Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  On the drive home, the paroxysmal rattling of the truck and the ice forming on the road shaped his thoughts into jagged and disjointed shrapnel. Fragments of suspicions, regrets, and sorrows mingled with other, sharper judgments, scooping out a mental path as slippery and treacherous as the road he was driving. He replayed the scene he’d witnessed with Cal, the woman who obviously wasn’t his wife, and the young blond girl. If he were quicker, more like Hannah, Zeke thought, who could twist an argument so fast you forgot which end was which, he would figure out a way to profit from the little get-together he’d seen. But knowing his luck, he’d get busted for extortion or something and thrown right back in the slammer. In the end it would come down to what it always did: his word against everyone else’s, and he already knew who would lose that horse race.

  It struck him that just as there were two layers of canopy in a forest, the green and tender shoots beginning to come into their own, and the overarching, bigger branches, full of dark and heavy leaves, there were two sets of justice in the world: one for people like Cal McAllister and another for boys like him. As he mulled over the inherent unfairness of this, he wondered how, when presented with interrelated wrongs, a body was supposed to know which one was the worst. He had beaten a man so badly he would never walk straight again—true—but only because that man had hurt Mercy. Zeke had done time, and the other two men had not. When a crime went unpunished, Zeke wondered, did it mean it was any less wrong?

  His head knocked against the truck’s passenger window as he went around a turn, and he snapped to attention. He hadn’t realized he’d been half dozing, lulled into semiconsciousness by his abiding hunger and the crunch of the tires against the dirt and snow. He was nearing the path that led down to the clearing they now called home. Just a few more wide turns and he’d be there, back with Mercy in the warmth of the RV, where things made more sense. He moved his foot on the gas to head into the next bend, but before he could press down, the truck was suddenly skidding, the back wheels digging an independent arc across the road. Zeke spun the steering wheel, but that only worsened matters, throwing the truck onto the narrow shoulder and smashing him full force into a tree.

  When he came to, he had glass stuck in his hair and his left shoulder hurt like hell. He wiggled the fingers on that hand, relieved that they all seemed to be working, and eased out from behind the wheel, being careful not to cut himself on any loose shards of metal or what was left of the window. He stood gape-mouthed for a moment, trying to absorb the exact magnitude of this latest of his fuckups, and then gave up and began trudging back to the clearing.

  He wasn’t really surprised when he heard the cops coming down the path a little while later, their belt hardware jangling, radios squawking. He watched from behind the RV’s curtain as the circles of light from their flashlights bobbed, then grew wider and brighter as they neared.

  He hadn’t done anything wrong, he thought as he gathered his coat, his hat, and laced his boots. On the other hand, he’d done absolutely everything wrong. He’d left the truck smoking on the road. He’d been driving when he was too tired. He didn’t have a proper registration for his vehicle. Any number of infractions they could haul him in on. There was just time for him to kiss Hannah and help her into her coat before they both slipped out into the trees. He left Hannah tucked in a copse of prickly holly and set off down the ravine. No doubt the police would try to book him on drunk-driving charges, not caring that he was as dry as a well in summer. Facts weren’t going to matter much in a case like his. He knew that the town hadn’t liked his father, and they weren’t prepared to like him either.

  Halfway down the slope of the ravine, he stopped. Something was very wrong. The secret quietude of the forest at night was being ruptured by the distant grind of machinery and the wailing of sirens. Using the river as a guide, Zeke followed the bends of the valley bottom, twisting and turning with the water, the commotion increasing as he approached the scene and saw what looked like a school bus tipped into the water. Keeping to the shadows, he held his breath and thought furiously back to the moments before his own accident. There hadn’t been a single soul on that road besides him. He was certain of it. And yet, astoundingly, here a bus had fallen. He watched as a pair of paramedics crawled out of the wreckage bearing a stretcher with a lifeless blond girl on it. Zeke held his breath and looked closer. It was the girl from the movie theater. The one who’d been talking to Cal McAllister, her yellow hair spread around her as if she were swimming.

