Mercy Snow (3 page)

June considered this information. After Gert’s disappearance the Snow place had stood empty for twenty-some years until Pruitt had put down his boots in the 1970s and lived in much the same seclusion as had his ancestor. When he’d died recently, the town had breathed a sigh of relief, looking forward to some peace, only to have a whole new clot of his relatives show up. The discovery of Gert’s remains would no doubt make Abel’s investigation into the crash much harder, since Snows had a reputation for being elusive on the best of days and downright shady on the rest of them.

June bit her lip, wishing she could summon Cal, but he was probably already at the cabin, and anyway, in their twenty-odd years of marriage, beckoning him was something she’d never managed very well. Instead she’d done all the bending in the relationship, giving up city life for tiny Titan Falls, sacrificing her dream of graduate school for wifehood, letting him be when he declined to answer his damn phone. She turned her attention back to Abel. At least he was here in front of her right now, when she needed him. She decided to ignore the issue of Gert and focus on the more immediate panic of the crash. “You arrested Zeke Snow, right?”

Abel shook his head. “Tried to. I sent my deputy, Johnny Stenton, out to the old place, but when he got there, Zeke was gone. Not a soul to be found.” He eyed the dark mud uneasily. “Don’t worry, Junie. On a stretch of road like this, it’s passing tough to get to the bottom of things, but we’ll be hunting that boy down.”

In front of June, the paramedics slammed their ambulance doors and flicked their sirens to life, spraying salt and dirt in
their wake as they departed. The commotion made her shudder and draw her scarf closer around her throat as she tried to expunge the image of Suzie’s limp arms and that sodden red mitten. Suzie’s mother had borne three boys before Suzie, and then, finally, along had come a daughter.
My compensation
, Dena always called her to the other ladies in the sewing circle, stitching up pair after pair of torn boy trousers, her recompense, she liked to say, after years of balled-up sweat socks and fart jokes and jeans pockets that arrived in the laundry filled with dirt, stones, and sometimes living worms.

Back in September, Dena had arrived at the sewing circle with the intention of making Suzie a little something. “I don’t know what yet,” she’d said, sighing, “just something to catch her fancy.” Then her eye had fallen on the ball of red yarn nestled in the sewing basket that sat near June’s feet. “That’s pretty. Is it from Hazel? It’s such a color, isn’t it? I never saw anything like it from her before. I wonder how she got it so
red
?”

June had laid her embroidery in her lap. The wool was a long-forgotten offering from Hazel Bell, who raised sheep in a valley at the end of town, but in truth there was something about the sulky richness of the color that had always offended June. She handed it to Dena with relief. “Take it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. Are you sure?” But already Dena was drawing out a pair of knitting needles.

“Absolutely.” To be honest, June had never been sure just what to make of that gift from Hazel, whom half the ladies in Titan Falls feared and the other half just didn’t trust. Among all of Hazel’s peculiarities, maybe her biggest was the makeshift graveyard she’d created in a disused sugar bush on her property after her only son had died. Whenever a woman in town lost a child, Hazel would put a stone out in the wood. “Sugar babies,”
the ladies called them, and June could never quite tell if the term was a fond one or not. Personally, she thought it was all superstitious poppycock, and she frequently said so, but the women of Titan Falls were stubborn in their histories and not inclined to change their minds, no matter what June barked, and this, too, was another bargain she had no choice but to honor. June might not have had the ears of the ladies in her sewing circle a hundred percent of the time, but neither did she share the brunt of their burdens. Nor did she want to. No one would.

June had returned to her embroidery, feeling vaguely guilty, like she did the time Mr. Collins had given her change for a twenty in the hardware after she’d only given him a ten, and she didn’t tell him. There hadn’t been any good reason for it, but June had taken the money anyway just to see if she could. All that afternoon a fizz of guilt had bubbled in the middle of her, electrifying her and terrifying her in equal measure, until finally, hours later, she’d snuck back into the store and left the difference on the counter when Mr. Collins wasn’t looking. With Dena she suspected she ought to mention how glad she was to be rid of the red ball of wool, but a mean kernel inside her thrilled to see the other woman so happy with what was essentially a castoff. She sighed and reached out for Dena’s knitting needles. She needed to be a little nice. Their children were the best of friends, after all. “May I? I’ll teach you the new pattern I learned last week. You slip two stitches after the knit. Here, you try.”

Across the road now, June saw that Dena had collapsed into a heap on herself, her head bent over her knees, the frayed edges of her coat splayed in the yellow mud. A concerned knot of mill wives was gathered around her, some of them stroking Dena’s hair, some of them glancing at one another and shaking their heads. June put a foot forward to join them but stopped, arrested
by the fact that she had no idea what she should possibly say to Dena in this moment. Relations had been cool between them ever since Cal had gone and fired Dena’s husband for drunkenness on the mill floor.

