new photos of the animals, a few with Eddie in them, and replying to commenters. It cheered him up some, seeing people coo over that photo of Ginger with her nose in the camera, her eyes big and curious, and the one of Ruby the sheep standing on a tree stump out in the pasture, the sun behind her.

  Focus on the ones you can save, said his inner voice. For now.

  Saturday was one of those spring days so fine you had to stop what you were doing every once in a while just to appreciate it. Samuel could tell it was going to be glorious even before the sun rose—it was so clear out the air was sweet, and the birds chirped and trilled like they were getting ready for a party.

  By the time he finished feeding and watering the animals and mucking out the stalls, the sun had come up like a bright-orange apricot, the sky was a vivid blue, and the breeze had started to warm from chill fingers to a warm caress. Samuel leaned on the broom on the walkway outside the barn and looked out over the pasture.

  He’d been at the farm for almost a month, and he liked it there real well, even if the situation with the animals was a little crazy. Take, for example, the Jersey cows. Fred was a huge, hulking creature for a Jersey. Anyone could see that animal didn’t need no more of its mamma’s milk. Fred was on pasture all day and got grain twice a day besides. She was so round in the gut she might have been half-pig. And if Samuel took some of Ginger’s milk, they
’d have milk to drink up to the house, and Fred wouldn’t be so fat, and that seemed like a good idea all the way around.

  But Eddie explained even if Ginger had a good life there and might be milked without it hurting her none whatsoever, most dairies killed male calves for veal and kept milkers inside in small areas all their lives and made cows give birth every year and other such things Eddie considered cruel. So not drinking milk was a kind of protest. The farm sanctuary had to stand for things, and not milking cows was one of the things it stood for. So Samuel didn’t milk Ginger.

  Samuel understood principles, all right. The Amish had more principles than you could shake a stick at. But he sorely missed drinking raw milk. He never complained to Eddie, though.

  Likewise the three old sheep, Edelweiss, Ruby, and Fleece, had been on their way to the butcher shop before Eddie took them on. Eddie didn’t intend to breed them, and there weren’t enough of them to get wool. They just lived at the farm like pets.

  Only the animals weren’t just pets. The farm would have “open houses” at some point, with visitors and things, and the animals would help educate people about farm animals. That’s what Eddie said. Eddie had a lot of strange ideas. But he was the boss, and Samuel was nobody special, so he did what Eddie wanted.

  Sometimes when Samuel worked on the front lawn or flower beds, he could see Eddie through the window in the office, working on his computer. Eddie worked a lot, which looked boring. It would drive Samuel crazy to sit still for so long and do one thing. Sometimes Samuel got an urge to say something to Eddie, share a comment about how Ruby was terrified of Fred yet followed her all over the pasture, or how Ginger was starting to treat the sheep like her calves, or even about the gusts of winds in the trees and how there might be a storm. They were the sorts of things he might say to one of his brothers and sisters back home. But Eddie was inside and shouldn’t be bothered, and there was no one else there.