Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  He slid the creature right onto Hazel’s lap. “The farmer doesn’t want it. Said he was going to let nature take its course if I wasn’t interested.”

  Hazel eyed the stony March clouds piling on the horizon, then the lamb, and felt such a clamping around her heart that it was as if the Almighty himself had shoved his fist down her throat and given her soul a squeeze. She started to protest—what did she want with a barnyard animal when she didn’t even have a barn?—but the little beast skittered its hooves around her thighs, then looked up at her, and that was that. Hazel was a goner. The fact was, the lamb needed her and she needed it. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she growled at Fergus. “Go fetch a box or something.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Fergus tried to put on his hangdog look, but Hazel could see a sneaky half smile dancing around the corners of his mouth, and she knew she’d been had. Fine, she thought. Sheep it would be, then.

  Sheep turned out to be her salvation.

  The real reason Fergus brought that sorry animal into her life, Hazel realized full well, wasn’t wholly to do with her tender heart. In actual fact, it had more to do with her broken one. It wasn’t Fergus’s fault, though, this flaw of Hazel’s. She’d warned him before they got married that she had a crack running right down the middle of her soul and that over time it would very likely only get worse, and in this she turned out to be correct.

  Simply put, Hazel had been born with a shaky foundation. Orphaned at birth, she’d been found fifty years earlier laid out naked and blue on the banks of the Androscoggin. It was a rare but not totally uncommon occurrence at the time. Lots of girls back then got themselves in trouble and couldn’t fix it, and some of the poor wretches made the decision to let the elements do their work. In Hazel’s case mankind interfered, specifically an itinerant Portuguese logger who gave her over to the Duncan Home for Girls in Gorham while she was still wet behind the ears. There she was brought up right quick. The place wasn’t bad, but it was hard on a body. Hazel and the other girls always had just enough and not a thread more to their names: two pairs of woolen stockings kept going with strategic darning and cut down to socks when they outgrew them, an itchy hemp pinafore that Hazel couldn’t stain if she tried, and a rickety cot she learned to crimp her bones into as they stretched. She wasn’t sorry to leave when she turned seventeen and wasn’t unhappy either when she heard that the place shut down a few years later, right after she met and married Fergus.

  Fergus had enough gentleness in him to make up for a whole world of sorrow, and right from the beginning he did just that for Hazel. They saved their money, Fergus from his driving and Hazel from odd jobs cleaning or waitressing in local diners, and they eventually bought a place outside Titan Falls in the pocket of a grassy valley where life was good.

  Much as she wanted to, Hazel couldn’t find it in herself ever wholly to leave the river or the woods where she’d been discovered. Maybe because the Androscoggin had spawned her—or was the closest thing she would ever know to what had—it both repelled and attracted her. When she went too far away from it, she grew anxious and irritable, feeling she was missing something, and when she traveled too close, she grew panicked and afraid. So she compromised, setting up house with Fergus near enough to Titan Falls that the mineral smell of the mud drifted faintly in the air during the muggy summer months but otherwise kept a respectable distance.

  For a good long while, Hazel managed to forget that she was a soul who’d been put on the earth untethered. She bore a son and tended a garden of sweet peas and roses right outside her kitchen, but the river played its tricks and orphaned her all over again. When Rory was two, he passed away from a hard-sucking blood cancer. Hazel didn’t want much to do with life after that—any of it—and she knew in her marrow that most mothers would feel the same. To be a mother, after all, was to know the most perfect fullness on earth followed by the most terrible emptiness. Even with healthy children, you were always losing them a little, Hazel figured, right from the moment the cord was cut and you heard that first cry. With Rory it just happened faster and more painfully, catching her by surprise.

  She puzzled the town by refusing to bury her son in the tiny cemetery adjacent to St. Bart’s, overlooking the Androscoggin. Instead she convinced Fergus to lay their boy to rest in the sugar bush at the end of their little valley, surrounded by trees, cradled by nothing but good black earth.