“He was higher than a loon. I just can’t have it,” Cal explained to June over dinner the night of the incident. “Insurance on the place is through the roof, and you know I’ve got those state inspectors riding my ass about water quality every damn minute. Costs are way up. If Fred falls and smacks his head or cuts one of his fool arms off—or someone else’s arm—he’ll take us all down.”

“What if you got him some help? What if he took some time off?”

Cal had simply stared at her, his knife and fork crossed on his plate like a pair of deadly military sabers. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

June’s stomach had dropped a little. “Get what?”

“That there are no second chances in a mill. Don’t you know that by now?” He’d stomped away to his office then, leaving June to face his empty plate alone at the table. She gathered together the dish and the silver, rolling up her husband’s still-pristine napkin, uncrossing his knife and fork. No second chances. She knew that truth better than anyone. All the women in Titan Falls did. Men might go and slice off legs or crush entire arms in a spectacular fall of logs, but it was the females who wound up carrying that missing weight for the rest of their natural days.

There was something else as well. Even though she was two decades out of college, married, and mistress of the town, June had never been able to wholly shake the feeling of being a scholarship girl, conscious always that she was the product of someone else’s largesse, that she needed to perform or face permanent
exile, that, for her, good enough wasn’t. Of all the people in the world to whom Cal needn’t have pointed out the unreliable frailty of second chances, it was his wife.

The tangle of women stared expectantly at June from across the road. They were waiting, she knew, for her to join their cluster of grief, keen with them, and run her fingers through the dank tangles of Dena’s hair. They were waiting for her to come and say just the right thing. Instead June found herself remaining fast where she was, immobile and undecided. She pulled her coat around her ribs like she was drawing curtains to keep the light off something precious.

Dottie Billings stumped over to her, her eyes questioning. She reached out and took June by the elbow. “I believe Dena could use a shoulder right about now.” Dot was a big woman, with hamlike upper arms and hips that could nudge a stuck boulder free, but her crochet work was so delicate that it looked as if insects had spun it. Last year, when June had come down with the flu so badly she couldn’t stand up, Dottie had been the one to deliver pot after pot of steaming-hot soup to her door until she felt better. “Time to put that bad business with Fred aside,” Dot proclaimed now—the voice of calm sense, the voice June knew
she
should be.

Still June hesitated. There were three things that women in Titan Falls never turned their backs on: the river, a man in drink, and another woman in need. Down in the ravine, narrowed by rock and hill, she could hear the Androscoggin gurgling like a cat licking its paws after a kill. June felt a drop of sweat bead on her chest, deep under her clothing. If the river were a live thing, she would have sworn it was pleased with itself at that moment.

“June?” The corners of Dottie’s mouth curved down like weighted fishhooks.

June took a faltering step backward, toward her car, where Nate was waiting bundled up, a living package she was lucky to have. What could June say to Dena, really, that would make any of this any better? Anything she did would be wrong, she saw, while she still had Nate safe and warm by her side and while Fred was still locked out of the mill and stuck down the wet end of a bottle. Dena was the kind of woman, June knew, who didn’t just keep score of the injustices in her life but settled them hard and fast, the way she stitched seams closed, knotting them extra tight at the ends. June had never learned to knot her thread with the same quick ferocity. She’d never had to. She turned her head away from Dottie, her cheeks flaming. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, a burning beginning to rise in her belly.

Dottie’s mouth fell open as her capable hands traveled to her hips. “What in holy hell is wrong with you?”

Instead of answering, June turned and fled. Low down in the ravine, the babble of the river rose up to follow and taunt her, telling her things she didn’t want to hear.

T
he newest set of Snows had arrived on the outskirts of Titan Falls at the end of October. Right away there was a whiskey-fueled debate in town about them. “Back-to-nature misfits,” Archie Lincoln scoffed at the steel-topped bar of Lucky’s Tavern, his belly sticking out and his toes turned even further, but Frank Billings disagreed. “They’re
backwoods
, not back-to-nature, Arch. There’s a difference, you know.”

“Not in Titan Falls,” Arch retorted, and, like always, he had a point.

There were three of them altogether: an older brother and his sister, both in their late teen years or early twenties, both long-haired and tangled in every aspect from their clothing to the loose-hipped way they walked, and a small child the villagers took some time to determine was a girl.

The town had had problems with vagrants in the area in the past. During the Vietnam years, draft dodgers would scoot up north on their way to the border, and even now, decades later, the occasional drugged-out vanload of washouts from summer music festivals would still pull in, erect filthy tents made from quilts and sheets, and proceed to do laundry in the river. Their
children were snot-nosed and decked in bells and rags, and the adults engaged in unconventional sexual arrangements that didn’t seem appealing to anyone local. There were fewer of these lost souls now, but pockets of them still remained, their cosmic freewheeling and lack of boundaries testing the working mettle of the town.

