Mercy Snow (27 page)

Aggie was cleaning out his clippers and rolling up the rest of his gear. He packed everything—the hoof clippers, the file, his gloves—into a single neat canvas bag and then surveyed the naked flock with satisfaction. “I remember when you just had the one, way back when. Remember how you sang to him the first time I did the shearing?”

Hazel nodded. She still occasionally sang to her animals, especially during lambing season, but she didn’t tell Aggie that. He would think it was ridiculous—and it was. Sometimes, though, a song was really meant for the singer. Back when Hazel still attended St. Bart’s, belting out the hymns had always been her favorite part of a Sunday. At those moments, listening to the town’s combined voices trilling up to the rafters, she used to
think that folks had it all wrong when they talked about going to church to invite God in. Surely, Hazel thought, it was the other way around. You went to let him out.

“You going to be okay?” Aggie had jammed his hat back on his head and was peering at her with concern, the way he would inspect a sheep with infected udders or a split hoof. “I heard you fired that Snow girl, but she’s still out there on Devil’s Slide Road, isn’t she? I hear the McAllisters are hopping mad about it. Abel Goode says June pesters him at least once a week with new plans to roust them out of there. I hear she’s talking about calling child protective services on them, though I’m not sure starting on the little kid is the right way to go. Still, you must miss a pair of helping hands around here.”

Hazel drew her shoulders back and shook herself out of her fog. “Don’t be a stooge, Aggie. I’m strong enough to corral one of the rams when it’s in a mood. I think I can handle the flock on my own. Besides, I’ve got the McAllister boy on weekends now.” She didn’t say a word about Mercy, though she’d certainly been on Hazel’s mind ever since the gory incident with the ram. Now she was glad as a ten-dollar bill that June had talked her into getting rid of the girl, although it bothered Hazel to remember the hollow angles of Mercy’s cheeks and the obvious thinness under the bulk of her jacket. But no. Hazel ought to have trusted her instincts from the get-go. The Snows were good for nothing but trouble. Always had been and always would be. By holding her door open wide to Mercy and inviting her to step across her threshold, Hazel had done nothing but curse her own fool self.

They strolled out of the barn and latched the door. Aggie took in the scratches on the wood with a critical eye. “Coyotes? They’re getting worse every year.” His forehead wrinkled. “Wait. Where’s that young ram of yours? I thought we were one short. Oh, Hazel—”

She cut him off. “Margie Wall claims she saw a wolf in these parts, but that woman’s got an imagination.” She couldn’t say why she didn’t want Aggie to know the truth about the ram, and this bothered her almost as much as the crime itself.

Aggie was concerned. “A wolf is a worry with lambing season around the corner.”

“I’d take a lone wolf over a pack of coyotes.” Hazel shrugged.

“Can’t argue that.” Aggie shook his head. “This town’s falling apart. First there was the accident, then that business with those old Snow bones. Now we’ve got wolves. Next they’ll be closing the mill down one hundred percent. I hear another operation over in Maine is shutting next month. There’s only Titan Paper and one other left around here.”

Hazel double-checked the barn door. “That’s exactly why I’m in sheep. If worst comes to worst, I can always eat them.”

Aggie waved his hat at Ivy to signal her to start up the truck, and the girl obeyed, a delighted grin on her face. Hazel’s heart hurt just looking at her. Aggie turned back to her. “I’m serious. Take care out here, Hazel. And if you need anything when the lambing starts, call me.” He grinned. “I can lend you Ivy.”

If I had her, I might not give her back
, Hazel thought. She knew what the women in town said about her and her sugar-baby stones. Well, half the women anyway. The other half had lost children just as Hazel had. Still, it was easier to mock Hazel for her grief than try to confront the reasons for their own sadness, but in the end it all boiled down to the mill and the river, she suspected. Gert and her family had allegedly always been complaining about the noxious water, and look where it had gotten them. In the ground, was where. Snows and McAllisters, Hazel suspected, went way, way back.

Not that Hazel, or anyone else in town, was one to go bringing
any of that up in polite company. Hurt was something you buried once and for all in Titan Falls—bones and everything. Hazel discovered early on in the Duncan Home for Girls that sorrow was as common as brickwork. There was nothing special about hers. Once an orphan, always an orphan. Or so she’d always told herself, until the day she accidentally learned that she might be less of a stray than she believed. There was a reason Hazel had moved to Titan Falls, but it was one she almost never dared admit to herself, much less anyone else.

Now, as she trudged from the barn back to the house in the early spring twilight, she heard the distant sound of an owl calling in the trees and once again felt the stab of Mercy’s betrayal. In spite of all that, she still missed the girl. Having Nate around wasn’t the same, but it was an improvement over no one. Better the devil you knew, Hazel supposed, although it didn’t answer the question of what you were supposed to do when the devils you knew included absolutely everyone.

O
n June’s wedding day, Hetty McAllister had sent her down the aisle with a warning and a curse. If June wasn’t careful, Hetty had hissed, fussing with her veil and handing her the bouquet, she would be driven to distraction by life in this town. Any number of things could do it: the vapors that fouled the place to high heaven in the warmer months, the constant noise, the calamity of a fall of logs jamming the Androscoggin, and the inevitable limbs that were fatally crushed in the act of freeing them.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Hetty had asked, and June, struck mute by love and wedding nerves, had nodded furiously. At the time what she’d loved best about Cal was how he wasn’t just from Titan Falls but actually
of
it. Every day she
looked forward to his coming home from a day at the mill with the heavy odor of pulp hanging in his hair and wood shavings stuck in his trouser cuffs. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to June, as if, when it came to Cal, wood and flesh were one substance.

