Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  June stabbed at her salad with quick, birdlike movements and ate sparingly. Halfway through she gave up and pushed her dish away, watching as Hannah demolished every last fry on her plate and sucked the dregs of her milk shake through her straw. She waited until Hannah was finished before speaking. “We’re friends now, right?”

  Hannah glanced down at the Cinderella watch on her wrist. She’d have to remember to take it off before she walked into the RV. She nodded.

  June leaned forward. “And friends share stories.”

  Hannah shrugged. Her stomach was beginning to hurt. She wasn’t used to so much rich food at once.

  “How about this?” June folded her napkin in a neat square. “I’ll tell you one of mine if you will share one of yours. I’ll start.” June folded the square in half. “Do you know who Anne Hutchinson is?” Hannah shook her head. “She’s one of my ancestors. A long time ago, before our country was founded, back in the Puritan days, she was thrown out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for daring to preach her own thoughts. Women didn’t do that back then, you see, and the men in charge didn’t like it.”

  Hannah sat up a little straighter. “What happened to her?”

  “Oh, it’s a sad tale. She was exiled. Do you know what that means?”

  Hannah nodded. Exiled was what she and Mercy were now that Zeke was on the run. Exiled was very bad. It was what happened to traitors, and greedy pirates, and to the wicked in books.

  June waited for Hannah to raise her eyes to her again. “She went to found another settlement—in Rhode Island—and she lived there for some time, but in the end she was killed by a band of Siwanoy Indians. Her youngest daughter, Susanna, was kidnapped by them and held hostage.” June twisted her napkin into a coil. “She was about your age, I imagine, with very long and beautiful red hair. In fact, that’s what turned out to be her saving grace. The tribe ended up adopting her and calling her Autumn Leaf. She lived with them for some years, and when she was finally ransomed back to her family, it’s said she didn’t want to go.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  June nodded. As a teenager she’d been quite obsessed with these foremothers, imagining the pregnant and outcast Anne lumbering away from the wooden gates of the Bay Colony before turning to Susanna’s terror as a strange, shrieking tribe began murdering her mother and siblings. Or had it perhaps been even worse for the girl to be rescued and returned, banished once again from people she’d grown to love?

  June hadn’t considered this tale in years and wondered what brought it on now. All the trouble of late with the mill and the business with the accident, probably. Once June had believed that marriage to Cal and life in Titan Falls would be a safe mooring, and truly it had been. Just maybe a little too safe. That was the problem. She sighed. “Now you have to tell me something.” She gestured to the string around Hannah’s neck and the cuff link dangling from it. “What do you know about that thing hanging on your necklace?”

  Hannah hesitated. She was used to reading stories, not telling them, so she decided to tell the truth. “Nothing.”

  Her answer seemed to please June, and Hannah was glad. She didn’t know why, but she wanted to keep the funny button to herself. She put a hand over it and continued talking. “I can see ghosts, you know. Well, the ones who want to be seen anyhow. Like the lady who got found in the ravine after the crash. Gert Snow.”

  June leaned forward. “And what does she say?”

  “Oh, she doesn’t say nothing. But she isn’t happy either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well…” Hannah trailed off. The dead were not easy to explain to the living. They were there, all right, even when they weren’t. They might choose to communicate through a blast of wind in the trees, or a rock Hannah stumbled over in her path, or an owl calling out at dusk, and it was up to her to figure out what it all meant. “It’s kind of like when you dream. It doesn’t always make sense in the mornings when you think about it, but when you’re sleeping, it does. It’s like that. I don’t know why that lady’s ghost is upset. It just is. Something about the river, I think.”

  June fiddled with the salt shaker. She kept her eyes pointed at the table. “And how about your brother? He’s a kind of ghost, too, isn’t he?”

  Hannah shifted uneasily. Her stomach was starting to feel tight as a drum. In stories, she remembered too late, treats taken from a witch weren’t always so sweet. “We don’t know where he is.” That was true—most of the time at least. Other times Hannah knew very well that Zeke must be right out in the woods behind their camper, because where else were all those birds and skinned rabbits coming from?