While he’d been alive, Pruitt Snow had run the interlopers off, and for that service alone the town tolerated him. To him the homestead was nothing more than a remnant of distant kin, an unwanted swoop of woods and dirt inconvenienced by the muddy thoroughfare that ran parallel to it, a place he’d once or twice heard tell of and never desired to inhabit, which was why, after all the trouble with his wife, after Arlene had sent him spinning into the trees with a busted jaw, half his tongue sliced open, and a promise to cut off something worse if she ever saw him again, Pruitt figured it was the last place she would ever come looking for him, and he was almost right. He and Arlene suffered through a brief reunion that resulted in the birth of Hannah, their youngest child, and then Arlene had taken off in the dead of the night, offspring in tow, and Pruitt had returned to Titan Falls.

Why Pruitt had chosen to stay for good the second time, no one knew. He mostly kept to himself, shacking up in the homestead’s old smokehouse, killing for food, and working the very odd job on a lumber site or at one of the many failing mills up and down the river. As he aged, he grew shifty-eyed, rotten-toothed, and meaner-tempered than a coiled snake, but Titan Falls grew used to him. Better the devil you knew, the people said—the same thing they told themselves whenever they had to settle for less, which turned out to be more often than not.

June’s only face-to-face experience with Pruitt came shortly
after his first arrival. She and Cal had been married for two years—long enough for her to feel the strangeness and unease of having a new Snow in residence but not quite enough time for her to feel like a native of the place herself.

“I heard he’s the heir to a lost lumber fortune,” Alice Lincoln whispered excitedly during June’s weekly coffee and sewing circle, her needle flashing like a canny eye.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Margie Wall drawled back. “He’s clearly no such thing. I bet he’s just some shell-shocked leftover from ’Nam. Maybe the Vietcong had him or something. We just don’t know.” The women fell silent. That was the point. They
didn’t
know. If Hetty had been alive, June mused, tugging on a piece of thread, she would have dug down to the bottom of the whole story with the brisk authority and teeth-gritting efficiency that had been her trademark. June looked up to find the other women blinking at her expectantly, like deer contemplating a new species of shrub.

“Fine,” she sighed, laying aside her stitchwork. “Let’s go see for ourselves.”

Led by June, the women formed a flotilla of condiments and concern and then marched upon the old homestead bearing baskets of blueberry muffins, trays of scalloped potatoes set with cream, and a blanket they’d stitched in rounds together. June wore a brightly checked apron over a pleated skirt, sturdy shoes, and she’d knotted her frizzed hair up out of the way of the heat and temptation.

Pruitt received them with the calm equanimity of a dictator, standing in front of the tipsy old smokehouse he’d patched up, thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his filthy dungarees, a broad hat tipped low over his forehead. “Well, now,” he drawled, and every single one of the wives shivered a little. Pruitt’s voice
sounded like it had spiders crawling in it, a fact he seemed to intuit and use to his advantage. Generally, as soon as he started talking, people immediately wished for him to zip his lips, and in this way he’d mostly been able to pass among men with little friction or bother. Women, however, were a different matter.

Because she was married to Cal, June was the one to step forward, keeping her arms clamped tight to her sides. It was August, and steaming. She hoped sweat wasn’t marring the underarms of her dress. Down in the ravine, the stink of the river roiled and insinuated itself into the already heavy air, but June was growing used to it. The paper rolls came out of the mill as clean and white as freshly bleached bedsheets, but it was a dark magic that made that happen, one June knew the townspeople paid for with this stench, not to mention with the odd child born twisted or cleft, with shoals of fish they didn’t dare to eat at the wrong time of year.

The Snow place was cursed—everyone in Titan Falls knew that much, even June. The problem, June suspected, wasn’t the land but the river. No one in his or her right mind would want to camp downstream from the mill and its attending swirl of not-entirely-legal effluvia. Pulp slurry and broken logs, eddies of acid—all of it floated loosely away from the chutes of the Titan Paper Mill and collected here in the elbow under Devil’s Slide Road. If the town, which sat just above the mill, couldn’t escape the stink of what went on all up and down two states’ worth of the Androscoggin, June couldn’t imagine what life right next to it in the ravine must be like. No wonder disease and ruin always seemed to stalk the Snows.

June nodded at the basket in her hands. “We brought you some food.”

Pruitt didn’t move to take it, so June set it down halfway
between the two of them, resisting the urge to reach up and plug her nose. Really, the river was terribly ripe out here. The other ladies followed June’s lead and laid their gifts next to her basket, smearing the weft of the blanket with grime and streaking the napkins that wrapped the loaves of bread.