  Slowly he backed away into the vegetation. At his feet the Androscoggin flickered with cold malice, the moonlight on its surface winking at him in mocking flashes. You’re only as good as the story you carry, it said. And you aren’t fooling anyone. Tell the truth and you’ll just get called a liar. Up above him on the ridge, he heard a dog braying and then the stamping of police boots on the snow, and without hesitation he turned and plunged into the safety of the water, heading for the opposite shore, where the woods grew thicker and the steep hills beckoned. He looked back once at the river, wishing he could go to Mercy and Hannah, but even as he fled, he knew it was going to be quite some time—if ever—before he crossed back to that life again.

  Two days after the accident, to Mercy’s unending frustration, Zeke was proving as good as his word. Though she knew he wasn’t wholly gone from Titan Falls, he also wasn’t anywhere she could find him. On the one hand, that was fine news, for if she couldn’t hunt him down, surely Abel Goode couldn’t either. On the other hand, she had a thousand questions for her brother and no way to answer them.

  By now the route home from Hazel’s was a path Mercy could have trudged in her sleep. Out of the valley and into town, then past the library, past the general store, with its tempting bins of penny candy and its back aisle of stationery goods, past Lucky’s Tavern. That was one place she knew she wouldn’t find Zeke. The mill loomed behind everything always, its smokestack as forbidding as any watchtower, like the trick painting of an old-fashioned, bewigged man Mercy had once seen in one of Hannah’s library books, whose eyes followed her no matter where she moved.

  Today Mercy decided to take the long way home down by the river on a neglected, weedy path. The vegetation was mostly buried by hillocks of snow, but she kept an eye peeled anyhow. Arlene had always finished all her plant and herb gathering well before the first flurries, drying her finds and storing them in glass containers for the winter. Mercy had some of those samples left, but her stores were dwindling and she wished for the thousandth time for her mother. Maybe she would know a plant or a cure for the comatose Fergus. If only he would wake up, he could say what had really happened on the road and the town would believe him. If Zeke was innocent of causing the crash—and Mercy believed he was—then he needed someone else, someone who wasn’t a Snow, to stand up and say it.

  Mercy felt her throat grow tight. When the population of Titan Falls stared at her brother, she knew, they perceived good looks riding hard on the heels of a rotten reputation, but Mercy saw straight through all that to Zeke’s damaged heart. They were so similar, the two of them—halves of an uncertain whole—but he was the boy and slightly older, and growing up he’d always tried to use that to her advantage. Most of the time, he’d gone on to discover all the worst parts of life first and tried to smooth them out for Mercy. The times he couldn’t—like when those men had found her in the woods—were times she didn’t like to think about.

  When she was six and Zeke was almost eight, he’d taken her deep into the woods and made her wring the neck of a rabbit he’d snared so she would get her hands on death first and meet it eye to eye before it took her by surprise. She’d startled when she’d felt the rabbit’s heart fluttering so fast against her palms and then had gone ahead and wrenched the neck as Zeke showed her. When it was over, Zeke had her skin the creature to teach her what lay beneath its fur. To this day she still had that pelt, stretched and scraped and gone bald in patches—a souvenir of her primary encounter with the fact that everything in t
his world was food for something else.

  When she was eleven, a boy in one of the campgrounds they were holed up in started teasing her. Mercy had been nothing yet but a tangle of dark hair and sharp elbows and knees, so skinny and jagged that Arlene had called her a human zipper. Every morning the boy would lie in wait for Mercy and buffet her with pebbles when she exited the RV—nothing that would cause any damage, just stones that would blister her skin and hurt. When Zeke found out what was going on, he picked up the biggest rock his fist could hold and went in search of the boy. The whole campground heard the cries coming from behind the washhouse, but no one did anything. The next morning the boy and his family took off before dawn, their vehicle leaving behind a reproachful trail of blue vapor that burned Mercy’s lungs when she stepped outside to watch them depart.

  But there were other times, when he wanted, that Zeke could pluck a note of gentleness from his belly like a song. The year they didn’t have any money for Christmas gifts, for instance, Zeke had astounded them by pulling out a wooden box he’d been keeping hidden, flinging open the lid, and releasing a score of luminously colored butterflies. Hannah, four at the time, had squealed and careened about the tight space of the RV, her plump palms extended to catch the glory rising in circles all around her.