  June spun the salt shaker in a slow, hypnotizing circle. “I bet sometimes you really miss him. I bet it’s hard not having a man around the place.”

  Hannah shrugged. “Sometimes.” Though, really, Mercy was man enough for anyone.

  June craned her neck forward so that her eyes were level with Hannah’s. “Don’t you ever wish you lived in a nice warm house with a pink canopy bed, and the Sunday comics, and cookies waiting for you when you came home?”

  Hannah was beginning to sweat now. Her armpits felt clammy under the boiled wool of the sweater Mercy had given her for Christmas. She squirmed, then thought better of it and held herself still. “No.” Though, really, she did ache for those things. Wanted them so bad she could close her eyes and see the flutter of eyelet edging a make-believe canopy, smell warm chocolate chips melting in cookies. For the first time in her life, Hannah realized why stories could be dangerous. They made you crave things that weren’t really possible—or weren’t possible for you specifically.

  June scrabbled in her purse for her wallet. Their lunch was coming to an end. All too soon, Hannah knew, she would find herself back on Devil’s Slide Road, where the land went either straight up or straight down, forcing her to choose each time she stepped outside whether she wanted to sink in this world or rise in it. Before she could stop herself, one last word slipped out of her. “Sometimes. Sometimes I want those things.”

  June sat back against the booth’s leather. She smiled. “That’s good. Wanting is never bad, my dear.” June herself was testimony to that. It was by sheer desire alone that she’d ever left the swamps of Florida behind her. The child was looking quite green around the gills now. Maybe it was all the rich food. June did hope she wouldn’t be sick on the drive back. With a click, June snapped her purse closed. “Catch me a ghost, Hannah, and I promise I’ll give you whatever you want.” And she could do it, too. All it would take would be a well-placed call to the right social worker, and Hannah could be hers. She’d give her a better home than Mercy ever could. After this mess with the bus crash, June brooded, Cal owed her that much. He wouldn’t dare make a fuss.

  As they slid out of the booth, she noticed that Hannah had left her hat behind. June picked it up and began to call out to the child, but the afternoon light was closing in fast. The day was ending. Soon it would be over, and what would June have to show for it? She desperately wanted a keepsake, some tangible proof of the possibility of second chances in life, and so she opened her handbag and shoved the hat inside. If Cal got to keep the mitten off a dead girl, she didn’t see why she couldn’t have the hat from a live one. What was good for the goose was good for the gander. June buttoned her coat and walked away from the table, eyeing the blond waitress before she left. She was pretty sure she didn’t need to explain why she hadn’t left a tip.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nate rubbed the sleep from his eyes and stretched. It was early on a Saturday, dark still, one of those cold mornings where the sky itself seemed to be undecided between dawn and night, light and shade, so that Nate felt a little like the first, last, and only boy in the world. Outside his bedroom Titan Falls was caught in a bubble of preternatural tranquility, the air barely punctured by the censure of crows, the black guzzle of the river, and the belching needle of the paper mill’s brick tower.

  His father, he knew, would already have le
ft for his office. Paper, he liked to tell Nate, was seven-dimensional, by which he meant there were no days off in the week, not even for a McAllister man. If the pulper jammed, Nate’s father would leave dinner or his bed and go help the foreman deal with it. If the converter broke, he had to write a check to fix it or face everything coming to a grinding halt. All for more paper, which no one seemed to want these days when they could get it cheaper from the mills up in Canada or the plants out west, with their huge trees and bigger orders, or even overseas.

  One time, when he’d been about four, Nate’s mother had taken him to visit his father at work, and Nate had pulled a stray crayon from his pocket and begun scribbling on one of the pristine new rolls stacked and waiting to be shrink-wrapped. The crayon had been red, he remembered, the same color as his mother’s lipstick, a riotous color he associated with hearts and fire trucks and circus tents. Red, he knew, was also the color of the insides of people. As he swiped the crayon across the white roll of paper, he wondered if he was suddenly making all the invisible things inside him perceptible. He’d stepped back to ponder that question and admire his work when he heard his father hissing at his mother.

