Mercy Snow (17 page)

“ ‘In the midst of life we are in death; from whom can we seek help?’ ” intoned Reverend Giles, and a sob escaped from
the congregation, floating up among the church’s dusty rafters. “ ‘From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered.’ ”

What could Suzie’s sins possibly have been? June wondered. Surely nothing more than the usual trespasses of a rambunctious teenage girl. Maybe a case of loving the wrong boy from one of the outlying rival towns. Maybe even something petty, like shoplifting an eye shadow from the drugstore in Berlin or swiping a bottle of rye from the package store. Things Nate had maybe even tried himself, though June didn’t think so. Not her son. Not when he had the whole of the McAllister reputation to uphold and the threat of his father’s temper looming over him. Unlike Suzie, Nate had something to look forward to and expectations to fill. One day, Cal coached his son again and again, the mill would be his, and he couldn’t very well run it with the ghosts of rumors haunting him. “The McAllisters don’t have skeletons to hide,” he always said. “We’re all backbone, pure and simple. Remember that.”

June tucked her hands in front of her and recited the Lord’s Prayer, considering the constitutions of the two men she loved best in the world. If what Cal said were true—and based on her late father-in-law’s rumored behavior, she had her doubts about that—if the McAllisters were all spine up and down, then what place had they left for hearts?

After the service a ragged receiving line formed on the way out of the church, and Mercy Snow stepped up to Dena. At her touch, to June’s surprise, Dena quit sobbing and calmed enough for Mercy to press a twist of wool decorated with roughly carved wooden stars into Dena’s hand. “This is for you. It’s just a little thing my brother once made, so you don’t forget to look up at the stars from time to time and remember there’s a heaven.”

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.

L
eft 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.

J
une 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.