Mercy Snow (16 page)

T
ucked alone in the very last pew of St. Bart’s, a shabby watchman’s cap pulled close around her ears, Mercy shifted uncomfortably, unsure of what to do while she waited for the funeral of Suzie Flyte to begin. Arlene hadn’t exactly been a wealth of church etiquette. Up front, Mercy could hear the whispering of the town wives—no doubt wondering how she had the nerve
to show her face at this event. In the very foremost pew, she could see the back of the woman she knew to be Suzie’s mother. Unlike the other wives, she was sitting with a fierce stillness that was familiar to Mercy. It was the posture of a woman struck so many times with hard luck that she could only wait to see what more the world would throw at her.

The town wives had arrived at St. Bart’s with time to spare, fully ready to engage in conversational battle, winter scarves loosened, handbags clutched reverently, lips cocked for a round of whispering. They cast uneasy glances at Mercy, swapped knowing looks, and then set to work trading information. Mercy leaned forward to glean what she could.

“When she’s not out with Hazel’s sheep, I hear she hangs over Fergus in his hospital bed, like
that’s
going to do any good,” Alice Lincoln hissed to Dot and her husband in the third pew from the front of the church.

Next to Alice, Margie Wall wore a face clouded with the misgivings of a devout woman. “Those Snows are bad news, mark my words.”

Alice nodded. “The boy certainly is. And I don’t even need to go into that old business with Pruitt and Gert.”

“What did he do anyhow?” Pregnant Stella Farnsworth had slipped into the pew next to Margie, her eyes rounder than usual. Margie licked her lips. When a morsel of gossip was this good, it was best delivered low and slow. “It’s not what he did. It’s what he supposedly knew.”

Stella wrinkled her brow, not understanding where Marge was leading. Dot sighed, exasperated. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stella. He was always insinuating that Henry McAllister was responsible for Gert’s death. Lord knows what Cal was paying Pruitt to
keep quiet about his father, truth to the tale or not. Gossip like that’s not what you want on a mill floor.”

Stella’s eyes flickered open even wider. She was far younger than the other women, not even born when Gert disappeared. “Do you really believe Henry McAllister might have killed her? Why would he do that?”

Margie shrugged. “I don’t know. No one does. But it’s suspicious, don’t you think? I’ll tell you one thing. Cal’s certainly kept the issue hushed. I’ve always wondered about that.”

The women sat back in their pews, hands folded in their laps, and thought about this. They’d been warned by their husbands never to interfere with any of the dealings of the McAllisters, however large or small they might be. Did they want their livelihoods to dry up like the river in a drought year, leaving them bare-bellied and parched? they were warned. Or did they prefer to work together to protect what they had the only way they knew? Mill business wasn’t always pretty—no one was trying to say otherwise—but when was anything ever lovely in Titan Falls?

A new pair of footsteps rapped up the center aisle of the church’s bare wood floor, and the ladies fell silent at the familiar, authoritative rhythm. Without a word June McAllister took her customary pew up front, her back straight, her arm cradled firmly in her husband’s grip.

“Do you think they heard?” Stella Farnsworth whispered loudly, and Margie shushed her, glancing nervously over at June, who didn’t twitch but simply bent forward as if in pain or prayer, indicating with her silence that she had indeed heard more of the conversation than she was in a mood to let on.

Apparently now the service could begin. The Reverend
Thomas Giles, eighty if he was a day, Mercy guessed, and so shortsighted he almost had to lick the prayer book to read it, appeared in the front of the church with a meek “Please rise” as Cal and June took their places.

But their son did not sit with them. Instead he lingered at the back of the church near Mercy, hands jammed in his pockets, a heavy scowl gathering on his face, the kind of frown Arlene would have said she could scoop up and slice cold. Mercy glanced out the church window. Today ground and sky, heaven and earth were equally frozen and gray, and none of them looked to be a place she’d want to send a loved one. On the other hand, the same thing stood for the woods Zeke was running in. Mercy startled as Nate began to sit down next to her, bumping her hip. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and frowned harder when he recognized her. Mercy produced her own unpleasant expression.
We’re all God’s children, dirty or clean
, she wanted to point out, but something in Nate’s posture—the broken angle of his bowed head, maybe—made her look closer at him, and what she saw tugged at her heart.

She followed his gaze to the back of his mother’s head several pews forward. In every town, Mercy had learned over her years of wandering, you could always find a woman just like June McAllister—glossy-haired, fond of pert little scarves, a woman whose front porch was reliably and seasonally decorated. Sometimes she was a schoolteacher. Sometimes she was the preacher’s wife. It was the kind of woman who social services would no doubt say Hannah should have as a mother. As a girl, in fact, Mercy used to imagine just what that would be like—to have a pair of feathery hands soothing her forehead before sleep and hot breakfasts waiting when she woke up, to be followed wherever
she went with a solicitous gaze. But that was before the men in the woods had gotten hold of her. Now, Mercy was grateful for the absence of such a figure, who would demand to know what had happened that day and, in doing so, would open up the wound fresh again, like shooting a buck twice to kill it once.

Mercy glanced at Nate again. In his looks he resembled his father more, she would have said. He had Cal’s wheat-colored hair and blue eyes but June’s graceful bearing. Rich
and
handsome. A combination Mercy suspected she was never going to get to experience in this lifetime, not with her mud-puddle bloodlines. But maybe Suzie Flyte had had herself a taste for that kind of life. Mercy leaned a little closer to Nate. She couldn’t say what prompted her mouth to spit out what it did next, unless it was the simple fact that she had almost nothing to lose. “Was she your girlfriend?”