  In spite of that, though, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the damn river, insolent in its foulness, capped by the belching smokestack of the Titan Mill, had somehow stolen her child, and Hazel was nothing if not obdurate. She would be a monkey’s butt if she was going to give Rory over to the Androscoggin for all eternity. Fergus, knowing the futility of resisting his wife’s opinions, dug a deep hole under one of the maples and marked the spot with a crude granite block he carved himself. When a woman in town gave birth to a stillborn a few months later, Hazel added a second stone out near Rory’s, for remembrance, she said. Soon another stone was placed as another child died in a car accident, and then another when an infant succumbed to cot death, until a small unofficial graveyard of the unconsecrated grew upon the spot, feeding the trees with unrealized sweetness.

  For the next decade, as the stones in the sugar bush slowly increased, Hazel foundered. She let her garden sink to weeds. She respectfully declined to attend St. Bart’s with Fergus. The townswomen, horrified by the graveyard that Hazel was curating at the end of her valley, kept their distance, choosing to take their chances with the river. None of it mattered to Hazel. Nothing at all mattered to her, in fact, until the night that Fergus walked in the door with that lamb. It was the first thing since Rory that Hazel cared about the end of. Without her, Hazel saw, the creature would die, and she didn’t have the energy to go through that misery again, not even with a stupid bleating sheep. So she roused herself, fed it by hand, kept it warm by the stove, and when it was ready, Hazel got it a mate. Two Shetlands became four, and four became ten, until she had built herself a little family in fleece, all of it blessedly white except for two spotted ewes, which Hazel kept anyway because she of all people knew that nothing on this godforsaken earth was ever perfect no matter how much she wished it might be so.

  There were three basic choices with sheep: fleece, meat, or milk, and after a long, hard think, Hazel chose fleece. It turned out to be the correct one, because she didn’t have the heart for butchery or the patience to wait for cheese to age, and except for that pair of spotted rogues her babies produced beautiful ecru wool, perfect for spinning and dyeing.

  Hazel’s coming to color was the second half of her revival, but she arrived at it slowly, the same way she took to husbandry. The first time Aggie, the shearer, visited, Hazel didn’t have the foggiest clue what to do with the raggedy pelts he stacked in front of the house at the end of his time. When she said so, he stared at her with his mouth cricked open, showing all the stumps of his teeth. “Why, you skirt them, woman, and wash them, and go from there. These can be whatever you want them to be.” And that was when Hazel first understood that she’d been given much more than wool. She’d been granted the stuff of life.

  She began her experiments in dyeing with the shade of black, because ever since Rory’s death that was what had filled her heart. When summer arrived, she took herself out gathering up and down the swath of her valley, returning with her arms full of sumac branches. Then she fetched an old pot, boiled a batch of the leaves, and watched with satisfaction as the alum-soaked skeins she’d spun turned a sickly gray and then a dusky black. She lifted them out, staining her fingertips, and hung the wool to dry off the side of the porch.

  When the cornflowers bloomed later in the season, they lightened Hazel’s mood to blue, and she added drips and dots of cerulean to the black smears on the porch railing. Dandelion roots gave her brown, lichen and lilac provided a dulled gold and orange, and lily-of-the-valley produced a toxic green quite suited to her general interior mood. Slowly the railings and boards of the porch
splattered, then smudged, then erupted in the muddy rainbow of her grief.

  For all that, Hazel only ever made the color red one single time, with the most peculiar result. First she edged up to the shade with pink (roses mixed with the tips of lavender) and purple (pulped huckleberries), then danced around it with a peachy brown leached from the branches of a weeping willow tree. She wasn’t sure yet if she was ready to let red—the happy buzz of paper valentines and velvet Christmas bows—back into her soul.

  But you couldn’t have a parade without the horns, Hazel told herself. And so, on the hottest day of that summer, she walked past the sugar bush and past the cluster of graves—one or two more of them every year—gathering chokecherry branches by the armful. Then she came home and stoked a fire on the old woodstove. She soaked the last three skeins of her homespun yarn in alum, waiting to sink the wool in the vat until the berries in the old nicked pot were oozing from fury and heat. The fiber bloomed to blush, then grew winey, then burst into the color of flame. She stared at the spectrum of dyed and dried yarn piled along the porch and bit her nails raw, because what she saw before her was an awful truth: All the colors of the rainbow weren’t going to bring her Rory back.

