Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  June waited for Dena to up and slap Mercy for such impertinence, to hurl the charm into the pews, perhaps, where it would settle with the day’s dust and sorrows, but instead she clutched the dinky string to her breast and whispered, “Thank you.”

  Whatever next? June wondered as she stepped out of the church, trying to keep her chin steady under the weight of the townswomen’s nosy gazes. If the lion was going to lie down with the lamb like that, why, something was clearly afoot. Unbidden, the red flash of Suzie’s mitten flitted through her memory. Cal was involved with the wreck somehow. June knew it, but before she could ponder that problem further, she descended the last church step and stumbled. She smoothed her skirt and looked around to see who had noticed, but it seemed no one had. June shivered, relieved but also disturbed. Twenty years in a town, and she still felt like she could trip right off the face of it and no one would notice. Or maybe they would and just wouldn’t care, the way they overlooked the random articles of clothing and shoes that were sometimes shunted along in the currents of the Androscoggin, which eventually appeared several miles downstream in a pell-mell of bashed-to-heaven logs and silt, stripped of all identifying traces of their former owners, blank and perfect as fresh sheets of paper ready to receive the press of a strange new hand.

  Chapter Eight

  Left undirected after a calamity, grief will puddle and flow willy-nilly, finding its own peculiar channels into people’s lives, each one a little different than the last. In the days after Suzie’s burial, a small but steady stream of townspeople, some of them bearing hastily homemade wreaths of holly and mistletoe, made their way out to Devil’s Slide Road to the site of the bus crash to try to gain some perspective and also, if they were being honest, because they were drawn by the sensationally gory lure of Gert’s uncovered remains and what they could mean.

  Hazel, much to her surprise, turned out to be no better than the rest of the town. It had been a full week since the accident, and there was still no change in Fergus’s condition. Hour after hour, Hazel held his hand in the hospital, patted the swollen patch of his cheek, and listened to Mercy’s accounts of the activity going on out in the rest of the world. Finally, driven by her own baser instincts and a powerful need for fresh air, Hazel left the side of her husband and went to see what all the fuss on Devil’s Slide Road was about.

  If finding Gert’s long-lost bones was a miracle of sorts, it was Hazel’s opinion that it was a purely accidental one. After all, what didn’t have the potential to startle and amaze when you were in the woods? A den of newborn foxes, their fur still wet, might be uncovered, or a pulsing cloud of fireflies, or a cave so deep it had no bottom. Bones, however, were not rightly unusual. Hazel stumbled across them on her land all the time and in all variations: deer femurs with their sinew still hanging, the rotted fossils of rodents and squirrels, as neat and tidy in the dirt as anatomical models. Once she found a coyote skull thick with bees, life cupped within death, and though she had the urge to pick up the seething mass just to feel that balance for a moment, she knew that she’d be punished with a thousand stings if she did.

  Along with a clutch of other curious souls, she stood in a tangle on the side of Devil’s Slide Road, not far from where the bus had begun slipping down the ravine, and peeked over the lip of the gorge. Sure enough, the remnants of Gert grinned up at her from a little ways down, as if sharing a cruel joke that had been a long time coming. A low barrier of wire had been erected around the partially uncovered skeleton, but it was an unnecessary precaution. Even a generation later, the people of Titan Falls were inclined to keep their distance from the likes of a Snow. Hazel shuffled closer to the edge of the road and stared harder, unimpressed. Such a fuss over what’s basically a pile of dry sticks, she thought, and then, picturing the inert form of Fergus, immediately regretted it.

  She sniffed and took in the familiar faces around her. There was Margie Wall’s husband, Tyler, and behind him stood Frank Billings and Archie Lincoln, Fergus’s card buddies. Stella Farnsworth was there, too. And more people had congregated farther down Devil’s Slide Road, closer to where Zeke had crashed his truck. Some had brought flowers or ribbons to leave in memory of the Flyte girl and in support of Fergus, too, Hazel guessed. A few folks met her eyes and gave curt nods, and others politely ceded her space, but no one approached her, and Hazel forgave them their lack of manners. Part of it was her own fault, keeping herself apart the way she had since Rory’s death, and part of it was simply that in a corner of the world where winter could freeze a man standing and summer could melt him to the heels, it didn’t do to let grief get the upper hand. Near her, Tyler Wall and Archie were in the middle of a discussion.

