Mercy Snow (26 page)

W
hen she wanted to, when she really concentrated, Mercy could thread a path through the woods with the easy cunning of a fox. Zeke had taught her this—the way to rock between footsteps, transferring her weight from one heel to the other, rather than pounding her feet into the ground. How to curve her body up against the trunk of a tree, melting into its shadow and musty bark, when to freeze and when to run like a mad dog. The only time these skills had failed her had been in the woods with those two hunters. That was the one thing Zeke had forgotten to impart to her—that there was always someone out there stealthier than you, that hunter could turn prey in the thud of a heartbeat. She thought of Zeke lying hunched in a cold cave or walking in aimless circles around fallen trees. A caged hunter, Zeke had always said, was worse than a downed one.

Mercy folded the ram’s fleece she was carrying tighter to her chest and swung her gathering basket over her arm. Out here in Hazel’s sugar bush, there was no need to take precautions. It was a deliberately abandoned space, and though Mercy didn’t understand who all the stones belonged to, she intuited enough to comprehend that they were to be left undisturbed. In her travels with Arlene, she’d often run across strange totems in the woods: mysterious runes incised into tree trunks, weathered twig crosses half rotted and leaning toward the grave themselves, and, once, a log carved into a fantastical creature, half woman, half bird. These places, her mother had taught her, were often the best for gathering plants. “They breed the unexpected,” she’d instructed Mercy. And as proof, under the chimera, she’d found a smattering of tiny orange-capped mushrooms that she wouldn’t let Mercy touch but cut with gloved hands at their stems and carefully bagged.

Mercy scanned the low growth in front of her. Occasionally she leaned down and plucked a twig or snapped some rushes into her basket. She was so focused on the particular as she wandered from tree to tree that she was startled to come across Nate McAllister bent over a fence post at the far edge of the space, a ball-peen hammer tossed at his feet. Mercy stifled a cry, and then her panic quickly turned to amusement. She surveyed the mess he’d made—the hole dug too shallow in the snowy mud, the fence post cracked along its bottom, a tangle of wire snared up with a pair of pliers and a hacksaw. Only a fool would try to fence a sugar bush, especially this one. Mercy sidled up on him, pleased with the opportunity to speak freely. “Do you even have a backside idea of what you’re doing?”

Nate turned around. He seemed equally startled. “Jesus.” He scowled at her. “I thought maybe Hazel would like it if this place was… set apart, I guess. She never talks about it, but it seems like maybe it should be enclosed or something. What are
you
doing out here? Hazel will have your head if she finds you.” His eyes fell on the basket Mercy was carrying, filled with all manner of twigs and rushes and roots she’d dug up out of the snow, and then on the fleece still clutched to her chest. “Seriously, what the hell are you doing?”

Mercy decided to take a chance and tell him the truth—or part of it anyway. Ever since she’d run into him outside his house, she had larger plans for the two of them, but she decided to keep those to herself for now. She handed the fleece to Nate, who seemed reluctant to accept it. “Making amends. Give that to Hazel. She’s expecting it.” She lifted her basket a little. “And making memories. Or at least trying to.”

Nate scowled. “I don’t understand.” Even though it was frosty, he’d worked up a sweat. He wiped his brow. He was just as handsome as she remembered, Mercy was pleased to note.

She bit her lip. Except for Hannah and Hazel, it had been weeks since she’d spoken properly to anyone, much less a strange boy. Her voice came out sounding as scratchy as a bargain-bin sweater. “They’re not for me. They’re for Fergus.”

Nate regarded her, still suspicious. To hear his parents talk, Mercy was a she-devil who was responsible for everything from the exhumation of Gert Snow to the crappy downturn in the paper business. Nate thought his parents were full of shit. “Does Hazel know?”

“Not yet.”

Mercy watched him weigh this information. Everything depended on how he reacted to her right now. He picked up the hammer and swung it from one hand to the other. Finally he laid it back down. “You’re the one who’s making that stuff Mr. Flyte drinks to keep him off the sauce. I heard my parents talking about it. They say it’s illegal peddling and that if you’re not careful, you’re going to poison him, not that they would care. My mom’s put Abel Goode on the case.”

Mercy paled. If Abel stopped Fred from giving her his small trade, she wasn’t sure she and Hannah would finish pulling through the winter, even with the ram meat, a situation that would no doubt suit June McAllister just fine.

Nate screwed up his face. “What do you put in that stuff anyway?”

Mercy shrugged and shifted the basket. “To dry a man out, sometimes you just need to keep his insides watered proper, that’s all.”

Nate’s gaze slid into the distance. “I wish you’d been around to see Mr. Flyte before the accident.”