Nate clenched his jaw. “She was too smart for that.” His blunt reply surprised her. Mercy leaned back a fraction of an inch and stole another peek at him. Maybe the angle of his head wasn’t broken after all, she decided. It could simply be bitter. Here was a boy with the weight of a legacy teetering on his shoulders—something Mercy knew nothing about—along with a heap of accounts he was probably going to have to grow up and settle if the rumors she’d heard around town were true. At that moment June turned her head, peering anxiously back at her son. When she spied Mercy, she shot her a nasty look.

Mercy waited until June turned back around and the congregation had risen for the opening hymn. Aside from Hazel, she hadn’t had occasion to talk to anyone in town about the accident, never mind someone who’d been a part of it. This was probably neither the time nor the place, but Mercy knew she
wasn’t going to get another chance. Maybe he’d seen a second car or something. She leaned closer to Nate, careful not to let anyone hear. “Do you remember anything from the crash?”

His answer was quick. “No.” The organ crashed and hit an off-key note, and Mercy flinched. Nate turned his full gaze on her. “That land’s not any good your family’s sitting on, you know. You all should clear out.”

Mercy set her chin. “And go where? Some of us don’t have a mill to our names.”

Nate snorted, but his voice had a little tremor hiding in it. “Believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

The congregation rustled and seated itself, Mercy and Nate included. They didn’t speak for the rest of the service, but Mercy couldn’t stop thinking about the boy sitting next to her and how, were their fates reversed, the last thing she would want would be to inherit the din of the Titan Paper Mill, just as Nate probably wouldn’t relish all the miles she and Zeke and Hannah toted up in a typical year. Surely, she mused, there had to be a middle way of passing through the world, something between the crunch of time clocks and packing up and drifting wherever the wind blew you. But what would that kind of life look like? Mercy had no idea. Whenever she let her mind run along those lines, all she could ever picture was Hannah’s small face with the pinch fattened out of it and a burst of laughter lighting up her eyes, and Zeke no longer feeling the need to check over his shoulder before he took a step.

The last trill of the organ warbled into nothingness, leaving a gaping hole in the air of the church that felt to Mercy like possibility—a silence that could be filled with anything at all and folks would choose to believe it—before the moment was swallowed by the rising tide of the townspeople’s feet.

A
ll through Suzie’s service, June struggled to keep her chin steady and her eyes dry. St. Bartholomew’s was packed, and the McAllisters were tardy, so much so that they found themselves having to squeeze in shoulder to shoulder against Archie Lincoln and his wife, Alice. June looked behind her as she settled herself, concerned that there was no room for Nate, and out of the side of her eye she caught him lowering himself into a pew in the back, right next to Mercy Snow. Alarmed, she half rose to go fetch him, to have him sit anywhere except in that one spot, but the Reverend Giles appeared and asked them all to stand, and June knew that her chance to correct the situation had passed. Nate would have to stay where he was.

Across from her, June could see Dena’s shoulders shaking, though she wasn’t making a sound. Fred Flyte’s thick arm girded Dena’s waist, and the more she shook, the tighter he squeezed, until June wondered that Dena could breathe anymore at all. June glanced sideways at Cal to see what his reaction was, half of her wishing the guilt of what she suspected he’d done would come spilling out of him right then and there, the other half praying it never would. His face, however, remained a mask betraying nothing.
When did he learn to do that?
she wondered.
And why did I never notice until now?
She cracked a hymnal open in front of her and sang the appointed hymn, rose for the Lord’s Prayer, and did not look at any of the faces around her.

When Suzie was younger, she’d been just like the daughter June had always longed for and never been able to have—a blond slip of a child with a gap between her front teeth and eyes that picked things apart. She’d had a bottomless appetite, June recalled, bigger than Nate’s, even. Her eyes would light up at the
sight of June pulling a fresh tray of sugar cookies from the oven or dishing out a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and before June knew what she was doing, she’d be laying one extra place at the table.

“I can’t seem to keep the child in food,” Dena used to apologize over stitchwork during sewing circles, her own cheeks gaunt from years of getting by on beans and bread. “She’s got a hollow leg and then some. Next time you send her on back to us.”

“Oh, I don’t mind having her over here one bit,” June always replied, and what could Dena say to that, when she knew about June’s inability to have more children? Dena had too many. She was happy to share. After feeding Suzie, sometimes June would offer to comb her hair, braiding the mass of it into two shining plaits and tying their ends with bits of clean satin ribbon she fished out of her sewing bag. She longed to make a dress for the girl—something with a big skirt and smocking—or whip her up a rag doll with yellow hair and blue button eyes, but she knew that Dena wouldn’t let her daughter accept such gifts. Mill pride had its limits, and June knew her place. Suzie continued to wear her brothers’ old cast-offs, and truth be told, she seemed happy in them.

Or at least she had until a few months ago, when Suzie and Nate suddenly seemed to have become painfully aware of their differences. Nate had grown busier with sports and studying, and Suzie had started hanging out with a crowd of girls who lined their eyes in swaths of hard black kohl, collected boys’ class rings as trophies, and drank like thirsty fish at parties in the woods.