  She considered burning the whole mess of color she’d created, but that just seemed melodramatic and a waste, and if there was anything Hazel couldn’t abide, it was a waste. So she did the next-best thing she knew. She decided to try accepting what life had given her. She laced up her boots, gathered her wool, and set off into town.

  “Why, Hazel. How kind! What’s this all about?” June McAllister answered her door in a blue apron starched to military rigidity, the ruffles on it ironed to razor sharpness. Hazel handed over the basket full of yarn balls, all neatly wound and prettily arranged, the scarlet one hidden down at the bottom. June’s house often smelled of cooking, and that day the air swirled with the scents of lemons, cinnamon, and sugar. In the front hall, Hazel could see a baseball glove and a pair of little boy’s sneakers.

  June folded her hands dutifully at her waist. She was known for always welcoming callers politely if not a hundred percent warmly. “Would you like to come in? I have iced tea.”

  Hazel shook her head. There was something about June McAllister that Hazel had never really cottoned to—and it wasn’t because she hailed from some fancy college, which was Fergus’s theory. There was something else about June that Hazel couldn’t quite put her finger on, and that was odd, since everything June did was perfect. Maybe that was simply it. In Titan Falls there was no reason to try that hard.

  “I can’t,” Hazel said. “I just wanted you to have some samples. I’m going to be selling wool, hand-spun and hand-dyed. Come on out when it suits you.”

  June ran one of her polished fingertips over the blue ball of yarn. “This is lovely. I bet you’ll be swimming in business before too long. I’ll make sure I get the word out.”

  That’s what I’m counting on, Hazel thought, but she kept that thought shoved under her hat. “Thank you so much. And you take care of that boy of yours.”

  June’s face briefly lit up, and this made Hazel like her a little better. “Oh, I will. They grow up so fast, don’t they?” And then her smile faded a bit.

  Hazel’s heart squeezed with that sentence—she wouldn’t lie. She nodded. “Yes, they sure do.” Before June could detect the stirrings of sympathy, Hazel turned and set off down the porch steps cursing. What had she been thinking? Giving away that basket of yarn hadn’t done a single thing to ease her grief. But at least she had company. The stones in the sugar bush were testimony to that—a hardened alphabet of grief spelled out on the ground—and what they said was simple. Everyone lost something once, no matter how beloved. There was nothing you could do. And thus a sorrow to one mother was a sorrow to all in this mill-pounded town, where the dead never really did go away but lingered, their woolen strings tangled up in everybody, knotted and frayed, impossible to snip no matter how hard you damn well tried.

  For a decade Hazel handled the sheep just fine mostly on her own, but by the time of the accident the work was taking a toll on her. She was fifty, after all. Her knees weren’t what they used to be, and there were days her back pained her so bad she would have let a demon dance on it if she thought it would help.

  Once Fergus determined that Hazel needed to get help in with the sheep, he didn’t let the notion go until she agreed to follow through on his plan. Obviously he had a boy in mind for the job. A strapping high-school lad would do, he concluded, someone a bit like who Rory might have been. A youth who could work after school, or maybe even a fellow who couldn’t score a job in the mill but needed cash all the same. Hazel thought they should be fair about the opportunity. She would, she decided, place an ad in the Titan Press.

  Sitting at her kitchen table, she chose her words with care. “Wanted, a strong back for strong work,” she wrote. “Good with animals, trustworthy, flexible. Outdoor labor involved. Felons need not apply.” A week went by, then two, and no one called. Hazel couldn’t understand it. She reworked her phrasing, removing the part about felons and adding in a promise for decent pay, but the telephone line stayed dead. Finally, at the end of October, on a frosty day that boded no good at all in Hazel’s mind, a flurry of footsteps crossed her porch.

