Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  “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.

  Chapter Two

  The 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.

  For 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 t
hese 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.

  They’d come to Titan Falls in search of Pruitt, their long-lost father, but had found him dead, too, making the three of them official orphans, their legacy a plot of land that didn’t feel anywhere close to home. The terrain was slanty, choked with poison ivy, and full of unexpected hollows and drops. Right from the beginning, Mercy had a dread of it, with its Tilt-A-Whirl hollows and the river waiting down at the bottom of the ravine like a snake’s open throat. Mercy couldn’t swim.

  “No Snow woman ever could,” Arlene had once explained to her. “We’re bound body and soul to the earth.” In return for that loyalty, Arlene was privy to a cache of secret riches, a cornucopia of antidotes and cures that bloomed right under her feet. From Arlene, Mercy had learned that a crush of mallow soothed and evened broken skin, that chicory made cold blood run hot, and that hemp leaves eased the mind. She’d been taught that the fat rendered from a white-tailed doe could grant a barren woman birth and that a squirrel’s tail, severed and bound with flaxen twine, could ward off bad dreams. But nothing good ever came from water, running or still. Even Mercy’s wild baby sister, Hannah, exercised caution around the springs and creeks that dotted the North Woods, planting her boots square before she dipped a bucket.

  Hannah wasn’t fooled by the ravine below them either. “If this place is supposed to be so great, why didn’t anybody else want it?” she grumbled the day Mercy steered the caravan from the crumbling logging roads of Maine onto the smoother interstate into New Hampshire, and finally onto Devil’s Slide Road itself, the vehicle teetering and skidding on the ugly yellow mud. Zeke was ahead of them, driving the barely better truck. All their worldly goods rattled along on uncertain wheels. Lord help them, Mercy thought, if any of them dared to stop spinning. It had been only a bare month since Arlene’s death, and there were times when Mercy missed her so badly she thought the ache might crack her teeth in half, but she tried to hide that sorrow from Hannah. She shifted now, wincing as the engine made another bone-crunching grind. She prayed that the transmission would hold out for just a few hundred yards longer. “Beggars can’t be choosers. Think of this as a fresh start. It’ll be good for us.”