Mercy Snow (19 page)

Hannah took the envelope wide-eyed. “Okay,” she breathed, and then she turned and fled, whipping past June like a sprite. June caught a scent of something wild—pine sap, deer musk?—rising up from the girl’s clothing and skin, but before she could identify it, Hannah was gone, picking her way into the tangle of trees, a blur of flying hair and spindly limbs, the realest ghost June was sure she’d ever met.

M
iracles can occur by design or by chance, but in retrospect people usually agree that they happen for a reason. In the case of the unexpected awakening of Fergus Bell, however, the cause was murky at best. Everyone concurred that his reemergence was a marvel, even if not totally successful, but whether it was in the end a blessing or a curse depended on who was doing the deciding. The fact that Mercy Snow was hanging over his bed when it happened only complicated matters, for no one could decide if she was a mere witness of the event or the very source of it—not least of all Mercy herself.

She’d arrived that morning at the hospital later than usual with her face drawn, empty of her usual promises and apologies. It had been one week since the accident, but for Mercy time had begun to unwind like one of Hazel’s balls of wool—in no discernible order, one string leading many ways.

“Late night?” Hazel asked, observing the creases grooved into Mercy’s forehead and the circles under her eyes. Then she sat up in alarm. “Are the sheep all right? Are you putting the vitamins in their feed like I told you?” Besides the constant fear that Fergus might never arise, Hazel also battled epic bouts of worry
over her flock. She’d never before been parted from them, and the heartache was almost as bad as what she was enduring with Fergus.

Mercy absentmindedly chewed on a piece of her hair. “They’re fine, Hazel. All tucked up in the barn.”

“So why the long face?” Hazel hated herself for asking, but she went days sometimes in this room without talking to anyone except nurses and doctors, and they just yammered at her in their bewildering medical lingo. On the other hand, silence was golden. Hazel had heard enough now about the gentle side of Zeke and Mercy’s determination to clear his name. Too late, Hazel put up a palm. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s okay.”

But Mercy had pulled up a chair and was fishing in her jeans pocket for something. She withdrew a crumpled note.

“What is that?” Hazel asked.

Mercy unfolded the note and smoothed it across her knee, then passed it over. “It came with a big lump of cash.” Hazel’s eyes widened when Mercy told her the amount.
I suppose I’m going to have to find someone else to look after the sheep
, was her first thought, and her second was,
But why would June do this?

The note supplied the explanation. It offered, in June’s schoolmarmish handwriting, a twenty-four-hour period of leniency toward Zeke if the Snows would just get themselves together and get the hell out of Titan Falls for good. Hazel looked at the date. “What are you going to do?”

Mercy accepted the note back. “It’s not like I can just go out and find Zeke. He has to come to me. And even if I could, leaving wouldn’t solve anything, no matter the amount of money.”

Hazel produced a crochet hook and a ball of yarn. She avoided Mercy’s gaze. She hadn’t said anything, but she’d been having doubts lately about how smart it had been to get involved with
these accursed Snows. So far they’d brought nothing but trouble to her door, even if the mother was supposed to have been some kind of backwoods healer. That skill set didn’t seem to have rubbed off on Mercy, however. She glanced quickly at the girl. “Do you have to tell your brother? What if you just took the money and went?”

“What, and leave him here?” Even without looking, Hazel could hear how outraged Mercy was. Mercy sighed, and Hazel briefly felt low about her suggestion. For one thing, she really couldn’t afford to find anyone else for the sheep right now, and for another, Mercy wasn’t a bad sort when it came down to it. But it didn’t look good, the two sisters huddled alone out there on Devil’s Slide Road like that. It made everyone uneasy.

“So what are you going to do?” Maybe it really was better if they moved on, Hazel thought. Maybe June McAllister had a point.

In reply Mercy ripped the note into tiny pieces and deposited them in the garbage. “That’s where this belongs. I put the money back in her mailbox this morning.” Then, to Hazel’s dismay, Mercy turned her attention to Fergus. “I’m so sorry about all this trouble,” she said, stroking his forearm gently. “But I am going to make things right for a change. You’ll see. I know I can do it.” Hazel watched as she laid her hands on his forehead, cupping his broken skull, and breathed in and out in time with him, like they were dancing. Shocked, Hazel looked away, almost more embarrassed than if she’d interrupted a pair of lovers, though Fergus, she knew, didn’t have a single romantic bone in his body. Just a heap of good ones.

The machines hooked to Fergus started going haywire. One of them beeped out an uneven rhythm, another buzzed like a car alarm. Hazel shot her hand out to make Mercy stop, but
before she could, Fergus did the unbelievable and opened his eyes. Hazel let out a whoop, and Mercy sank back into a chair, her arms dangling limp as wet strings of wool.

Hazel turned to her, tears dancing in her eyes. She hadn’t been one to listen to the malarkey of Mercy’s home remedies and claims to folk healing, but it was never too late to change the stripes on a tiger. “God bless you right down to your grubby toes. You really did it. I bet everyone in town changes their tune when they hear about this. Even June McAllister.”

