Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  Hannah bounced in the passenger seat. “What will there be for us to do when we get there?” They made their money wandering—doing seasonal work, foraging for fungi in the right season, picking apples in the fall, pulling in at logging sites, always moving on before they wore out the sweetness of their short welcome. They were down to the last five twenties in the old coffee can Mercy used as a makeshift bank, a fact she hadn’t yet told her two siblings and that made the walls of her stomach cramp.

  Mercy tried to put on a smile and sound reassuring. “Things will be different. You’ll see. We’re planting roots now. Everything’s going to be great.” She put her foot down harder on the gas, and the RV’s engine sputtered and whined, as if even it recognized a lie when it heard one and felt bound by honor to protest.

  When they arrived at the clearing, however, Mercy’s heart sank. She barely remembered the place, but the impressions she did have of it were all bad. Mercy had only been days old when Arlene had left Pruitt the first time, Mercy and Zeke bundled on her chest like a pair of rabbits, and eleven when they tracked him down to Titan Falls for the briefest of reunions. Mercy could still recall the brass belt buckle Pruitt used to wear and how he would swing it when he got drunk or angry, and she knew that for Zeke—who’d taken the brunt of Pruitt’s rages—the memory must be even sharper. Before he met his father, he’d been a happy-go-lucky, gap-toothed boy. Afterward it was as if something inside of him had been irrevocably rearranged, like a box of dishes dropped, shattered, and then shelved for good. He retreated into days of silence. His reading—never good—dwindled down to the level of a very young child, as if by giving up the complicated world of words he could find a deeper, more dependable layer of the universe where things were simple to understand.

  Zeke pulled the truck into the clearing and let the engine sputter and die. He climbed out, peering around him, as wary as the deer he went after during the fall. “Where is he?”

  Mercy stalked over to the smokehouse—the only structure standing on the place, albeit wonky as a jack-in-the-box—and tapped on the door. When there was no answer, she opened it and stuck her head inside. Dust particles stirred to life and floated in a kaleidoscope of neglect, but nothing else moved. A trio of iron hooks barbed out of the ceiling, patches of black were burned onto the foundation’s cinder block, and a rusty cot stood in the far corner, its blankets stripped and folded, but there were no signs of life. Mercy closed the door again, her brow furrowed. “He’s not here. Doesn’t look like he’s been for a while either. Guess we’re on our own.”

  Zeke folded his arms in front of him. “That’s fine. Better than fine.” His chest expanded, and Mercy realized how carefully he’d been breathing up until now.

  They didn’t grieve when they learned two days later that Pruitt had been found dead in the woods by some townsmen. Hannah had never met her father, and Mercy and Zeke only wished they’d been so lucky.

  “So we get a fresh start,” Mercy murmured, laying her head on her brother’s shoulder. “How about that?”

  Zeke didn’t respond, and Mercy didn’t half blame him, for she knew as well as he did that there was no such thing as a brand-new start for the likes of them. There was only starting over.

  The morning of the accident on Devil’s Slide Road, Mercy heated a pot of coffee on the camper’s wheezing stove and rummaged for the last of something to eat, feeling about as crotchety and sag-hipped as a girl her age could. She sat grumbling on the “banquette,” the fancy word Arlene had liked to use for “bench,” as if, Mercy thought, the walls around them weren’t really dinged aluminum and the light on the table didn’t come from a stinking pot of kerosene.

  Eventually Zeke came banging through the door, letting in a blast of cold. He courted the chill and preferred to sleep out in the smokehouse on Pruitt’s old cot. Mercy, however, was still wary of that space. If there was anywhere on the property that was haunted by Pruitt, she thought, it would definitely be the smokehouse. She wondered if Zeke chose to bunk there in spite of that fact or precisely because of it, battling his demons in the dark, where no one but a ghost of a man could see him.

  “Best fetch a tank of propane when you head over to Berlin,” Mercy said, sliding a bowl of stale food-bank cereal over to him, though what he’d buy the gas with, she didn’t know. Even the change in the coffee can was scant.

