June’s heart pounded as Cal gave her a probing look and then stepped through the door. Suddenly she was desperate to get back to Titan Falls, where she would mend the hole in his pocket for real. If there wasn’t one there, she’d make one and then fix it. Some rips, she thought, you could manage to repair, providing you were quick with your thread, but there were others not worth bothering over. The real trick to holding two things together, June was coming to see, wasn’t how tightly they were bound but how well. Sometimes a loose thread was a saving grace.
Chapter Six
Time slowed and warped in a hospital. Hazel remembered this from Rory’s illness—how a minute could stretch itself out like a whole damn day and then how the instant of death itself tricked you, sneaking up and stealing your loved one so fast you couldn’t believe it had really happened. In that vein, Thanksgiving passed without Hazel’s caring one fig. Maybe the turkey had defrosted and rotted on the counter. Or maybe Mercy had wrapped it up and hauled it out to her place—Hazel didn’t know, and she didn’t rightly care. Hours turned to days, and all the while Fergus hovered between the here and now and the hereafter, his brain occasionally beeping out a blitz of activity but otherwise unresponsive. He was breathing on his own. His heart was pumping. Fluids were going in and out of him, but he simply wouldn’t wake up.
Hazel knew without a doubt that the man she’d wed and to whom she’d given over the better part of her life was in there somewhere, but the doctors didn’t seem partial to her belief. If his situation didn’t improve, they kept warning her, she was going to have to make a difficult decision. Was she prepared for such an event? they wanted to know. A fool question she didn’t see fit to answer. Of course she wasn’t ready. Who in her right mind would be?
Visitors from town came and departed, but Hazel didn’t talk to any of them, and finally the nurses starting asking people to stay away. Wherever Fergus was—some icy, dark place—Hazel wished to be there, too, and so she clutched his hand, closed her eyes, and hour after hour hunkered down with him, praying for a miracle.
The only soul she allowed near her was Mercy, who arrived daily with updates on the sheep and the state of the farm. Fergus might have stopped in his tracks for the time being, but the rest of life didn’t work that way, Hazel knew. Of course she’d heard the news about Zeke supposedly causing the accident and being on the run, but the situation was complicated. For one thing, it was breeding season for the sheep, and if matters weren’t managed right in that arena, Hazel would end up paying for it later. Each afternoon she waited for Mercy’s arrival, pouncing on her with furious questions, throwing all the living she wasn’t doing at the girl’s feet. “Is the big ram eating the littler one’s share? He can be an awful bully, and you can’t let that happen. Did you pen the white ewe with the black ears in with the big ram? In a week or so, it will be time to bring them all into the barn for the season. You think you’re up to the task?”
Mercy responded to Hazel’s demands with resigned calm and few words. “Yes, ma’am. All done. The feeding’s going fine.” Then she’d stare gawp-mouthed at the shrouded figure of Fergus, her lips working themselves around the silent apologies Hazel imagined she must want to get out and never did, whether from pride or fear, Hazel couldn’t determine. It didn’t matter anyway. What was done was done. There was no putting that bus back up on the road, no turning back the clock. All her married life, Hazel had worried about her man driving that icy stretch of road, and now that her blackest fear had come to pass, she was almost very close to being actually relieved. The worst had happened, and she would no longer need to live with the dread of wondering.
When the nurses found out that Mercy’s brother was wanted for the crash and was on the run, they fell into a flurry of indignation. “You don’t have to receive her, you know,” the little blond nurse told Hazel, her nose twitching as she watched Mercy’s scrawny shoulders disappear down the hall. “I wouldn’t.”
Hazel hesitated. She hadn’t been out to the crash site, but Mercy had, and she described a scene of confusion: panicked divots of footprints leading everywhere, stray bits of metal, the hollow scoop of earth where they’d reportedly found Gert Snow’s long-lost bones, much to everyone’s uneasy astonishment.