  “What are they going to do with her?” Tyler was asking.

  That stumped Archie. “Don’t know.”

  Stella spoke up. “They’re thinking to cremate the bones, I heard. It was June’s idea.”

  The men nodded. “Any idea what did Gert in?” Archie said.

  “Naw.” Having grown up near the din of Titan Mill, with a father who manned the paper screens and a husband who oversaw them, Stella had absorbed the lingua franca of hardwood vowels and granite consonants uttered in the shortest sentences possible. In this case, Hazel thought, that conversational style was for the best. There was only so much gossip a body could abide about a dead woman, after all, and, when it came to Gert, Hazel had heard everything. How she’d caught the eye of Henry McAllister before she disappeared under mysterious circumstances. How Pruitt then came along and never paid a penny of the taxes on his property and never worked much either but always had money for booze. What incriminating tidbit about Henry had Pruitt held over Cal? Hazel wondered. It must have been something damning, for Cal McAllister had so far not been recognized as a vast philanthropist in his lifetime.

  A flicker of movement in the trees across the road caught Hazel’s eye. A small figure was dashing from one pocket of shade to another, shyly approaching the open grave. “Who is that?”

  Tyler squinted. “Looks like a kid. I heard there was a little one out here, but no one ever sees it much.”

  At first it was difficult to tell if the creature was a boy or a girl, but as the child emerged from the forest, Hazel saw that it was female—or on the verge of becoming so. It was tough to tell with the girl bundled in a bulky and stained parka, rubber boots that appeared to be at least a size too large, a scruffy knitted cap in a riot of rainbow colors topped by a pom-pom, and lobster-claw mittens. In odd contrast with her attire, she moved forward with the dainty steps of a ballet dancer.

  Hazel realized she must be looking at the youngest Snow. Mercy occasionally spoke of a smaller sister, and once or twice before the accident Hazel had even found herself sending a slice of extra pie or half a loaf of bread home with Mercy. Judging by the gaunt angles of Mercy’s cheekbones, food wasn’t abundant in the Snow household (such as Hazel imagined it), and it turned out that she still remembered all the things Rory used to love to eat: apple cobbler with extra cinnamon baked in, dill bread spread thick with butter, peanut nougat. After Mercy’s employment Hazel had begun baking these old favorites again, filling the kitchen with bittersweet aromas that simultaneously evoked Rory even as they highlighted his long absence.

  “Is that pumpkin bread?” Fergus had asked just the day before the wreck, his eyes widening as he’d tentatively sniffed. “Why, Hazel. What’s come over you?”

  Now Hazel eyed the beneficiary of her cooking with suspicion. Up close the child had none of the innocent charm one would expect from a girl of her size. Instead her dirty little face puckered knowingly as she came to a stop in front of Hazel.

  “You’re the lady with the sheep,” she declared, sizing Hazel up. Hazel remembered Mercy telling her that her sister was a reader, and she could see that now. The youngster squinted as if she were used to poring over pages for long hours in dim conditions. She just looked like she’d perused too many stories beyond her years.

  Hazel put a hand to her
heart. Unbidden, it was flopping and twisting in her chest like a bass pulled to air. How many years had it been since she’d stood nose to nose with an actual child for any length of time? “Yes,” she finally exhaled, for what else did one say to a plain fact accurately stated? The girl’s ratty coat was a faded shade of bile that offset the rust stains on her filthy jeans. Hazel watched as the child burrowed in one of its pockets, her face screwed up with concentration. The skin of her bared wrist was smudged with dirt, as were her nails. Finally she pulled out a fistful of granite pebbles, shiny with flecks of mica, just the kind of flotsam a child’s eye would land on. Solemnly she walked over to the ravine, stared down the slope, and then flung the pebbles onto the bones.

