Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  I need a drink, June thought. Where had Cal stashed the scotch? She began banging through the cupboards faster and faster, unconcerned with the noise she was making, grateful for it, really, because as long as there was a steady thumping to pay attention to, she didn’t have to think about Suzie’s mitten sitting on the counter and the yellow mud streaks on Cal’s car, and what those things might mean.

  “Mom?”

  June whirled around, smashing the side of her hip into the corner of the counter and letting out a yelp. Nate was crossing the living room wearing a sweater she’d made him for Christmas last year, the wool pilled down the front. She hadn’t heard him come downstairs.

  “Yes?” Without thinking, she shoved the mitten into the back of the nearest drawer and hoped Nate wouldn’t notice. It was a drawer no one but June ever bothered with, filled with the detritus of summer: capless pens, inconvenient lengths of dirty string, warped paper clips, and orphaned buttons. One day, she was always vowing, she would sort it all out. Now she was glad for its confusion.

  “What are you doing?”

  June smoothed her slacks, wincing as her fingers touched the spot on her leg that she’d just bruised. “Oh, nothing. Looking for something I left here last August.”

  Nate shoved his hands in his pockets. His face was puffy and red, and his nose was running. He looks so much like his father, June thought, regarding her son’s strong chin and the wide plane of his forehead, his honey-blond hair. He had always been more like her in temperament, though, reflective, measured, careful about his future. She had an urge to run her palm over his head, to cup his cheeks, but Nate was already edging back toward the stairs, his gaze sliding back to his feet. “I just came down to say I love you. I’ll see you and Dad in the morning.”

  “Okay,” June said to the empty spot he left behind him. “Sleep tight.” The same incantation she’d always bestowed upon him in the same singsong lilt. But nothing was the same anymore, she knew, nor would it be, not with Suzie’s dirty mitten shoved in the back of that solitary drawer, lost to the light, as treacherous as a single yellow footprint dusted under new-fallen snow.

  Chapter Five

  The moon was up high, peeking over the clouds and the trees, when Mercy finally extracted herself from the hospital. Hazel had planted herself fast as a weed by Fergus’s side and told Mercy to take her car for the night. Though Mercy tried to refuse, she was secretly grateful for the favor, since her body longed for sleep the way a hungry man’s stomach demanded food.

  She didn’t think Hazel had heard the news yet that it was Zeke who’d caused the crash. Otherwise Hazel surely wouldn’t have loaned her the car. She wouldn’t have put her powdery arms around Mercy and squeezed good-bye, whispering her thanks. She wouldn’t have given Mercy the key to her house and begged her to look in on the sheep in the morning. Those sheep were family to Hazel, and good people didn’t put their families in the path of trouble if they didn’t have to, Mercy was all too aware.

  In the forest Arlene had blended in as naturally as bluebells in spring, but in a town folks would get one look at her and the rope of grizzled hair tossed over her shoulder and they’d set their lips and pick up their feet. This used to make her laugh. “If I’m the scariest they’ve seen, then they sure haven’t seen much,” she used to crow, straightening the knife attached to her belt, and in these moments Mercy always used to feel a surge of pride in her mother, who knew how to snare a bird so that it would be waiting fresh with the morning dew, who could draw fire out of two rocks and make a blade of grass sing between her fat thumbs.

  Remembering all this, Mercy almost developed the courage to blurt out to Hazel what she’d heard at the nurses’ station about Zeke and the accident. She wanted to, but her throat choked up like a stream jammed with stones, and the words stuck inside her, swirling indefinitely. What would she say anyway? An apology, maybe. I’m sorrier than sorry. Followed by an explanation of what Zeke had once done for her, how he’d taken care of a pair of men in the woods who’d hurt her and then paid the price for it. How, after jail and losing Arlene, he wasn’t really himself anymore. Hadn’t Hazel buried her own son? She must know all about the razor teeth of grief, Mercy reflected—how if you weren’t careful, they’d scrape you raw, eating up your flesh before going for the far more delicious meat in the middle of your bones.