  “A hundred dollars of product he’s ruined! Get him out of here, quick.”

  “He’s just a child.” His mother’s voice was low and reasonable, the way it got when Nate was in trouble. No matter what he did, she was always quick to defend him.

  But Cal’s voice was sterner. It won. “He’s a McAllister. One day all this will be his. He better grow up respecting that.”

  And so every single Saturday since he was eleven, Nate had spent some part of the day at the mill. Until shortly after the crash, that was, when he’d found something peculiar in his father’s office. He’d been at his father’s desk, looking for a certain receipt to confirm a shipping order, when he’d found it, along with a photograph of a strange blond woman shoved deep in the middle drawer. Nate was about to pluck the picture out of the drawer when his father came bellowing into the room.

  “You don’t ever go in my desk without permission! What do you have there?” He ripped the receipt out of Nate’s hand.

  “N-nothing,” Nate stammered, his heart pounding. “I’m helping Mr. Felding square the accounts. I was just looking for that receipt.”

  Cal’s eyes were cool. “Well, now you have it. You’d best leave. Don’t let me catch you snooping ever again.”

  “No, sir.” Had he been snooping the night of the accident, when he’d seen his father and Suzie talking in front of the movie theater? Nate didn’t think so. He remembered the flash of his father’s camel-hair coat disappearing into the darkness, the receding set of his shoulders. All this time he’d kept quiet about what he’d seen, too afraid to say anything.

  That evening over dinner, Cal announced that starting after the holidays Nate would be working with Hazel Bell’s sheep on the weekends instead of at the mill.

  “Sheep?” Nate had sputtered, putting down his spoon. “Hazel Bell?” He pictured the weathered Hazel, with her wiry hair blown all crazy around her face and her stumpy rubber boots. Then he pictured the photograph of the blond woman again. Was this his punishment for what he’d seen? “Dad, I don’t know a thing about livestock.” Nor did he care to. Leave it to his father, though, to find the one thing in the world sure to be worse than heaving equipment or adding up receipts at the mill.

  Cal stabbed a roasted potato. “Your mother thinks it’s a good idea. Something to take your mind off—” He stopped. Ever since Suzie’s funeral, none of them ever said her name—a silence so dense Nate often questioned if his ears were still working right. Sometimes he wondered if something had happened to dull his senses when the bus plunged off the road. Or maybe some crucial part of his spirit had followed Suzie underground. It sure felt like it—like everything in his life was coming at him slow and black through a six-foot wall of dirt. His father cleared his throat. “Well, a change.”

  “Won’t that be nice?”

  His mother’s voice was always too bright these days, piping and trilling like a windup bird’s. She always got like that when there was trouble with the mill—layoffs or new environmental regulations—as if the sheer force of her domesticity could hold the whole damn operation together. There were moments when Nate wanted to smash her and watch all her gears go flying.

  “As the weather gets into spring, I imagine it will be lovely to be out of doors on Hazel’s land. And soon you’ll be hearing from colleges. You’ll be away at Dartmouth before we know it.”

  Nate pushed his food around his plate. Indoors, outdoors. Dartmouth or Titan Falls. Sheep or paper. Nothing really mattered. It was all the same to him.

  The morning the McAllister boy was due to show up to work for the first time, Hazel woke at dawn with a quick jerk. She stuck a hand out and laid it on Fergus’s warm flank, relieved when he groaned and stirred. His memory was foggy at best, but he was getting better. He always knew her now. He remembered how to hold a spoon and a fork, how to tie his shoes, didn’t lose his way around the house anymore. She could leave him alone for a little while wrapped in blankets at the parlor window and trust that he’d still be there when she returned.