Mercy bowed her own head, remembering what Nate had said to her the day of the funeral when she’d asked if Suzie had
been his girlfriend.
She was too smart for that.
At the time she’d thought he’d meant Suzie wouldn’t have him, but now that Mercy had tangled a bit with June McAllister, she wondered if maybe Nate wasn’t correct after all. It wasn’t that Suzie hadn’t loved Nate back. She’d just known her place, and it hadn’t been at the right hand of the mill owner’s son. Neither was Mercy’s, but she didn’t plan to let that stop her.

Nate turned his gaze back to her. “It’s like ever since she died, nothing matters that much anymore, you know?”

Mercy pictured the way her brother’s back had hunched like a cautious beetle’s as he’d disappeared down the throat of the prison hallway after each visitation, then again as he’d vanished into the ravine’s woods. There was more than one way to lose a person. “I know.”

Nate made a divot in the snow with his boot toe. “I wish
I
could heal people.” He swept his arm out at the defunct fence post. “I can’t even do this right. Instead all I’m ever going to do is make more stupid paper.”

That in itself was something, Mercy thought, to take the wilds around them, grind it all up, smooth it out, and churn it clean and flat. She tried to think of anything pristine in the texture of her life and failed. All her edges were splintered and torn, all her pages written on. She tightened her grip on her basket. If she couldn’t sow, she could at least gather. She stepped closer to Nate. “You know, there’s a difference between healing and saving. Only one of them is God’s work.” It was an Arlene phrase.

Nate looked up. “Which one?”

Mercy gazed up at the tangle of branches above her. “I don’t know.” It was frustrating standing here among so much untapped sweetness, so much richness she’d never get at. Mercy’s mouth watered, and then, suddenly, with the quick brutality
of an arrow striking flesh, she knew exactly what would bring Fergus back. She regarded Nate. He was an unlikely accomplice, with his patrician looks and bluer bloodline, and he certainly wasn’t dexterous when it came to handiwork, but he was here in front of her, and that was worth something. Mercy ran a hand down one of the trees. “Do you want to start?”

“Start what?”

“Healing. Or saving. Maybe both. I’m not sure yet. If I give you a list, can you meet me here next week with some special tools?”

Nate looked at her suspiciously. “Are you planning on tapping the maples?”

Mercy gave the tree a solid thump. Memory was supposed to begin and end with the body, but didn’t always. Maybe you could drain it like the sap from a tree, and what then? She pictured the bare scar of earth at the bottom of the ravine where the bus had come to rest and the sliver of a grave where Gert’s bones had been found. The hole was gone—filled—and yet every time a crow clacked out a call from a tree, every time the wind snapped and rattled twigs, Mercy wondered if it was Gert, or maybe the equally disembodied Pruitt, materializing out of thin air to haunt her. She stood up. “I’m going to try to give Fergus back his roots the only way I know.”

And maybe, if all went well, she might even find some of her own.

Y
ou never knew what early spring was going to bring you in Titan Falls, but you could always bet it would never be anything good. The season was a fickle one, in which muddy runoff might freeze overnight into treacherous brown slicks, ravenous field mice invaded basements and kitchens with a boldness disproportionate to their size, and the river, replenished with snowmelt and a winter’s worth of illegally dumped sulfites, started flowing with a faster urgency. It was not a period of public congenialities, heartfelt exchanges, or much gossip. Even the men in Lucky’s Tavern were more subdued than usual come early spring, resting their fists in heavy knots on the bar, hesitant to start something when they weren’t sure how it would likely finish, especially in the face of continued layoffs. More accidents happened on the mill floor at the tail end of winter than during any other time, and the men, knowing this, figured they’d rather not bother killing one another when they could just as easily kill themselves.

It was with some trepidation, then, that in the middle of March the entire population of the town woke to find a most unusual gift waiting on its collective stoops. Alice Lincoln was the first one to discover the jar half filled with an amber-colored
liquid deposited outside her front door, but she soon determined that she hadn’t been the only one favored. Up and down the village, each and every household had the same concoction waiting for it in a motley collection of glass containers. Some families found jam jars perched on top of their mailboxes, others plucked glass vials used to hold spices off benches on their front porches, and some received what looked like old ketchup bottles, their labels soaked and scraped away.

“What do you think it could be?” Margie Wall asked at the emergency sewing circle convened in June’s front parlor. She tilted what might have been a cola bottle first one way and then the other, making the mysterious substance slosh.

“It smells sweetish.” Alice wrinkled her nostrils and then took another whiff. “Familiar, even.”

Dot was the only one brave enough to taste it. She dipped the tip of a meaty pinkie into what was clearly a recycled mustard jar.

“Oh, Dot, don’t!” the expectant Stella cried, her belly plumper than ever. She had only a few weeks to go in her pregnancy, and she lumbered now with the uncomfortable swayback of an old milk cow. “What if it’s poison?”

