Mercy Snow (25 page)

Nate picked up the toolbox. He was aware that Hazel was giving him a test of sorts, and he was determined to pass it. “I’ll check on Fergus, ma’am, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll have a whack at that fence.” Out in the field, it occurred to him, there would be nothing to bother him but the raw scrape of wind against his cheeks, the rustling of birds and mice in the frozen undergrowth, and his own two hands, square like his father’s and pale as his mother’s, but trying for once to figure things out on their own.

T
he scent of fresh blood greeted Hazel as soon as she stepped into the clearing where the smokehouse stood on the Snow land,
and she knew immediately that her hunch about the missing ram had been correct. Growing up in the Duncan Home for Girls, she’d been made to work half her childhood in the kitchens, transforming whatever kinds of carcasses were thrown their way into food. Sometimes that meant plucking a batch of chickens or carving a side of beef. All these years later, she could still identify the metallic odor of an animal bled and butchered, and that scent was here right now under her nose.

She walked around the smokehouse and then peered inside, but it was empty and dark. She paced around the RV, but the curtains were drawn and there were no signs of life, and then she heard a rhythmic
thwack, thwack
coming from the edge of the ravine.

She was too late. She saw that at once. The ram was tied by his feet and hoisted over a stout pine branch, his thick bluish tongue hanging out of his mouth, his eyes bulging and blind. Mercy was skinning him, but her knife was too dull, and she was having to hack and tug at the skin to get it to slide off.

“A greedy father has thieves for children.”

Mercy jumped at the sound of Hazel’s voice and spun to face her, the knife still in her hand. In spite of the cold, she’d been sweating. Her hair was damp along her forehead. Hazel was startled to see how thin she’d grown. “Hazel, I didn’t hear you.”

Hazel folded her arms and pitied the poor beast. He had been a magnificent specimen. Now he was just a raw sack of innards waiting to spill. “You’ve bloodied the fleece. Anyone with a brain would have shorn the animal first.”

Even Mercy’s lips were pale, and there was a sore erupting at the corner of her mouth. She looked like she hadn’t washed in weeks. “Hazel… I know this looks bad.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a thief.”

Mercy ducked her chin. “I’m not.”
But my brother is.
The unspoken words might as well have been shouted. Mercy inched forward a step, the knife no longer a potential weapon, no longer even a tool, just an afterthought dangling from her fingers. “Hazel, let me explain. Zeke found him already dead. Honestly. He would never take from someone who’d once been kind to me.”

Was it Hazel’s imagination, or did Mercy stress the word “once”?

“Look, I can prove it.” She turned the carcass sideways, revealing the half-stripped flank. “See where the fleece is all ragged and torn? Do you really think Zeke would slaughter an animal so carelessly? Hazel, I warned you something was lurking around your barn. Didn’t I?”

Hazel bit her lip. She didn’t know what to believe. With a lurch she remembered the open latch on the barn door this morning. Maybe a predator really had gotten in, or maybe the ram had slipped out, but how unlikely that was. There had been no signs of a struggle in the barn, and sheep were herd animals. They moved either as one or not at all.

On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine that the Snows would be dumb enough to pull more trouble down on their heads. This was it, she decided, the final inch she was going to give any of them.

She took a fortifying breath and pulled her spine as straight as she could get it. “June McAllister was right. The only thing you Snows ever make is trouble.” She sighed at the mess in front of her. There was so little of the creature left to salvage, whatever had really happened to him. “I want the fleece, such as it is.” That, at least, belonged to her. The ram’s wool would go back to his flock.

Mercy bowed her head. “I’ll bring it to you. I promise.”

“If I see so much as your little toe on my land, I’ll have it for my own, followed by your head. You can give the wool to Nate McAllister. He’ll get it to me.” Hazel drew herself together and prepared to hike back to her car. There was nothing left to do.

Mercy’s voice floated up the hillside after her. “Hazel, I’m sorry for it all.”

The girl’s apology floated and then dropped, heavy and final. Hazel didn’t even turn around.

I
nside the RV, Mercy cracked the last of their eggs in half and dropped the yolk into a clean jar. Zeke hadn’t killed the ram—she was positive. But still, did that make giving it to her and Hannah any less of a crime? Without the animal she and Hannah risked starvation. With it they most certainly wouldn’t hunger, but was it worth it, Mercy wondered, to trade the last shred of Hazel’s goodwill for something as fleeting as full bellies? Once again Zeke had acted according to his own impeccable moral code—he’d found a dead ram that would have been wasted, and Mercy and Hannah were in desperate need—but in doing so he’d missed the bigger picture. In trying to care for his sisters, he’d threatened to undo any inch of progress Mercy might have made with people’s bad opinions in town. She bit her lip in frustration. She would have to ramp up her efforts.