  There was an intake of breath from the crowd. Hannah combed the townspeople head to toe and blinked. “The bones wanted them,” she explained matter-of-factly. Before anyone could react further, the child made her way back to where Hazel was standing. She planted herself squarely in Hazel’s path so that even if Hazel wished to, she wouldn’t have been able to avoid the girl. “My sister and I are sorry about your husband,” she said, tipping her chin up. “Real sorry.” Before Hazel could summon her voice, Hannah surprised her by taking one of her hands in her grubby own. “But don’t worry yourself, ma’am. My sister’s going to make him all better just like my mama would have. Then you’ll all see that Zeke didn’t do it.”

  Hazel watched dumbfounded as the child zipped up her parka and pulled her mitten on again. The girl surveyed the townsfolk, nodded once to them, and stepped her way back into the trees, taking festive hops over the rocks and branches scattered in her path.

  “How in Sam Hill is a Snow going to make anything better?” Tyler Wall grunted, and no one replied, for none of them had an answer to a question like that.

  “Be quiet, Tyler.” Hazel spun on her heel. She knew that the whole damn town thought she was madder than a March hare for letting Mercy pass across her door in the first place, and maybe she was. On the other hand, for the first time since she’d heard the terrible news about Fergus, a small beat of something like hope was pulsing away inside Hazel. She let her gaze wander down the ravine to the sorry pile of bones and then back up again to the muddy mess of the road. It was a hell of a place to try to make a living. Hazel would give the Snows that, but maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t the land out here that was cursed. Maybe it was the folks. And folks, as Mercy had pointed out, were always the problem.

  June was busy fishing holiday decorations out of the attic and lining up the boxes along the hall, their labels color-coded according to their contents. Every year, on the weekend following Thanksgiving, she liked to do this, but this season, for obvious reasons, she was late with her preparations. They hadn’t yet gone out into the woods to cut their tree, and June wondered when they would. It should be soon. She was having her Christmas sewing circle in a week’s time and wanted the house to look right. The town needed to get back to its usual rhythms, whether it was ready to or not, and June knew that as Cal’s wife she was the one person who could make that happen. Where she led, the other women would follow.

  She opened the box closest to her—tagged red for ornaments—and lifted off the tissue paper that covered a layer of delicately blown glass balls, stamped tin soldiers, and an assortment of bells. Tipped in the corner, crumbling with age, was a dough wreath that Nate had made back in kindergarten, the green paint faded and chipped. June plucked it out of the box, cradling the circle in the palm of her hand. Cracks riddled the surface, threatening to shatter the whole into fragments. If she’d had more children, she mused, how many more of these fragile tokens would she have from the past, and would they make the present more palatable? Probably not. Life was just plain fragile, June reflected, laying the ornament back on the tissue paper. How fast it went by.

  The front door slammed, and June quickly drew the box flaps back together. Nate was staying at a school friend’s for dinner, so it must be Cal, home early from work. She ran her hands through her mussed hair, tucking strands behind her ears, and brushed a spot of dust off her trousers. She wished she had time to swab on some lipstick, but she could already hear Cal’s heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, seeking her out.

  “Hello. You’re home early.” Ever since the accident, and since finding Suzie’s mitten and seeing that swath of yellow mud on Cal’s car, June had kept up a guarded normalcy around Cal and, most especially, around Nate. If she just pretended hard enough, she thought, if she baked loaves of gingerbread and decked the house with tinsel and played all their favorite holiday CDs, everything really would go back to the way it had been before the crash. If she and Cal simply never talked about it, the whole terrible accident would eventually fade to indeterminate shades like an uncomfortable old photograph snapped years ago.

  Christmas was June’s favorite time in Titan Falls. Her childhood holidays had consisted of a fake Douglas fir leaning in the corner of their living room with its lower needles singed off from an electrical fire, a shrimp dinner, and the majority of the day spent evading her mother’s boyfriend du jour. In the twenty years of their marriage, Cal had never once suggested going south for the season, and June had never once complained about his lack of interest, not even when her mother had still been alive. It was one of the things that made their partnership work. Her need to reinvent her life perfectly matched Cal’s need for someone to be wholly consumed by his world and his alone. June had no desire to change this dynamic.