Dot waved off the objections, raised her finger to her lips, and then smiled triumphantly. “Why, it’s maple sap!”

This set off a tizzy of proclamations and questions. “Sap, not syrup?” Stella asked, cautiously dipping her own forefinger into the liquid.

“Who put it out?”

“It reminds me of what Mercy Snow gives to Fred.” All eyes turned to Dena. A hush fell over the room. Several of the ladies put their jars down with loud rattles.

“Is she trying to kill us or cure us?” Alice asked.

“Maybe she’s trying to make amends.” Margie always did see the good side of a situation.

June watched the proceedings with tight lips. She had neither opened the lid of the canning jar she’d received nor deigned to bring it indoors.

“Look, there’s some kind of message on the bottom,” Stella suddenly declared, peering at the tiny piece of paper taped underneath her jar. “I think mine says
‘forgive.’ ”

“So does mine,” said Dot, squinting at her own pot. Alice and Margie confirmed that the same thing was written under theirs.

Dena was staring at June. “What does yours say?”

Grimly June went outside to fetch the jar. Against all her better instincts, she tipped it over, a bad feeling beginning to burn in her stomach. Plain as day, a message was indeed scribbled, but it wasn’t the same as everyone else’s. June’s simply said
“forget.”

A
ll week Hazel had been preparing for the shearing. She’d blocked off two pens inside the barn, made sure the outlet for Aggie’s clippers worked and that she still knew where the extra-long extension cord was, and stocked herself with a roll of plastic sacks into which to stuff the fleeces. Always, shearing seemed to her to be an act of theft, capped off with the hasty inspection and bagging of the wool, though the flock never seemed to mind. To the contrary, the animals mostly submitted peacefully to their fate once Aggie wrestled them onto their backs. They lolled like narcoleptic lapdogs, their heads angled to one side, their front legs crooked at the knee, and when it was over, they shook themselves, spun around, and got straight back to the business of looking for feed with the rest of the flock. Who
knew? Hazel thought. Maybe the animals were glad to shed the burden of their wool and start collectively anew.

This year the sheep seemed to guess it was coming. They bleated and milled around one another in the barn with more vigor than usual, waking out of their winter torpor, the pregnant ewes proudly trotting and showing off their burgeoning bellies and teats, the rams feisty as all get-out. They startled when they heard the clacking of Aggie’s truck and hustled themselves into a protective knot, their eyes and tongues darting.

“Hi-ho, lady-o.” Everything about Aggie’s annual visit was always the same, down to his greeting, but this year, Hazel saw, he was holding the hand of a small girl who looked to be about ten or eleven. “My daughter, Ivy,” he proclaimed, removing his hat per usual and scratching at his thinning hair, a little sparser than it was the year before. Aggie was a widower. Hazel wondered about the toll it would take on a man to raise a girl all alone, and then she debated which was worse: losing your child or the mother of that child. It was a question she didn’t think there was a very satisfactory answer to. “She’s learning the ropes and lending me a hand this year, aren’t you, sweetie?” Aggie tousled the girl’s hair, but the child didn’t break rank. She folded her arms in imitation of her father’s habitual stance and glared at Hazel.

“She’s a fierce one,” Hazel remarked.

“Aye.” Aggie paused. “How’s Fergus?” Hazel saw Aggie once a year, but word traveled up and down the narrow neck of the New Hampshire woods. Hazel wasn’t a bit surprised that Aggie had heard about Fergus’s condition, but she was startled that she minded so much.

Sometimes, in the contented blur between sleep and day, Hazel would forget everything that had happened. In the morning
she’d wake with her legs tangled against Fergus’s and his hands wrapped in her loose hair. She’d reach for his torso, as if to pull him over her, but he’d make a confused sound and she would jerk fully awake, returned to the fact that the warm-blooded man she’d married was gone for good, or at least for now.

Sometimes Fergus would lift one of his gnarled hands and stroke Hazel’s cheek or smile at her with the lopsided portion of his face that still worked, but other times she would notice his eyes darting around the parlor in frantic zigzags, landing on her spinning wheel, on the old chesterfield or the antique phonograph, like a man in a dream trying to wake himself. Hazel would have to soothe him then, unfurling his clenched fingers and massaging the ligaments, wrapping his knees in a blanket and tucking it tight. She worried about him when she left him alone to see to the sheep, but what could she do?

It reminded her of the time when she’d first started husbandry and her flock had gotten stranded out in an autumn storm. No matter which way she’d moved, the animals had turned away from her, paying no mind when she tried to herd them.