  “It’s about damn time,” she grumbled, pulling on a cardigan and stumping to the front door to see what the winds had thrown her way. She was disappointed to find a compact, black-haired girl standing at the door clutching a copy of the Press with Hazel’s advertisement circled in red.

  “Hello, ma’am. I’m here about the job. I’m Mercy Snow.” She stuck out her hand.

  Hazel declined to take it. “I don’t need a girl.” She folded her arms across her chest and tucked her chin.

  She tried to close the door, but before she could, Mercy’s skinny arm shot out and stopped her. “Hold on. What’s the work, exactly? Your ad don’t say.”

  Hazel leveled her gaze. “Sheep.”

  “Your sheep.”

  Not only was the girl stubborn, but Hazel was starting to think she was stupid, too. “Well, obviously.”

  “But you’re female.”

  Hazel couldn’t argue that perceptive detail. She sniffed. “What did you say your name was again?”

  The girl’s voice came out a little quieter. “Mercy Snow, ma’am.”

  “You related to that late scoundrel Pruitt?”

  The girl hung her head and stayed silent, and Hazel didn’t blame her there. If she were related to Pruitt Snow, she’d bow low, too. The man had been a disgrace, living out on that old place on the edge of the Devil’s Slide Road, poaching whatever he could put in his belly, and drinking himself stupid.

  As for Pruitt’s children, Hazel had heard that the feckless boy had a record and time under his belt, but she didn’t know much about this sister of his. And don’t want to know either, she thought, trying to close the door again. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’re really not who I’m looking for.”

  The girl was surprisingly strong. Before Hazel could stop her, she’d stuck her foot between door and jamb. “Why not let me work today and see how it goes? I’ll do it for free.”

  Hazel considered. “Nothing’s ever free.”

  “So pay me if you want.” The girl shrugged, but underneath the hard glaze of her eyes Hazel could see a slick of need. She ran all the rumors about Pruitt through her mind again. Several stories immediately sprang to her imagination, none of them very comforting.

  On the other hand, the girl looked strong enough, and beggars couldn’t be choosers. It’s not like there was a team of young men thundering across her porch for the work. “Fine,” Hazel finally said, swinging open the door a fraction of an inch wider, wondering who exactly was helping whom. “I’ll give you one morning. If my sheep take to you, you can stay.”

  “Oh, they will.” Mercy scraped her boots carefully on the mat before crossing the threshold, trailing the scents of pine sap and bacon grease into
Hazel’s clean hall. “You don’t need to worry about that, ma’am. Animals are just fine with me, I always find.” Her face clouded for a moment, and her eyes grew dark. “Folks are more often the problem.”

  Hazel sighed and closed the door quick before the girl could drag in the wind, flies, or something worse. “Folks mostly are.”

  All through that November, Mercy delivered herself to Hazel’s doorstep early and lingered for the ostensible purpose of work, but the real reason she loitered on Hazel’s farm was for the company. Out in the barn, the Shetlands were constantly bleating and stammering over one another, and up above them a colony of starlings lived in the rafters and could set up a ruckus of their own. There was sound going on inside the house, too—the gentle hum of Hazel’s spinning wheel, the wheezing gasp of the vacuum that Mercy offered to run at the ends of her shifts, Hazel rattling sudsy spoons and forks in a sink full of dishes. Sounds that reminded Mercy that in spite of Arlene’s death, life was going on all around her and that it was fine; she could let her shoulders relax and her mind wander a spell the way she was never able to when she was looking after Hannah.

  There was one spot at Hazel’s, however, that ran a chill up Mercy’s nerves the single time she saw it. Down at the end of the valley, where the pastureland narrowed and the forest took over, hidden under a bare canopy of trees, there was a smattering of stones, some of them roughly carved, some of them still jagged. They weren’t large, but there were too many of them to be natural. Mercy rounded them twice before she found the stone with Rory’s name on it and a third time before she realized she was standing in a sugar bush—unused for quite some time by the looks of it. She paused for a moment, painfully aware that she was caught in a twin bower of sorts, bones spreading under the earth even as branches closed above it, and decided it would be a very good idea never to tell Hazel she had trespassed on the spot.