  Hazel slipped on a sweater over her nightdress and then padded downstairs, her nerves buzzing. She took her parka off the hook by the door, shimmied on a pair of work pants and then her boots, and let herself out into the cold, her mind crawling with a list of creatures she didn’t want to encounter: coyotes, bobcats, moose, wolves. Especially not wolves.

  She found the door of the barn unlatched—had she forgotten to lock it?—but the animals were fine, snuggled up against one another, stamping their hooves and nosing around for food like always. When they saw Hazel, they started forward toward her as a single unit, jostling one another for position. Hazel braced herself, her eyes running over the familiar little quirks of each animal. There was the ewe with the eyes too close together and the one with the black spot down by her tail, and there was Ballyhoo, the oldest ram, and Dunkirk, the biggest ram, and… Hazel scanned the flock again. Where was the youngest ram? The feisty one that nipped anyone who tried to come near? Where was he?

  She pushed into the center of the flock and tapped various animals on their backs as she counted, pushing them to one side. She was short a beast. The ram was definitely missing.

  Or taken. It happened sometimes, when folks got desperate, when the mill started shutting out men like it was. Hazel paced the perimeter of the barn, inspecting the walls for any openings, but everything was solid. The outside of the door bore the scratches she’d found weeks earlier with Mercy, but no new marks. Hazel scowled something fierce and squinted. Rams didn’t just vanish. Someone had definitely stolen this one. She stomped back into the barn to ready the feed.

  “Hello?”

  Hazel spun around and saw Nate McAllister’s teenage frame filling up the doorway. He hovered in the threshold, hands shoved in his coat pockets, jigging from one foot to the other to keep warm. “You’re an hour early.” Hazel checked her watch. “I don’t guess the sheep mind, but don’t think I’m paying you for it.”

  “Sorry. I couldn’t sleep.” Instinctively Nate reached up and pulled off his woolen hat, though the cold instantly made his ears tingle. He took this for a hopeful sign. It was the first feeling in a while that he could remember paying even a little attention to.

  Hazel stumped over and thrust a rusty metal bucket into his gloved hands. “Save your breath and come on in. Meet your esteemed colleagues.”

  Nate took a tentative step inside the barn—which was really more of an aerated shed, he saw, with straw bedding and various pens lining the sides. The air steamed with the thick smells of lanolin, wool, sheep shit, and hay, and he was surprised to find that the odor wasn’t unpleasant, just rich. And he actually kind of liked how the animals bleated to one another, their lips quivering, their long, alien tongues dancing. It was heartening the way they eventually came over and leaned against him as if he were on
e of their own. Hazel watched with an assessing eye. “That’s something. They feel comfortable around you.”

  Nate wasn’t sure about that. They were sheep, after all. How smart could they be?

  “You see how swollen she’s getting?” Hazel asked, rubbing one ewe’s flank. “I bet she’s carrying twins. I’m going to have to call Aggie out here to do the shearing next month. Don’t want to leave it too long.”

  Nate regarded the ewe with her riot of wool. It looked dirty and hard-earned to him, and it seemed like a cruel theft to shave it off the animal’s back. “Won’t she be cold?”

  Hazel waved one of her rough paws, bare to the cold but apparently no worse for it. “Naw. The girls run hotter the nearer their time comes. And we don’t want a big mess when they lamb.” Now that he was up close to her, Nate could see that not all the lines on Hazel’s face came from old age. She was probably a decade younger than he thought, just winded and weathered. Her eyes were a vivacious blue. They watched Nate watching her. “After they’re all sheared, I’ll turn the rams out and keep the ewes here until they give birth. That’s when I really know spring is coming.”

  Nate patted the pregnant sheep. The ewes seemed so accepting of their impending fates, huddled together in a comfortable little group, their mouths going round and round, as if producing new life were no more complicated than breaking down a mouthful of alfalfa. And maybe it wasn’t. What did Nate know about it? He’d never before seen a thing hatched or born. All he knew was paper. “When will it happen?”

  Hazel squinted. “Oh, not for a spell yet. End of March, I’d say.”