  Mercy looked up from the sodden ground to find that she was almost at the mill. Slack winter shadows were creeping along the surface of the river, gathering and separating, oozing ahead with the current of the half-frozen water. She stopped for a moment, trying to reconcile her earlier perspective of the tower and the rectangular factory with this closer, more intimate view. In front of her, the back wall of the mill rose in a monolith of gray, its windows menacing pinpricks. Mercy instinctively hunched in on herself, although if anyone were looking out, they might hardly see her in her mud-spattered work coat and boots.

  She stopped. She’d reached the edge of the mill yard now, where machinery was hunkered under layers of tarps for the season and where the men parked their trucks and cars. A small hidden creature—a mouse or perhaps an early bat—squeaked unseen in the shadows. Mercy shivered. She couldn’t imagine a more unlovely place. It hadn’t snowed for a few days, so the ground was a smear of mud and frozen sludge crisscrossed with a web of tire trails. She picked her way through the vehicles, not entirely sure what she was even looking for. Parked closest to the mill was a splotch of brazen color in the crowd of pickups and four-wheelers, dun-colored and dented, all of them. She stepped closer. Without a doubt, it must be Cal McAllister’s car, for no one else in Titan Falls had the luxury of possessing something merely because it pleased him, because it was beautiful, an end in and of itself.

  Timidly she reached out and ran a single finger over the hood. The metal was cold to the touch and slickly polished, and her finger left a clouded smear. She quickly retracted her hand, and the mark faded. Inside the car the leather tufts on the upholstery were as plump and taut as bread loaves just pulled from a steaming oven. Mercy wondered what it would be like to crawl into such comfort after a day spent in the cacophony of the mill. Was the transition from clattering gears and whining saws to the insular comfort of leather and gleaming chrome a blessing for Cal, she wondered, or did he have to push away a little pang of guilt as he watched his workers climb into their own battered vehicles and drive back to equally scruffy homes? Mercy had heard that the mill was getting ready to lay off a round of men. She wondered how they would feel about Cal and his fancy car then.

  But beauty always had at least one flaw nicked into it, just as something unredeemably ugly could be its own kind of lovely. Sometimes it took only the blink of an eye to see it. The light dropped a shade, casting the last of the day into formal dusk, and Mercy scanned the sky. In a world of gradations and shadows, of one road blending into the next—the only life she’d ever known—she wondered how she was supposed to winnow out a fixable truth.

  When she looked back down to the car, her eye fell on a fine spray of yellow mud filmed on the inner wheel casings. She bent over, the edges of her hair sweeping onto the ground. Upside down, she could see that the undercarriage of the car was clotted with the yellow mud from Devil’s Slide Road. She frowned and reached a finger out. It didn’t look that old. The color still held its sulfurous tang. The ruin of Zeke’s truck was covered in the same dirt, faded to the same shade but not yet so bleached that it had turned an ordinary brown. Not that many people dared to travel Devil’s Slide Road—not at this time of year at least.

  Mercy bit her lip, trying to construct a timeline of the accident in her mind. What if Zeke had been ahead of the bus the whole time? And what if someone else had come up behind it and tried to go around? It was possible. There’d been several different tire marks in the frozen mud when Mercy had gone to look at the crash site: the wide, swerving ones from the bus; the bald tracks Zeke’s truck left, also swooping off the road; the short neat lines of police vehicles; and another set, too, from good tires, Mercy could tell. But either the cops hadn’t noticed those or they didn’t care. And why should they? They already had their suspect in Zeke. Mercy straightened up, her mind whirling. Cal’s car, she noted, had very fine tires indeed.

  She was turning to leave when she felt a prickling along the back of her neck. She lifted her eyes to the windows and spotted, on the very top floor, the figure of Cal staring down at her. Even from this distance, his eyes looked cold and hard. He didn’t move as Mercy backed out of the mill yard and returned to the path by the river, her mind working furiously. Common sense said that she and Zeke and Hannah should load up the RV and get out of town while they still could, but she had been altered by that quick change of light and the revelation of the mud on Cal’s car. Something wasn’t right, she felt in her gut.