Gert’s disappearance was a story that had always haunted Hazel. It seemed wrong to her that a woman so allegedly rooted to a spot of earth would have left it in such an open-ended way. Now it turned out Gert had been there the whole time, and Hazel wasn’t sure she considered that idea any more comforting. No, not at all. She sighed. Any way you sliced it, the Snows—all of them—were double helpings of nuisance and trouble. Still, Hazel found herself praying that Mercy was different, and it bothered her in the extreme, this unaccustomed little sun of optimism burning away inside her. When she replied to the nurse’s concerns about Mercy, her voice came out far gruffer than she meant it to. “The girl says her brother didn’t do it.”
The nurse scoffed. “My brother’s in law enforcement down in Concord, and that’s what all the lowlifers say, honey. None of them ever did it.”
Hazel picked up her spindle. “You don’t understand. I need her help with my animals. There are so few people I trust.” But there was more to it than that. The terrible truth was that Hazel half enjoyed the guilty way Mercy skirted around Fergus and his machines. It gratified her to watch Mercy’s head snap to eager attention when she gave the girl instructions, for it meant that there was someone else in the world who wanted Fergus to get well even more than she did.
The nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Fergus’s unmoving arm. Her nostrils flared again. “You’re a more forgiving woman than I am.”
Hazel worried her spindle between her fingers, coaxing out inch after inch of yarn, the pile of fleece growing thinner and thinner on her lap. Maybe it took an accident to uncover something that had been there all along. Maybe that’s what that nurse was trying to say. Hazel stared at the wooden tool in her hand. She hadn’t been paying attention. She’d reached the end of the thread, she saw, and now had nothing to do. Somehow, without even knowing it, she’d come around full circle, empty-handed, right back to the same damn place she’d started.
After death there was still always some kind of life. It was the unofficial dogma of Titan Falls—a creed long ago arrived at not out of civic hope or optimism but simple practicality. When a man was churned to bone in a mill accident or simply wore his skin clean out, when a wife turned her toes up to the sky and closed her eyes for good, there was always someone left behind: snotty-nosed children not yet out of diapers, twin sisters or brothers who’d never married, sometimes just a dog—long in the tooth and matted, perpetually hungry—but always someone. The women of Titan Falls recognized this. Of the many things they did well, they excelled at carving order out of mess. They rose at dawn to smooth the wrinkles from threadbare sheets and scrub the black off kettles, to sort odd socks and wrap the day’s sandwiches in squares of waxed paper. Because life required attention to the little details, they knew. Because sometimes those small things were all a woman had.
Three days after the accident, Stella Farnsworth sat in the comfort of June’s parlor, like a cat preening its fur. Twenty years old, Stella was a recent bride and expecting her first child in April. To June she seemed still to be half child—twig-limbed and doe-eyed—but so far she’d approached her pregnancy with a hypnotic calm.
“Oh, Paul already put the crib together,” she said, giggling and waving her hand when June asked if she needed any furniture. “It took him half the night, but he got there in the end. He’s started in on painting the nursery now. Apple green, we chose, because we don’t know if the Nugget here”—she lightly touched her belly—“is a boy or a girl.”
June thought back to her own expectant days, when Cal had taken one look at the crib’s instruction sheet and then called Tom Plimpton, the mill foreman, to come and sort out the whole thing. “He can fix the pulp screens in ten minutes flat,” Cal reasoned, staring at the dia
grams of instructions. “He ought to be able to figure this out.”
Now, sitting surrounded by the women of Titan Falls, June wondered if maybe she’d skipped some important step of wifehood. She’d made sure everything in her domestic life had always gone so seamlessly, so easily, just as Nate’s crib had been assembled without one wrong step but also without any of the laughter or the shared intimacy that small failures created between couples.
Soon, as June hoped it would, gossip began to flow. “What do you think it means that they’ve gone and located poor Gert Snow after all this time?” Alice Lincoln started in, her eyes goggling. “Isn’t it just the strangest thing?”
Dottie waved one of her meaty hands. “Never mind that. It’s the living we ought to be focused on. I hear that the Flytes are down to the bone in their savings. I don’t know what will happen now with the funeral expenses.” The women darted little accusatory glances at June, as if it were her fault that Fred Flyte was an incurable souse and a piss-poor provider.