“Get on!” she’d shouted, rain running down her face, but the beasts were deaf and stubborn with fear. Hazel had been tempted to give up then. She’d been cold to the marrow and wet through, one woman raging against the whole wide world. And then something in her had snapped. She remembered the way Rory’s head had lolled against her shoulder at the end and how, in that moment, he’d seemed to grow lighter and not heavier in her arms, and she knew with savage certainty that she had stayed on the earth for a reason. She was damned if she would lose another living thing on her watch. Ten minutes later the sheep were rounded up and locked in the barn, just as miserable as they’d been before.

Hazel felt that way about Fergus, like she’d rescued him from the elements, but in doing so had only managed to deliver him into a fresh state of confusion. She snapped herself back to Aggie’s inquiry about Fergus. “He’s in the parlor.” Hazel tipped her head in the direction of the house. “All alone.”

Aggie’s eyes flickered in understanding. He was a man of few words and deep comprehension. “Ah. Then let’s make this quick. You got the bags ready?” Hazel nodded. “Which one do you want me to do first?”

She fetched one of the younger ewes, a small specimen with particularly lovely eyes, and soon the air of the barn was filled with the electric buzz of Aggie’s clippers and the loud protestations of the flock.

Ivy crouched quietly in a corner, hands folded across her knees, her little face puckered in concentration as she watched her father work. Hazel’s heart contracted into a painful knot as she observed her. Her coloring was much the same as Rory’s had been, and she possessed the frank and curious gaze he’d had. It was like witnessing a ghost in reverse, Hazel thought—an apparition of an unrealized future instead of a curtailed past. Had Rory lived, would he have sat watching Aggie shear? For the first time in years, Hazel had the sudden urge to go see Rory’s stone out in the old sugar bush, but she pushed that thought aside. Her son had gotten sick, and she’d buried him. End of story. Hanging over his bones wouldn’t bring him back.

At some point, nearly halfway through the process, Aggie noticed Hazel staring at Ivy. His eyes went back and forth between the two of them before he announced that the girl must be hungry and sent her out to wait in the truck. “There’s jam sandwiches and a thermos waiting,” he said, gruff, before shooing his daughter out into the gray cold. “Go on.”

“I have cake in the house—” Hazel started to offer, but Aggie flipped another ewe at his feet and turned the clippers on, filling the barn with the same purposeful sound a hive of angry bees would make.

“This ewe’s having twins,” Aggie announced as he finished the last girl, palpating her belly with one of his gnarled hands. The sheep rolled her eyes up at Aggie in helpless surrender. She opened her mouth and panted. Hazel fetched her paint. She daubed each twin-bearing ewe with a dot of red spray paint. The girls with single lambs got blue, and the occasional sheep with triplets received a smear of yellow. Aggie’s practiced fingers probed and rubbed. “But there could be trouble. One lamb feels bigger than the other.” He frowned. “Probably only the one will live. Just so you’re prepared.” Aggie flipped the ewe back onto her feet so quickly she was stunned by it. It took her a moment to catch up with herself, and then she clattered away, all newly trimmed hooves and pink skin. The sheep looked like different beasts after they were sheared. All their flaws were visible—their legs just a hair too long for their bodies, their square flanks bloated over their skinny knees, their floppy ears halfway to looking like donkey ears.

Hazel finished stuffing the last fleece into the plastic sack. Like the others, it was of excellent quality. The wool was supple with lanolin and free of too much filth. As soon as the weather cleared a little and after the business of lambing, she’d wash the fleeces and lay them out to dry in the sun, letting nature bleach what soap couldn’t clean. Hazel liked to use the stretch of lawn just off her porch for this job. She’d putter around indoors while the wool dried, glancing out the windows from time to time to make sure birds didn’t come down and try to steal or foul her bounty.

“It looks like you massacred a passel of angels and took their
wings,” Fergus remarked the first year Hazel had shorn her sheep. Horrified, she had flown to the upstairs bedroom window and looked down on the tufts dotting the lawn.

“No it doesn’t.” But it kind of did, providing that angels could ever be caught. Hazel wondered if Fergus would remember that quip when he saw the fleeces this year or if, after his brush with death, he carried a different image of angels altogether. Maybe instead of the ephemeral beings everyone conjured, the angels were really as hard-shelled and shiny as beetles. Perhaps instead of arriving with a face of human mercy, they came down with articulated legs, wriggling antennae, and multifaceted eyes that could see not just your side of the story but all the versions necessary to produce the honest truth. That would be useful, Hazel thought, when it came to the whole mess of the crash. Ever since June’s visit, Hazel hadn’t been able to get rid of the tiny germ of doubt settled deep inside her. What if Fergus
had
made a mistake? What if Zeke really
was
innocent? In that case maybe it was better Fergus didn’t remember.