  The problem was that no one could say what had really happened. The children who’d been on the bus were too addled and probably hadn’t been paying attention to the road anyway, and if Zeke came forward, Abel would clap him in cuffs and haul him off before he managed to squeeze out two words in his defense. That left only Fergus, cocooned in his nest of bandages, his sleeping mind tucked up like a nut in a hard shell. But what if he woke? What if she could rouse him? Would he remember then? If he did, he could help prove that Zeke was innocent like he said.

  No doubt whatever really happened that night had been a terrible mistake, but the problem, Mercy realized as the last of the day’s light rolled itself up and curled away, was that no one in Titan Falls seemed prepared to admit that. And why would they, she thought as she stared at the dark geography of the mill, when nothing in their lives was accidental, when they lived and died by design of the mill?

  And lately nothing in Titan Falls seemed to be very certain at all. Hazel had told her about the impending mill layoffs. How glad she was, Hazel had said, that Fergus was not a mill man. How fortunate that he had his job driving. As if, Mercy thought now, bad luck could be evaded like a dangerous stretch of river, portaged with your boat on your shoulders and your gear on your back, a shortcut of safety taken on land. She looked at the Androscoggin. In a few more weeks, ice floes would cover its surface completely, but even when those waters looked dead, she suspected that they would still always be swirling down along the bottom, shifting sandbars and submerged logs around so that, come spring, no one would know what they were dealing with exactly. And maybe, Mercy thought, easing back onto the weedy, unused trail that would lead her into town, just maybe, that was exactly what Cal McAllister was counting on.

  Chapter Seven

  The dead, no matter how long passed, love nothing more than attention and remembrance, to hear their names flitting from living tongue to living tongue. When it comes to that, there is nothing like a good funeral, even if it is not their own. Certainly this was the case with Gert Snow. Reunited with the air, dancing once again on the lips of the townspeople, Gert’s newly freed spirit began kicking up mischief. She started with the burial of Suzie Flyte.

  The day dawned eerily warm over Titan Falls, sl
ushing up the neat sheets of ice that had formed on the river, making a mess of the path in front of the church. Stella Farnsworth felt the first insinuation of a flutter in her belly. When she went to change into black for the service an hour later, she found a foot-shaped bruise smeared on her skin that would remain there for the rest of her pregnancy. All through town, people’s measures of cream curdled in coffee, shower water ran to freezing before scalding, and mice frolicked in pantries.

  Cal woke earlier than usual that morning with a pounding headache and the feeling that something heavy and insistent was sitting on his chest. For a moment, groggy with sleep, he thought it was their old cat, Moss, before he remembered that it had been years since the beast had been alive. Groaning a little, he threw the covers aside. June shifted in her sleep, her arm snaking across the bed toward him, but he evaded her and stood.

  She cracked an eyelid. “Do you want coffee?”

  “No.” Cal slid on the pants he’d left draped over the armchair in the corner. “You sleep. I’m going to check on a few things at the mill. I’ll see you later at St. Bart’s.”

  June had half hitched herself up on one elbow. “But your suit…”

  Cal found the garment bag hanging on the closet door and hooked it over his arm. “I’ll change in my office. Go back to sleep.”

  With a mumble, June complied, burrowing herself back in the covers and rolling onto her side. Cal observed her for a moment, her body so well known to his, even after all its changes. When they’d met, she’d been as narrow and pliable as a ribbon, and then, pregnant with Nate, she’d been plump as a summer pheasant. Lately the angles of her youth seemed to have vanished forever. Her body lacked the pleasing tenderness it had once possessed. Was it the slight weight gain she’d suffered over the past few years? Simply the beginning of the descent into life’s second half? Cal didn’t know. He missed the girlish June, however, and the way her plaid skirts used to dance just above her knees, though if he were being honest, he knew that this yearning said more about him than it did her. Now when June wore skirts, she wore them longer, if she bothered to wear them at all.