  Every morning Zeke disappeared in the wheezing truck to hunt for work, but sometimes, Mercy suspected, he simply slipped into the woods, where he felt most comfortable and could at least track some game for a few hours. Mercy couldn’t really fault her brother for that. Hell, there were days when she wanted nothing more than to vanish, too, but someone had to make sure they had clothes on their backs, figure out a way to make expired cans of tuna and stale rice taste like something better, and generally keep Hannah alive.

  More and more, Mercy missed her mother. Arlene had been their glue. In addition to a talent for healing, Arlene had possessed other, far more practical gifts. She could track a squirrel through the brush and skin it so fast it barely had time to bleed. She knew the dark and loamy spots where morels and oyster mushrooms sprouted in lush colonies. And most important of all, she’d owned the gift of flight, sensing when to pack up and hit the road before the long arm of the law could reach out and tap them on the shoulders. Or at least she had until that arm caught Zeke six months ago now and popped him in jail for something that wasn’t his fault. It had thrown all of them for a loop, stopping them in their tracks, forcing them to circle the imprisoned Zeke like unsettled planets, just waiting until he got out and they could hit the road again.

  Mercy didn’t like to think about the incident, but sometimes the memories pierced the fragile skin of her days anyway, like a new hole in her jeans exposing a patch of flesh underneath. When Zeke caught her floundering in those recollections, teeth tearing at one of her ragged cuticles, her brow furrowed, he would give her a secret gesture from their childhood—a finger under the chin that meant Eyes up, head up. It was the way he’d taught her to sit in a blind, finger ready to pull the trigger, her shoulders relaxed, her back straight and strong. It was the way she should always be in the woods, she knew, but wasn’t, which was why a pair of hunters had grabbed her on that dusky evening half a year ago, when she was coming back from a spring with a bucket. Mercy still flinched whenever she remembered the wet feel of their breaths sliding down her neck and on her bared stomach, their teeth on her shoulders. What they did to her was bad, but she couldn’t imagine how it would have ended if Zeke hadn’t come along, fists flying, and told her to get up and run.

  She never saw what Zeke did to the two men, but she knew it was serious enough that one of them would never walk right again. Zeke was arrested that same night and sentenced for battery and assault. No one in the area believed his story about protecting his sister over the word of two locals.

  “Let me say what happened,” Mercy pleaded, but Zeke had refused to entertain the idea.

  “What they would do to you… it would be worse than what went down with those men. It would be like it happening twice, and it would hurt more the second time around. Keep your mouth shut, Mercy. Trust me.”

  When Zeke was finally released from prison, he exited leaner in his stomach and thighs and chiseled in his jaw, an effect heightened by the scruff of beard he’d kept and the buzz cut he was still growing out. He’d come back different inside, too, Mercy had noticed. It didn’t matter now if he was out shooting in the woods or scanning a crowded bar for lit-up women—it seemed that everything had become a kind of hunt to him.

  Never a drinker before, he started occasionally losing himself in a bottle or two, although now that they had Hannah to look after, he’d sworn to Mercy that he would stay away from the stuff, especially after the brawl he’d gotten into at Lucky’s Tavern their first week in Titan Falls. Over the occupancy of a barstool of all things, at least ostensibly. The real reason, Mercy suspected, was the death of Pruitt, but when it came to that subj
ect, Zeke was as cool and secretive as a rock buried under snow. She knew that something sat frozen at the center of him, yet all she could see of it on the surface was a white suggestion, nothing but shadow and innuendo.

  The only time he’d let his opinion of Pruitt slip was the night of that bar fight. “He was a bastard, right?” he’d rasped, tipping himself into the RV long after dark with a bloody nose and a swollen jaw before doubling over in a coughing fit, holding his ribs, which were probably bruised and maybe even broken. He’d come out of jail with a wheeze in his lungs that wouldn’t respond to any of Mercy’s remedies, and Lord only knew what she would do to fix these new injuries. They couldn’t afford a doctor, and Arlene had died before Mercy could learn enough about healing from her. She needed her brother whole and strong, the way she remembered him before jail, not heaped in a drunken pile. She reached out for Zeke’s hand and took his fingers in hers. She kept her voice low so Hannah, asleep in the loft of the RV, couldn’t hear, and she whispered fiercely into his ear. “Yes, he was a bastard.”