Alice laid down the pillowcase she was needlepointing and turned to face June full-on. “Have you been to see them yet?” Alice’s husband handled the incoming logs at the mill. She’d had a daughter of her own on the bus, a ten-year-old who’d escaped with a broken wrist and a bracing new fear of the dark.
Dottie glared at her. “That’s a terrible idea, Alice. If you were stuck in Dena’s shoes, would you want to speak with June right now?”
Alice bowed her head and slid her eyes away from Dot. “No. I guess not.”
Dottie shifted her considerable bulk. “I didn’t think so.”
June wondered at Dot’s change of heart. “Have you been to see her?”
Dot fixed her with her gaze and sniffed. “She’s not in a good way.”
“I heard that Snow boy was in some previous trouble in Maine,” Margie Wall broke in, trying to change the subject a bit. Everyone knew that the mill was teetering on the edge of another round of layoffs. That wasn’t technically June’s fault, but it was hard not to hold it against her all the same. “That’s what Abel said, at least. I heard the little bastard was drunk when the bus went down but that no one can find him.”
June picked at the stitches she’d looped onto her knitting needle. With the women of Titan Falls, there were always two sides to things, she knew, never more. The good and the bad. The black and the white. The innocent and the damned. June’s mother-in-law had taught her that lesson right off the bat, and, once dispensed, Hetty’s advice had not been optional. If June didn’t take it, Hetty would hound her until she submitted. It was a skill that came in handy during gatherings like these. “Ten to one if they don’t go and charge Zeke with murder,” she said now, dropping a conversational pebble to see what kind of ripple it made. Not the sort she was expecting.
“But it was an accident!” Stella cried.
This was worrying. June hadn’t expected to hear sympathy for the Snows. “The court won’t see things his way when they catch him, I can guarantee.”
Stella cleared her throat. “I’m just saying, I don’t think the crash was intentional. Those Snows are awful, but I can’t believe they would go and deliberately hurt the Good Lord’s children.”
Pregnancy was making Stella soft in her head, June thought. She wrapped a tail of yarn around her knitting project. It wouldn’t do for the whole damn town to go tender on any of the Snows just now, not with Suzie Flyte’s funeral right around the corner and Abel still looking for Zeke and that mitten sitting in the cabin’s drawer. The story of the crash was going to have to go the right way, and if she had to, June would make it. Once she’d been very good at that kind of thing. Once she’d written her own better ending. “Justice has to be served.” She tried to say it gently, as if she truly lamented this state of affairs. “What kind of world would it be if it weren’t?”
That stumped Stella. She rolled up her needlework and opened the lid of her sewing basket. Her top lip was set in a stubborn curl. “What kind of world would it be without the benefit of the doubt?”
Dot came to the rescue. “That’s no way to talk, Stella. We’re all women of faith here.”
Just then the front door slammed and Nate walked past the open door of the parlor into the kitchen without saying hello. The women started gathering their loose threads and patterns, shoving fabric scraps into bags and shrugging on coats. The sewing circle was over. The next time they met, they all thought but no one said, they’d be gathered together under the rafters of St. Bart’s to bury Suzie. Maybe Zeke would be caught by then and his bail would be set. Dena would have to pull herself together, and Cal would once again lead the town in resuming its normal routine. Hopefully, the mill would keep churning out its white rolls of paper and the river would run clean. No one would ever know about the mitten in the drawer at the cabin—a little scrap of Suzie stuck behind on earth, all but forgotten.
One by one, the women approached and kissed June on the cheek and thanked her for her hospitality. Margie Wall asked for her marble-cake recipe. Stella said she had a few questions about the upcoming Winter Carnival. None of them noticed the tremor in June’s fingers as she attended to the door or the way she bit the corner of her bottom lip, and none of them guessed, as she waved them into the darkening afternoon, that she was carrying, folded and tucked under the starched bib of her apron, a pinpricked length of dread stained a deep, unsettling scarlet.