Mercy jumped away from Fergus as if she were unwilling to be held accountable for one more thing, marvelous or not. She honestly hadn’t expected Fergus to wake up, not really—even though Arlene had possessed some ferocious healing powers—and she wondered if her touch had done it or if Fergus had simply been responding to some mysterious inner clock of his injuries that only he could read. Where did one person’s influence on another ever begin or end? Mercy wondered. Was there a way to make manifest the secret ties that bound unlikely souls together in sin, or bliss, or random kindnesses? Or were outer appearances all anyone could go on? If that was the case, she and Zeke were screwed.

She brushed her hair out of her eyes. She didn’t look too certain about Hazel’s prediction. “Maybe,” she finally said, the words sitting in her mouth as sour as unripe apples, “but if you do talk to June, you should remind her I said it’s better to give than receive.”

A
t first Hazel was so happy to see Fergus back that she didn’t notice he’d been returned touched by the angels. Almost right away, however, it became clear that while a miracle of some sort
might have occurred, it was a partial one at best, a gift wrapped in a maze of complicated strings.

After an exhaustive battery of tests, the hospital spent the better half of a morning describing to Hazel all the therapy options available to her: live-in centers, traveling nurses, part-time rehab wards. Some of them were too far away to bother with. Some sounded downright unsavory to Hazel, and all of them cost the blessed earth. “Do I look like I’m spun out of money?” she brayed to the administrator who was trying to help her navigate the mountain of paperwork Fergus now seemed to require. “Next I suppose you’re going to hand me a brochure for the goddamned Ritz.”

The administrator—a very pink-skinned young woman with a nervous habit of sucking her bottom lip, paled a shade. “Gosh no, ma’am. Nothing of the sort.”

Finally it was Mercy who came up with the solution. “Why don’t you just bring him home?” she piped up from the room’s darkest corner, where she was slumped in a plastic chair fiddling with Hazel’s spindle. “I’ll help you with him. Heck, I wrangle the sheep every day on my own. Together we can probably handle the likes of Fergus.”

And so it was agreed. Hazel signed what seemed like a cartload of documents declaring that she knew what she was doing in bringing her own kin back where he belonged and that no matter what happened, she didn’t have plans to hold Heritage Pines Hospital responsible for the outcome. Hazel snorted at that. “You all are the ones who wanted to pull the plug on him in the first place, remember?” To which the pink administrator said nothing, simply bit her lip some more and scurried as far away from Hazel as she could.

Once he got home and put on some weight, Fergus looked
much the same as ever on the outside, from his bulbous chin down to his hammer toes, but his mental faculties were a different matter altogether. It was as if his innards had been scoured clean, leaving just a dry husk of a man smiling at elements he could no longer put together in good faith.

In the bustle and logistical riddles of moving the bedridden Fergus, it was initially easy for Hazel to dismiss the faraway sea that his eyes had become, or the nonsense words he sang to himself like a toddler. She knew very well, of course, the state he was in, but it wasn’t until he was home that she truly
felt
it. Hazel was surprised to find that she minded the drool that collected on her husband’s chin during mealtimes and that the babyish way he clapped his hands and begged her to sing to him affronted her. “I’m no singer, Fergus, you know that,” she told him roughly time and time again, pushing his hands back down by his sides and turning her cheek from his pleading gaze.

But Mercy, it turned out, had a voice like an actual lark. “I’ll sing for you, Fergus,” she said out of the blue one evening when Fergus started up his frantic jiggling and shaking of Hazel’s hand. “What do you want to hear?” And then, without waiting for an answer, she took a deep breath and let out a note so high and pure it seemed snatched from heaven. It was “Amazing Grace,” Hazel realized, but sung with such a lilt that it came out like a whole new song. How odd, she thought, watching as some of the light seeped back into Fergus’s gaze and his chin took on its familiar sensible set, that a mere chit of a girl would be the one who could bring him back, and not his own wife. That thought was immediately followed by another, more unsettling one.
Why is that?

Hazel crossed over to her spinning wheel and began fussing with the spindle—her cure for ailments of the soul. She still had
some carded wool left over from last spring’s shearing. She’d coax out a good long string of yarn, she decided, and go make some color. She’d tucked some dried blue hyacinth blossoms in a jar somewhere in the pantry, she remembered. Blue for constancy, for memory, but also the color of a heart grown cold. Hazel gave herself a shake. What nonsense. Fergus’s mind might be in a bit of a pickle at the moment, but his heart was going just fine. It was as steady as ever, red as the day was long—a fist right in the middle of him holding all the loose ends of Hazel in a single bunch. As long as it held fast, so would she. She just didn’t like to think about the fact that Mercy might be the glue in that knot.

H
azel and Mercy were walking out to check on the flock when they discovered a web of coyote prints outside the barn—little dots of treachery flecked into the snow. It was the week before Christmas, but out in Hazel’s valley you wouldn’t know it. There was nothing festive about the woods. Together, Hazel and Mercy stared at the marks, trying to read the pattern, though prints like that screamed only one thing any way you blinked at them. Cursing a blue streak, Hazel flung open the barn door to find her sheep huddled in a panicked clump on the far side of the structure. She crossed over to try to comfort the flock, but they were having none of it. They rustled and bunched away from her. The biggest ram struck out at her with a foreleg and bared its teeth, and Hazel didn’t half blame the poor beast, for even with all of Mercy’s help things hadn’t been what they ought around the place since Fergus had come home, and even the animals knew it.