  Zeke’s head lolled against Mercy’s chest. His eyes filmed over with grief. “God, I hope I’m nothing like him.”

  Mercy gripped his hand for dear life. “No. You’re nothing like him. At least not if you don’t want to be.”

  Now Zeke stayed away from anything alcoholic and mostly avoided Titan Falls unless he was looking for work—always stone-cold sober, his hands folded in front of him, hat clenched tight in his fingers as if to prove that he could hold things in check—but it didn’t help. The town had labeled him a ne’er-do-well, a chip off the dead block of Pruitt, and they closed their doors on him hard.

  To make it up to Mercy and Hannah, Zeke was being extra solicitous, almost courtly. He brought Hannah a collection of rabbit pelts he’d skinned and dried, and he promised that when there were enough, he would sew her a cloak with a hood. He wouldn’t let Mercy lift anything heavier than a flour sack, and when he chopped wood, he sang all the bluegrass ballads Arlene used to love, one by one, until his voice gave out and grew as rough as the wood chips by his feet. But there were still moments when Mercy saw an unfamiliar rage bubble up in him, and those instants scared her, for just as her time in the woods with those two men was a memory she wished to keep to herself, as stagnant and singular as a puddle drying up on asphalt, she knew that Zeke also had pockets of similar disquiet that wouldn’t evaporate in him either, and she prayed every morning that he would make it through one more day without those waters breaking.

  “Where’s he going?” Hannah climbed down from the loft of the RV and began gobbling the bowl of cereal that Mercy had set out for her. Outside, the engine of their old truck shook to life like a reluctant dog being roused to herd. In the months since Arlene’s death, Hannah had become particularly attuned to Zeke’s comings and goings. She reminded Mercy of a miniature weather vane, always spinning in the wind.

  Mercy cleared Hannah’s bowl and rinsed it, regretting that she couldn’t offer her another helping. “Berlin.” She turned to see Hannah making a beeline for the door. Before she could reach it, Mercy caught her by the collar and sat her down hard. “Where do you think you’re headed off to?” Though she knew full well. Hannah had an insatiable curiosity about the smokehouse, a place that Mercy still found unsettling in the extreme. “That thing’s bound to be chock-full of snakes, spiders, or both. You stay in here.”

  “All the snakes are sleeping for the season.” Hannah crossed her arms and pouted, though she had a point. The ground was chilly as a widow’s heart. But Mercy had other reasons for holding her little sister back. She knew too well what could happen to a girl alone in the dark of the trees, and it was something she was determined that Hannah would never experience.

  And maybe Hannah wouldn’t have to either, Mercy half hoped. She herself had recently found work with a woman named Hazel Bell, who kept sheep. Maybe Zeke would nab something soon, too. And maybe then they would settle in better. Zeke would find a way to change his reputation in town. Mercy would no longer feel the need to fall asleep with a knife stuck under her pillow.

  And maybe hogs would sparkle and fly.

  Hannah, sensing her older sister’s apprehension, moved in for the kill, pestering Mercy with a subject she wouldn’t drop. “Am I really going to get to go to school?” She leaned her scrawny body forward, all big ears and skinned knees, her teeth crowding together in the front of her mouth.

  Mercy eyed her sourly. She’d known only a couple of schools off and on throughout her own childhood, and she hadn’t thought much of them. “We’ll see. You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “Oh, it is.” Hannah clutched her fists to her bony chest. “It is.”

  “Hush.” Mercy turned around and put a hand on her half sister’s shoulder. Hannah was literally a gift from heaven, but honestly, everything about the child was a mystery. Unlike Zeke, words were Hannah’s biggest problem. She never shut her mouth when she should, and when she wasn’t talking, she was reading or picking up some fancy words off the radio. The first thing she did whenever they pulled into a new campsite or town was find the nearest library, and the second thing she went and found was the closest school. “You’re supposed to be sending me,” she would harangue Arlene. “It’s the law.”