  Instead she suffered Hazel’s embrace in silence, guilt making her arms stiff and her back a ridge of stone. She couldn’t remember the last time another woman besides her mother had embraced her, and the too-sudden proximity made loss fresh all over again for Mercy. Would Hazel rebuke her tomorrow, curse her, or simply close the door in her face with the gentlest and firmest of clicks? Mercy wondered.

  “I have to go,” she said. “My little sister…” She trailed off. The less she said about Hannah, the better. She hoped to God that when the sheriff had come for Zeke, Hannah had had the good sense to hide the way Mercy had taught her. She wasn’t declared Hannah’s legal guardian, and she had an abiding fear that one look around their filthy RV would be enough to send Hannah to foster care. These occasions were times when Hannah’s love of reading came in handy. It kept her quiet for one thing, but, more than that, the fairy tales and folk yarns Hannah so loved provided easy bait for her imagination.

  “You know they’ll take you away if they find you,” Mercy would tell her. “Exactly like the witch in one of those stories of yours. And just because a man wears a star, that doesn’t mean he’s any good. You have to look at what’s underneath, and to do that you have to look without being seen. Do you understand?” And Hannah always nodded and said she did.

  Mercy sure hoped so now. She patted Hazel’s shoulder one last time. “I’ll bring you some things from your house, if you want.”

  Hazel sniffled. “That would do kindly.” Mercy turned away. Such a small thing in the face of such a great wrong, but it was all she had to give. I would do anything, she thought, stepping into the glare of the hospital hallway, to put things right.

  If she were smart, she’d head home, find Hannah, fire up the RV, and get the hell out of Titan Falls. Maybe Zeke was already in custody. Or, likelier, the more complicated scenario by far, he’d taken off, hell-bound not to return to jail. Either way, Zeke had made this mess, and he could damn well lie in it. It was none of Mercy’s doing.

  Except family didn’t work like that when you’d spent your life rattling through the backwoods, the hard woods. In that geography what was past and what was present were one and the same. Crime and punishment danced ever close on the heels of brotherly love, and Mercy, so help her, was tied fist to palm to her older brother and to Hannah whether she liked it or not. It was the very last vow she’d made to Arlene, and she’d rather be tarred a black sinner than go back on that word now.

  Would. Should. Could. In the long run, those words led to no end of trouble if you chose to use them.

  Mercy wasn’t going anywhere.

  When Mercy finally parked Hazel’s car on the edge of Devil’s Slide Road and crept down the skinny path to the clearing where the camper was parked, she saw that Zeke’s truck was indeed missing. A kerosene lantern flickered in the RV’s window, elongating Hannah’s delicate silhouette.

  “What the heck do you think you’re doing?” Mercy growled, banging into the sardine-can space, stomping what snow she could off her wet boots. She moved the lantern to a corner. “The window’s lit up like a damn Christmas tree.”

  Hannah hustled over with a ratty towel for Mercy to squeeze the frost out of her hair with. Her eyes were too big in her face, and her hands were shaking a little. “It’s okay. All the lawmen are gone now. They came looking for Zeke, but he took off when he heard them coming, and I hid in the trees and kept away, just like you taught me to.”

  Mercy’s heart skipped a beat. “Zeke came back here?” It flat out didn’t make any sense. If he’d gone and knocked Fergus’s bus into the ravine, wouldn’t he have tried to get as far away from it as he could, eve
n if he’d had to leave his truck? But then who could ever explain what Zeke did? “Was he sober?”

  “His nose was bleeding, and he was holding one of his shoulders crooked, but he didn’t stink like drink.”

  “What happened?”

  Hannah’s teeth were still chattering a little. “I don’t know. I overheard the police talking about some bones they found and a school bus falling down into the ravine, but Zeke didn’t say nothing about any of that when he came in. He was just cussing up a blue streak because he said he’d smashed the truck and now what were we going to do for wheels?”

  “Hannah, look at me. Are you sure that’s everything that happened? He didn’t say anything about the bus?” Mercy knelt down and put her hands on her sister’s shoulders.

  “I’m sure.”