  Cal glanced toward Nate’s closed door. “Is he in or out?”

  “He’s at Tommy’s for dinner.”

  Cal sighed heavily, and only upon looking at him more closely did June notice the dark circles bruised under his eyes. “June, I need to tell you something.” The muscles in his jaw ridged and tensed the way they only ever did when he had bad news to share.

  Was it the mill? Had he just laid men off, a threat he’d been faced with for months now? June knew he was trying to wait until after the holidays. But his tone was too soft for that, and there was a tremor in his bottom lip that mill matters had never invoked. Her stomach dropped. No, she thought, just don’t, but Cal kept talking, staring straight at her, still in his overcoat, the same one that had held Suzie’s mitten.

  “I was in Berlin the night of the accident.”

  June closed her eyes. Cal’s voice rushed at her as if down a long tunnel, gaining velocity.

  “I met Suzie that night, June. Outside the movie theater. She begged me for her father’s job back. That’s when she dropped her mitten.”

  June opened her eyes.

  “The one I know you got rid of.”

  June knew that Cal wanted her to confirm what he’d just said—to explain what she’d done with the mitten. Instead she asked a question she didn’t really desire an answer to. “What were you doing in Berlin?”

  Cal hesitated, but that was fine. June could wait. One of the Christmas boxes looked like it had been chewed on by mice, she noticed. She made a mental note to put poison out in the attic. Pests shouldn’t be allowed to multiply. “Were you alone in Berlin?”

  No reply.

  “You said it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  And he was. June could hear it in his voice along with… was it uncertainty? She thought back to the time when she’d found the strange bra after his trip to Boston. He’d been contrite then, too, but not anxious. Something else was wrong. June stepped closer to Cal, searching his eyes. In spite of everything, they had a life and a son together. Deep down she still loved him, and that was something. “What is it?” She almost reached out to cup his cheek but refrained, still badly stung by the confession he’d just made.

  “I don’t know if Zeke really caused the accident.”

  June sucked in her breath. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I was on the road that night, too. I…” He trailed off. “I drove by his truck on the side of the road. It wasn’t him.”

  June put a hand o
ver her mouth. She worried she might be sick.

  Cal stepped closer to her and lowered his voice, as if what he was going to say next could only be uttered in the most terrible of intimacies. “June, I can’t afford to let anyone in this town know, not now with the way things are at the mill, with layoffs coming after Christmas.”

  June had hoped those wouldn’t go ahead for certain. It was just one more dreadful thing to keep secret. “Did anyone see you?”

  “No. I’m pretty sure. Or if they did, they didn’t know it was me.”

  “And your… appointment… in Berlin? What about her?” She couldn’t bring herself to call it anything else.

  Cal clasped June’s hands in his. “That’s all over with. Please, you have to believe me.”

  She bit her lip and considered. “Why are you telling me all this now?”

  Cal slid his gaze away from hers. “I need you to do something.”

  June blinked with frustration. Never in his life had he been spurred to action by love or conscience, only necessity. It was the way Titan Paper had operated since time immemorial, and Cal was first and foremost a mill man. She’d known that when she married him, but she hadn’t minded then. Of course, that was before the affairs, back when June had thought she still might change him just a little.

  Downstairs, their phone started ringing. Cal clenched his jaw and made no move to answer it, and June understood what he was trying to tell her. It might be someone important, or it might not, but he would not jump to see. He meant what he’d said about ending the affair. If Cal’s life depended mainly on the operations of the mill, so by extension did hers. She wished now that she’d managed to destroy the mitten wholly and not just hide it, but she could fix all that come spring, when the path to the cabin cleared and she could return. Cal need never know. Until then the item would be safe. No one would ever have any reason to link the likes of the McAllisters to such a business. She swallowed her tears. Funny how good intentions in a marriage could breed deception just as easily as they did intimacy. Maybe that was another one of the late Hetty’s lessons that June should have learned before now. She swiped the drops out of her eyes and looked properly at her husband for the first time in a long time. “What do you need me to do?” she asked.