  Mercy sighed now. Hannah knew far too much and not nearly enough for an eight-year-old, and it drove Mercy crazy. She’d never planned to have to mother anyone—she still needed her own mother—but the love she felt for Hannah was as simple and huge as the sun rising in the sky every morning, a phenomenon so primal and necessary that she knew she would die without it.

  “Here.” Mercy fumbled in one of the cloth bags bundled near her feet. “Put on your hat. It’s extra cold in here today.” It was Hannah’s favorite one, a ridiculous swirl of rainbow colors topped with a pom-pom. They’d gotten it for fifty cents in a secondhand store. “Zeke needs to get us more propane.”

  “You off to work?”

  Mercy bundled herself into one of Zeke’s old jackets. It broke her heart leaving Hannah alone, but what choice did she have? A handful of twenties in the coffee can wasn’t going to get them through the coming winter.

  “Yup. Off to take care of the sheep.” She didn’t want to be late. It was a half mile into town, and Mercy had another mile to go on foot after that.

  Hannah’s face lit up. “Can I come see them, too?”

  Mercy rubbed a hand over Hannah’s delicate shoulder blades, which stuck out of her back like hopeful little nubs. They were Mercy’s favorite part of her sister. “I’m afraid not. Not this time anyway. How about this? If you promise not to talk to anyone, I’ll drop you at the library. At least you’ll be warm.”

  Hannah sulked her way into her parka. There was a new tear at the elbow, Mercy saw. She couldn’t believe how rough Hannah was on cloth. “I’d rather see the sheep.”

  Mercy bit her lip. “I know, but maybe let’s wait. Nothing terrible ever came from that.” Nothing wonderful either, she thought as they clattered down the RV steps into the cold, but given the life they were leading, she didn’t feel like she needed to point that truth out.

  Chapter Three

  Over the slow course of years, Hazel Bell would lose sight of why or how Mercy Snow first landed in Titan Falls, but when she thought about it, it seemed that the girl had sneaked up on her the same way keeping sheep did: out of plain nowhere and without Hazel’s permission, a necessary evil, or maybe a blessing in disguise, though, really, Hazel suspected, the difference between the two was about as small as the pulpy space squeezed between the walls of the devil’s own heart.

  When it came to honest company, there was nothing like a flock of Shetlands, in Hazel’s opinion, and honest animals needed honest people to care for them. Sheep were trusting creatures, susceptible to everything from thievery to coyotes to hoof disease, and while this made them placid and easy as pie to corral, by the time Hazel met Mercy, she was starting to have her days when she resented having to think of every
little thing all the damn time. More often than not, she was finding herself in a state of blind worry. Would the ewe with the spot of black near her tail produce white offspring or speckled? Would the ram with the broken horn be bullied to kingdom come by his brothers? Poor Fergus would come home from a long day of driving buses or tow trucks wanting his recliner and a hot plate right quick, and Hazel would just about natter his ear off. “What do you think?” she’d stew. “Should I put paper and straw down in the barn or wood chips? The paper turned straight to mash last year, remember? But I’m worried those chips might combust.”

  There was only so much gab a man could handle, even an extremely patient specimen like Fergus, and finally, after two long months of Hazel’s rising anxiety, it got to be where he’d plain had enough. “You need a hand,” he told his wife the night she started in on the wood chips. “Your knees are giving out. Your back hurts. It’s time to get someone.”

  Fergus never wanted sheep in the first place, Hazel knew, but the man was nothing if not a soft touch. One blustery spring night ten years ago, he was called to a towing job down near the Franconia Notch, and when he stomped back in to their front room, still shaking the March wet off his coat, Hazel saw that he was holding a dirty towel all bundled up. It worried her whenever he was out in the weather. “What the Sam Hill—” she started to say, but before she could finish the words, Fergus unfolded a corner and showed her what he’d brought. It was an orphaned Shetland, hours old, all legs and bleat, its white wool marred by a single black spot.