But sprouting roots, it turned out, was a far more painful business than June had anticipated. Now, as the early spring shuddered forward, the days thawing and the nights still freezing, a vague malaise draped itself over her, worse than anything she’d felt before at this time of year, swathing her in perpetual ill will. The sewing circle was finishing up the wall hanging in Suzie’s memory, embroidering the tiniest buds on the apple tree’s branches with green silk thread the color of dragonflies, basting over their previous stitches again and again to make the bark rough.

As the project neared completion, the women gathered more frequently in June’s parlor. Normally June relished such company, but now she felt smothered by it. For one thing, the mill was operating at half staff. After the first round of layoffs, Cal had let go another group of men, including Alice’s husband, and June could feel the unspoken resentment of the wives buzzing in the room like a ball of riled hornets. It made her careful in the extreme. Cal had promised that orders would pick up again with better weather, but June didn’t say that to the women sitting around her. She simply kept her head down and stitched, hoping to set an example of patient industry the rest of them would follow.

She was beginning to regret the memorial panels for Suzie. The work was fussy, painstaking, and required the press of too many hands too close to June’s own. She sensed, in the women’s tense shoulders and tight lips, the same impatience from the other wives. Suzie was buried. The business with the accident should have been, too, but here they all were, led by June,
pricking it over and over with their needles. How stupid she’d been, June thought. Knowing what Cal had done should have made her cautious. Instead what had she done but invite rumination over the incident? She took comfort in the fact that in another month or so the road out to the lake cabin would be passable enough for her to go find the cursed mitten and destroy it once and for all. After that she would feel better. Nothing would be able to touch her family.

In the meantime June never wanted to see another needle in her life. The thought of hosting one more sewing circle made her want to tear her hair out and trample it like a woman lit on fire. The pricks of pins sliding along a hem were tantamount to someone performing voodoo on her nerves. She would glare at the townswomen she knew so well—at Dot’s face, bland as a winter tomato, and Alice’s double chin and widow’s peak—and wonder what she’d done to herself to end up trapped in a stuffy parlor with a bunch of ladies she knew almost everything about and yet cared so little for. She thought back to her student days at Smith and wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t married. Would she be an English professor as she’d planned? Perhaps. Or maybe she would have ended up back with her addle-brained mother in Florida as she feared, turning into a younger version of her. No. Cal had saved her. If nothing else, he had made that particular scenario impossible, and for that grace alone June felt she owed him more than she could ever give.

The women in the sewing circle were blissfully unaware of June’s glum mind-set—a fact she was grateful for until she realized why. Somehow, without her noticing, they’d fallen into a tizzy of enthusiasm for the maple sap that Mercy was providing them. Even stalwart Dot was converted. “Look, my arthritis
is gone,” she chirped, fluttering her thick fingers like they were butterflies.

“My ulcers haven’t bothered me in a week now,” Alice chimed in, and Margie added that she’d dropped five pounds without even trying. Stella said she was waiting until her child arrived before she sampled her portion of sap, but there was rampant speculation about that decision.

“Maybe you want to take it now,” Margie gently prodded. “I mean, look at all the good things it’s done for us. Maybe it will…” She hesitated, looking for the right words without bringing up the sugar babies buried out at Hazel’s. “Make your babe strong.”

Stella chewed her bottom lip and appeared to consider what Margie was saying. She had a point. As Stella’s due date grew closer and the Androscoggin began to quicken under its thinning patches of ice, she had been thinking more often about those stones planted on Hazel’s land. They were touchstones in the realest sense of the word. When a woman had a healthy child, people said it had “come through just fine,” and when a woman bore a babe disfigured or dead—a sugar baby—folks just pressed their lips together and eyed the river uneasily.

But what if there was a way around all that? What if Mercy Snow had found an antidote to the years of poison and sorrow that swirled in the currents of the Androscoggin? Politicians and river inspectors had famously tried to clean the waters up, but she suspected that getting the river to run pure was going to require more than a bunch of government men’s signatures, or even the reluctant efforts of Cal and the other mill owners. It was going to take the tongues of women and the stories of the children they’d loved and lost. Maybe change in Titan Falls was going to take someone like Mercy Snow.

“Ow!” June had pricked her finger. A rosette of blood unfurled on her fingertip. The ladies watched it bloom.

“Let me get you something for that.” Dot stood up.

“No, it’s fine.” June stuck her finger into her mouth, savoring the metallic tang. “Leave it.” She pressed on the wound and held her breath, determined to keep the balance of the world—her world—in check, a dominion of steel pinpoints and paper edges, where the splinter of a log could pierce a man’s heart, a mitten of red wool could undo the years of a careful marriage, and a drop of sap could turn blood to honey.

C
al was furious when he found out about the fondness the townswomen had developed for Mercy’s jars of sap. “You promised months ago that you were going to see to it that the Snows left,” he hissed as he sat himself down to dinner. “The whole mill floor is buzzing with talk about this girl’s so-called cures. Now some of the men are even questioning if her brother really caused the crash. I can’t have it, June. That family has to go.”