To the mix in the jar, she added a flurry of powdered and dried mushrooms that she’d foraged with her mother on the border of Canada last spring, a pinch of chili flakes, and a measure of vinegar, and then she stirred everything with the blade of a knife. She cleared her throat and turned to Hannah. She loved everything about her little sister, but it was exhausting being her sole
guardian. Still, if she didn’t take the time to explain the nuances of things to her, Hannah might end up just like Zeke—well-meaning but always somehow in the wrong, no matter what. “Even if he didn’t kill it, you know that Zeke still shouldn’t have taken that ram, right?”

Hannah yawned and flipped a page in her book. Her stomach was rumbling. She wasn’t sorry about Zeke’s taking the meat. She couldn’t wait to feast. “There’s only so many birds in the woods this time of year. Besides, I bet she loses a few animals every season. Or she sells them.”

Mercy slammed the jar back on the counter. “That’s not the point. How are people going to care about Zeke if they think we’re a bunch of thieves?”

“Zeke’s looking after us. You should be grateful.”

“I’d rather have some answers.”

Hannah pursed her lips and quoted Arlene. “Better to let all the dogs lie.” She nodded at the jar. “You going into town to drop that off?”

Fred Flyte had been drinking Mercy’s remedy steadily, and even though Mercy never asked him to, he always pressed some kind of payment into her hands when she brought him the stuff: a basket of dried apples, a loaf of bread, a pair of striped socks hand-knitted by Dena. “I know it’s nothing much,” he’d say, “but how do you repay a true miracle?”

Mercy would blush ferociously as she accepted the gifts, uneasy with Fred’s accolades. Healing was turning out to be a simple business, really. It was all just a matter of bringing opposites together. To tame a fever, for instance, Mercy cooled it with a paste of rue and mallow. To thin out thick blood, she watered it with cucumber and spirits. Even waking Fergus from his cave of darkness after the accident had been uncomplicated in the
end. All it had taken was breath and willpower—his or hers, Mercy still didn’t know for sure. But she had held his head in her hands and sent him a message:
Do not go
. That was it. And it had worked, sort of. Fergus had come back, but not the same. Mercy frowned. Thanks to Zeke’s gift of the ram, Hazel might well be a stranger now, too.

Mercy looked at the fleece lying on the RV’s banquette. She’d trimmed what she could off the animal’s skin and had tried to sponge the wool clean, but it was still smeared and dirty. She knew she had to give it back—a promise was a promise—but she longed to hold on to it for a few more days, the last bit she would ever have of Hazel. Lost in thought, she rolled the fleece and tucked it under her mother’s old quilt.

What if she could give Fergus back his memory? she mused. Would Hazel forgive her then? But if healing was simply a matter of mending, bringing back a man’s memory surely carried further complications, for that involved a wholesale type of retribution—something Mercy wasn’t quite sure how to go about in Titan Falls, skinny little lick of a town that it was, full of narrow eyes and narrower minds. She sighed and slid the jar into the palm of her hand. If she was going to put Fergus back right, she was starting to suspect, she was going to have to make some kind of exchange: one soul for another, sister for brother, the damned for the innocent. If only it were so easy to tell which was which anymore.

B
y Nate’s third Saturday at the Bells’, the fence didn’t really need any further repairs. The ones he’d managed to complete weren’t that fail-safe, but Nate didn’t tell Hazel that. He suspected she knew it already, and he appreciated her reserve on the matter.
The more he got acquainted with her, the more he liked her. He knew she’d lost her own son sometime back, and he was guessing she must have been a tolerant kind of mother, quite unlike his own, who bustled around him constantly, as annoying as an extra thumb, readjusting his scarf before he left the house, overpacking his school lunches with food he didn’t want to eat, and asking him all sorts of questions he didn’t feel like answering: Why had he quit the hockey team? What did he want to do after church on Sunday? Who was he going to ask to the winter formal?

When Hazel spoke, it was simply to impart information and nothing more. Most of her conversation wasn’t even of the human variety. All her syllables were for or about the sheep. By Nate’s third weekend, he’d gotten used to it. One thing he never asked about, however, was the overgrown sugar bush down at the end of the valley, where a profusion of stones stood. The first time Nate stumbled upon it, he almost tripped over one of the boulders, which was half sunk in the snow and rounded. Then, righting himself, he spied all the other rocks set under the trees, and the hair on his arms stood up. He’d backed slowly away, stepping in the footprints he’d made. He couldn’t say why he suddenly had such a strong desire to leave the smallest trace possible behind him, but it was so. Even when he and the other high-school kids broke into the abandoned worker cottages down near the river in the spring and summer, he’d never felt such a sense of trespass, but maybe it was because those buildings were, in a roundabout way, his. This place, however, was clearly private. Everything from the low-hanging boughs to the stippled shade in the center of the glen forbade entry. In spite of that—or maybe precisely because of it—the very next week, as soon as Hazel set him free with a set of tools and more wire, Nate found his way back.