Again the chill of Pruitt’s voice crawled up and down June’s spine. “What’s all this for?” He didn’t call them “ladies” as the other men in town did, June noticed. He didn’t call them anything at all, and this absence of decorum unsettled her the way a fox at the bottom of a tree might startle the birds nesting above. The wives tightened into the comfort of one another and inched away from Pruitt.

June was beginning to realize that their visit was a mistake. The smokehouse door had a rusted horseshoe nailed over it, she saw—an ironic sign of hopefulness on a structure already so past its prime. She wondered if Gert had nailed it there before her disappearance or if it was the more recent work of Pruitt, and then she wondered if Pruitt had heard any of the stories about Gert.

Even now, more than twenty years after her disappearance, there was still a running discussion between the men at Lucky’s Tavern about what had really happened to Gert Snow. Half the bar believed she was as dead as a stone somewhere out in the anonymity of the woods or food for the fish down at the base of the falls, but whether by an act of God or the lowly hand of man, no one could exactly agree. There was a vague, unspoken pact among the drinkers that none of them would dwell too heavily on
who
might have dispatched Gert, for in a town as tightly woven as Titan Falls a prick of gossip could go only so far before it would shred too much of the common fabric. The optimists maintained that Gert wasn’t deceased at all but had
escaped in the nick of time for good reason. Maybe she’d been ratting out the mill to state water inspectors. Maybe she’d bedded the wrong man. The why wasn’t so important. It was far more fun to imagine the where. She’d crossed the river, the men said, and had gone to work in a logging camp two towns over. She was working in food service, or as an ancient, saggy-titted stripper, or living as a man, driving a cab. She was everywhere and nowhere at once.

Pruitt watched June wondering, leveling his flat gaze at her and her alone, as if he knew everything about her, even though June had never spoken to him before in her life. She colored and turned her cheek. Cal didn’t look at her like this, and June was suddenly glad for it. She drew her belly in toward her backbone and took a fortifying breath. “We won’t trouble you again.”

“I’m sure you won’t.”

June couldn’t tell if the expression on Pruitt’s face was sorrow or triumph as her flock departed in an affronted mass. Only she hung back, anchored by an unease that was thickening by the minute, like gelatin setting in a bowl. “What are you really doing in our town?” she whispered.

Pruitt sneered, but at the same time his eyes glittered for the barest moment with a sheen of what nearly passed for sadness. “Keeping secrets.”

June cocked her head, listening to the fickle gurgle of the river below them. “The waters here have plenty.”

“They’re not the only thing that does.” He said it so low that June almost believed he hadn’t uttered anything. She eyed Pruitt, but he was staring at an invisible point just over her left shoulder. The conversation was finished.

“Well, there’s a man you can tell doesn’t know the first thing about women,” sniffed Margie as soon as June returned to the
station wagon. Margie’s face was radiant with sweat. The front of her dress was damp, her lips loose and parted. She was a woman, June thought, who leaked secrets like curds seeped whey.

June slammed the driver’s-side door hard and threw the engine into gear. A new Caddy, bought even though the mill owed a backlog in pay because, Cal insisted, the trappings of success would surely engender more. “Oh, he knows plenty,” June spit. She just wasn’t sure what. Truth be told, she wasn’t certain she
wanted
to know either. She drove home in silence with her teeth gritted, feeling more and more like her late mother-in-law with each passing mile. She never told Cal about the encounter, and over the years she forgot all about it until Pruitt’s death and the subsequent arrival of his estranged children picked the skin off that wound and left it as exposed as the tattoos she sometimes glimpsed etched onto the mill workers’ backs—fiery, fanged creatures posed with wild eyes and claws drawn, yet trapped forever in the pale of human flesh.

F
or as long as Pruitt’s eldest daughter, Mercy Snow, could ever remember, the color green had signified the rough hue of North Woods living—not just vast acres of spruce, maple, and fir but also the shade of rot trimmed off weeks-old vegetables, the tint of fiddlehead ferns plucked and fried with an onion in the spring, and the shine of algae slicking fallen logs. When Mercy ate, she tasted green in the bile of the deer livers her older brother hunted and in the tang of the copper of their kettle. When she slept, she dreamed in green, and when she looked in the mirror, Mercy could see how the verdancy of her life had bled into her skin, her hair, and even her eyes, making her appear aged before her time.

But she wasn’t old. Quite the opposite. She was only nineteen,
still baby-cheeked from certain angles. Backwoods mud hadn’t yet muted everything in her, but almost. Her newly dead mother and her mother’s mother before her had been famous among the North Woods loggers and hunters for their healing touches, their ability to close a wound with a hunk of moss and a firm squeeze, or to cure a case of the whiskey shakes with the press of three fingers on a man’s throat. Mercy supposed she must have inherited at least a smidgeon of these gifts, but so far they were proving to be like everything else in her life: threadbare to the point of invisibility, not in working order, and as late as her older brother Zeke’s last paycheck.