  Mercy sat back on her heels. The one thing her brother had never been was a liar. “How did he seem when the boys turned up looking for him?” It was what Arlene had always called law enforcement. The boys. As if they were a band of friendly relations. Because once you knew one, you knew them all, Arlene liked to say.

  Hannah pursed her lips. “He didn’t stick around when he heard them coming. He just lit out, and so did I.” So maybe he was guilty, Mercy thought. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to scare Hannah.

  Just then, however, Mercy spied Zeke’s jackknife laid on the dinette’s counter. Dented and worn, the handle was bone, carved in relief with the antlered head of a stag. Arlene had given it to him on his fifteenth birthday, and except for prison he was never parted from the piece. Mercy picked it up. “He didn’t take his knife.” She tightened her fingers around the bone, comforted by the sure way it fit her hand, hollow to hollow, curve to curve. She opened her palm and dropped the blade back onto the counter, then closed her eyes, picturing her brother running fast through the woods, his hat half pulled over his eyes. Underneath its brim those eyes would be alert as twin moons, and on his belt an empty space sat where the knife used to rest.

  When she opened her own eyes, Mercy saw that Hannah had taken off her sweater and that welts were blooming up and down her arms. She scratched at them without complaining, and this fact suddenly broke Mercy’s heart. She went to fetch a tin of salve that Arlene had taught her to make, a mixture of beeswax and chamomile, clean-smelling and soothing, and then took one of her sister’s needle-thin arms in her hand. So slight, but also surprisingly strong, like a green switch cut from a willow. “Let me see. Don’t scratch.”

  “It’s from the ghost that haunts around here,” Hannah said matter-of-factly as Mercy capped the salve. “She’s real mad about something.”

  “Don’t be silly, Hannah. That’s just another one of your stories.”

  Hannah, once she believed in something, was not easy to dissuade. “There is so a ghost. I told you. They found her bones tonight. She wants something from us, Mer. I just don’t know what.”

  Mercy twitched the curtains. “You keep out of that whole business. We’re not here to delve into ancient town history. It’s nothing to do with us. Anyway, they’re going to be up in our lives enough as it is, what with this accident and Zeke running off. Leave it.”

  Hannah pouted. “But Zeke didn’t do nothing. We get all the trouble,” she said, mournful and slow. “It just sticks to our sides.”

  Mercy almost burst out laughing. Hannah, with her tousled hair and huge eyes, sounded and looked like a kitten complaining in the rain, only things weren’t funny. Mercy was bone tired, damp, and there were precious few hours left until dawn. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving. Now, that was a joke. Mercy still had the pilfered page she’d ripped from Hazel’s cooking magazine folded in her pocket, but she saw now how stupid she’d been to think that she could ever re-create anything from that world in this one. She fisted her hands on her hips. “Let’s go to bed now.”

  Somewhere in the darkness, an owl let out a scream—a wet and panicked noise like a woman drowning. Mercy shut the curtains tighter on it. When the weather got good enough, she would have to remember to give them a good wash and an airing. She watched as Hannah began to climb up to the sleeping loft. “Why are you so sure Zeke’s innocent?”

  Hannah’s head wobbled on her frail neck as she echoed Mercy’s earlier thoughts. “He may be a box of fury, but he’s not a liar.”

  Mercy looked at the dented cans of corn pone and green beans lined on the kitchenette counter next to Zeke’s knife. When she and Zeke were little, anything could make him mad, but the one thing that could do it fastest was being blamed for something he didn’t do. Mercy remembered the time he got whipped for stealing eggs from a farmer’s henhouse. A few days later, when the man caught a fox and tried to apologize, Zeke wouldn’t even look at him. He still hated eggs to this day.

  Hannah achieved the loft. Her disembodied voice floated down, a mere suggestion in the dark. “A road’s an open book. Mama always said that, remember? Anything can happen on it, and who would ever know?”