It was strange in Hazel’s house without her. The air smelled of dust and pine, and the only sound was the grating of the clock on the sitting room’s mantel. Every time she came, Mercy checked it to make sure it was wound, then let herself into the kitchen, where the cupboards were stocked with all manner of good things to eat: noodles and bags of creamy rice, packets of powdered onion soup, canisters of apple tea. All of it free for the taking. Mercy thought of Hannah, growing so fast that her pants were short around her ankles, but she quickly pushed the thought of stealing out of her mind. The Snow name was low enough as it was. Instead Mercy took any spoiled food out of the fridge, then took the sack out to the row of metal rubbish bins lined up behind the house. Fergus used to haul everything to the dump twice a month, but now Mercy supposed that she would take over that job for Hazel. She’d do it gladly if it meant bringing Fergus back to life.
Telling Hazel what the police believed about Zeke had been the hardest thing so far. Mercy had been terrified that Hazel would fire her on the spot, and then what would she do to put food on the table for Hannah? But Hazel had surprised her by not reacting at all.
“I know all of this,” she’d said from the chair placed next to Fergus. Her head had been tipped back and her eyes were shut, so Mercy couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Up close, the bare skin on her neck was veined and papery like an insect wing, a thing both delicate and deceptively strong. “I’ve already heard. Now, here’s what I need you to do for the sheep…”
Hazel’s refusal to discuss Zeke was a frank relief. Every day since then, every hour she was in Hazel’s presence, Mercy had tried to think of a way to say thank you, but Hazel was having none of it. And so Mercy was doing what she could to make it up to Hazel. She owed her more than she could ever say, she knew. Hazel was the first person Mercy could remember who’d opened her home to her, and Mercy was surprised to find how quickly she’d grown to count on the little comforts of stable domesticity, things no one else would think to notice, perhaps, but which touched her to the quick: a calendar with cats on it hung in the kitchen, to-do lists pegged on the fridge, a wall of photographs showing the progression of years—Hazel’s face starting off thin and smooth, then plumping and creasing—houseplants grown lush and lazy. Bits and pieces like this, Arlene had always dictated, would just drag them down on the road. Better to stay anonymous and uncommitted. For the first time, Mercy had begun to wonder at everything she and especially Hannah were missing.
In Hazel’s bedroom Mercy slid open dresser drawers and found clean socks and underwear, then fished a fresh pair of dungarees and a cris
p shirt out of the wardrobe. The garments hung in patient order, placeholders for the absent couple, Fergus’s shirts nestled next to Hazel’s, work-worn trousers folded over the hangers’ neat halves, Fergus’s one suit zipped in a dusty plastic cover. If he passed away, would Hazel bury him in it? How wrong to go down into the ground in something you’d never really worn, Mercy thought. Surely the earth should receive you the way you’d really been in your life. It’s what they had done for Arlene—dug a grave deep in the woods and tumbled her into it wrapped in a dried deerskin and wearing her favorite black hat. But civilization had its own customs. Town folks, Arlene had always told them, buried their dead right under their feet, stomping on the bones as if that would ensure the departed remained that way.
Mercy shivered and closed the closet door. Fergus wasn’t going to die. She had to believe that. She pictured him in his hospital bed, shrouded in white, tubes and wires shooting out of him like tentacles. If only he would get better, he might be able to say what had really happened. Arlene would have known how to do it. She would have gone straight into the forest, plucked an assortment of flowers and buds, and made a miracle. But that was just wishful thinking on her part, Mercy knew. In the end even her mother hadn’t held sway over the whims of life and death. Her own passing had proved that. No, if Mercy was going to sort out the mess of the crash, she was going to have to rely on her wits, not magic. She shoved Hazel’s spare clothing into a duffel bag she found in the bottom drawer of the bureau. Problem was, she wasn’t her mother. These days she wasn’t even herself. She zipped the bag and left the bedroom.
Considering everything, maybe that was all to the good.
Mercy Snow Page 9