  Mercy stripped down to her T-shirt and long underwear and settled herself beneath her thick quilt. Across from her the knife gleamed, its sheen still visible in the dark, and she wondered just how long it would be before Zeke returned for it. To be a Snow, after all, was to keep things close. She pictured Zeke slumbering somewhere in the vast woods surrounding them, the knowledge of his crimes bundled tight in his heart, and then pondered Hannah and the library books she collected from town to town. There was whatever had happened to Zeke in jail and the memories that Mercy carried of what happened to little girls in the woods, wolves or no.

  One secret at a time, she thought, punching her jacket into a pillowlike shape and laying down her head. Not everything in a forest desired to be dragged to light, she knew, but just because you couldn’t see a creature, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. It just meant you’d better be twice as careful where you chose to walk.

  June woke in the cabin far later than she meant to, well after Cal and Nate, and when she came down into the kitchen, they were both there, Nate silent as the grave with a plate of eggs and Cal making a pot of coffee. June tensed as he opened the drawer next to the one with Suzie’s mitten—he was looking for the coffee filters—and exhaled as he crossed the kitchen to another cupboard. “They’re on the third shelf,” she said, going over to help him, her hip butting up against his. She cursed herself for not getting rid of the thing last night.

  She wanted to ask Cal right now, right here, just how he’d come to have the mitten, but Nate was behind them, alternately brooding and watchful. June thought she could handle whatever Cal’s explanation might be—maybe even the fact of his lying about it—but she wasn’t sure Nate would be able to square himself with a betrayal like that. Much as they argued lately, Cal was still his father, and Nate hadn’t left childhood all the way behind yet.

  Outside, it had begun to snow, the flakes dizzying down in a confused flurry, gentle at first and then faster. During her freshman year at Smith, June had run outside every time a burst of winter weather started, spreading her arms wide and tipping her face up to the sky to feel the crystals kiss her forehead and cheeks. Her friends had teased her, but June hadn’t cared. She was baptizing herself, being reborn as a New England co-ed, a girl who wore circle pins and cheered at football games and quoted Whitman, not one who ate gator, fended off her mother’s bad boyfriends, and only wore shoes when she had to.

  It had been twenty-odd years since June had stood in the dizzying swirl of being two people at once, the one you let people see and the one you kept buttoned close to your chest. With the mystery of Suzie’s mitten shut up in the drawer, she was both horrified and surprised to remember how exciting it was—that sense of boundless possibility. In the monotony of married life, June sometimes forgot that she’d become who she wanted to be after all, even if she’d had to drop some of her dreams along the way. She looked at the drawer where the mitten resided, and she suddenly knew: She was not about to let a scrap of red yarn undo her life’s work.

  Cal gave up on the co
ffee and joined Nate at the table, where he had his own plate of eggs waiting. How similar they were, June thought, father and son, both left-handed, both averse to jam on their toast, both shot through with the famous McAllister stubbornness. They ate without speaking, heads down, avoiding eye contact. The night’s catastrophe had made them careful with each other, June saw, though she couldn’t tell yet if this was a good thing or not.

  After breakfast Cal helped her wash and dry the plates, the egg pan, and the butter knives. June let him, saying nothing about the mitten and nothing about the mud streaked on his car. She watched as he pulled the winter sheets over the faded couch and chairs, closed the shutters, and piled the cooled ashes from the fireplace into a metal bucket. He didn’t move like a man with a secret, but he was capable of them, she remembered, thinking back to the horrible afternoon when she’d found that strange lacy scrap of a bra hidden in his shirt.

  “Here.” She handed him his coat, watching with interest as he shrugged on the garment. She noted—she was almost sure—a slight awkwardness when he plunged his hands into his pockets. First his square fingers patted the jacket’s exterior pockets—one, then the other—and then they fluttered to the pocket hidden in the lining. He glanced up, his face dark.

  June watched him, her hand on the front doorknob. Nate was waiting for her in her car. “I noticed last night there was a hole in one of your pockets, so I patched it up,” she lied. She was glad for the cool air licking down her bare neck. She’d stripped the beds and unplugged every appliance. All they had to do was close the door. The secret of the mitten would be safe until late spring, when she could return to burn it or bury it for good. By then everything would be back to normal.