Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  Tonight there was a cold snap whipping in the air, and Mercy was thinking about food. She and Hazel had just finished making sure the sheep were locked securely in the barn, that they had water and enough feed, that none of the rams were fixing to fight. “Margie Wall swore to Fergus that she saw a gray wolf out by Bretton Woods the other week,” Hazel said as they wound their way back to the house, her breath steaming into the night air. It made a spirited cloud to rival the size of her whole head. “Skinny thing. Quick, too, but I think she’s full of it. Margie Wall will say anything to bend somebody’s ear her way.”

  Mercy thought about that. The green sway of the forest was the most familiar thing in the world to her, but at the same time it was full of leafy mysteries better left alone. Mercy knew that there were some things in the trees you didn’t want to have to answer for.

  As they clattered into the kitchen, Mercy saw that Hazel had set a plump turkey out on the draining board to defrost. Thanksgiving was tomorrow. Mercy stared at the bird, picturing the spread Hazel would no doubt conjure up, and her mouth watered. The Snows’ celebration was always more of a paper-napkin-and-beer affair. Zeke had come home the other day toting an extra sack from the food bank and had proceeded to slam the wares one by one on the RV’s single chipped counter: a can of cranberry sauce, a can of corn pone, and two tins of green beans. Combined with the venison he’d shot the day before, it would be a passable enough holiday, better than some they’d had, especially if Mercy could rustle up something fresh—it didn’t matter what to her—just something with some fiber in it and no tang of metal aftertaste.

  She had an urge to make things nice for Hannah for a change. And maybe a real holiday would start to loosen some of the tighter angles of Zeke, prying him open and bringing back the daydreaming boy Mercy remembered from childhood.

  A woman’s magazine sat on Hazel’s kitchen counter. The cover featured a sumptuous Thanksgiving feast laid out on a farmhouse table much like Hazel’s. In the background a fire roared in a brick fireplace, casting an appetizing glow on the bourbon-glazed turkey (according to the caption), green-bean succotash, and cranberry chutney. As quietly as she could, Mercy flipped through the pages and ripped out the recipe for the green beans, folded it, and slipped it into her pocket. There was no chance she would ever be able to reproduce anything like what it offered, of course, but she liked the idea of carrying the promise around anyway. It was like having a lucky penny or a road map to some other existence. Hannah had her pilfered library books for that, and Zeke had the hours he spent in the woods, but the only thing Mercy could rely on for transcendence was the coil of her own soft innards. She was never full of the things she wished to be.

  “Fergus will drive you home when he returns,” Hazel said, coming up behind her. “He ought to be back any second. Archie was going to drop him by from town when Fergus was done with the youth-group run over to Berlin. Fergus likes to leave me a vehicle, even though he knows I won’t drive at night.”

  Mercy closed the magazine to hide the scar of torn pages. “Okay.” She stuck a guilty hand over her pocket. She didn’t like the dark either. She knew all too well what lurked once the sun went down.

  “Here.” Hazel tossed a skein of yarn at her and kicked out a chair in her direction. “Wind this.” Mercy ran the wool through her fingers. The color was an orange so zesty she was tempted to lick it. She sat down and started balling up the fiber. So far Hazel hadn’t let her much near the uncombed fleeces or yarns. She said she was still learning what kind of touch Mercy had. Hazel sat down in an opposite chair and watched as Mercy’s fingers worked the wool.

  The jangle of the phone broke up the puddle of still air spread between them. Hazel sighed heavily and rose to her feet, pushing hard against her thighs with the heels of her hands. She always moved stiffly in the evenings, Mercy had noticed, as bandy-legged as her Shetlands.

  “What?” Hazel didn’t so much speak as bark on the phone. “What do you mean? How do you not know?” There was a pause, and then she rasped, “Yes, of course. I’m on my way.”

  The orange wool in Mercy’s hands flashed too bright all of a sudden, the color of alerts and alarms. “Hazel?”

  Hazel’s hands were shaking. She couldn’t have wound wool if she wanted to. “Do you know how to drive?”

  Mercy nodded. “Yes. Of course.” Anything after the monstrous RV and Zeke’s death trap of a truck would no doubt handle as smoothly as a limousine.

  Hazel snapped Mercy her sedan keys. “That was Abel Goode. He said there’s been an accident and Fergus is hurt. Go start the car. You’re coming with me.”

  Chaos greeted Mercy and Hazel in the waiting room of the Heritage Pines ER. Even the light in the place was calamitous, Mercy thought, flooding into every nook and cranny, chasing the shadows of death back under the floorboards for a little while longer.

  Hazel pushed her way up to the reception desk and rapped her knuckles on it. “My husband,” she demanded in her gravel-dust voice. “Where’d they take him? Fergus Bell.”

  Hazel seemed preternaturally calm to Mercy, who always itched on the rare occasions when she stepped anywhere institutional and never knew what to say. Around her, knots of panicked parents tapped their feet or just sat, silent and grim. Normally the Heritage Pines ER was a sedate place, even when full. Chainsaw accidents weren’t unknown, of course, and there were always car accidents, sports injuries, and little kids who shoved peas up their noses, but never all at once.

  A fresh pair of ambulances squealed up outside. Mercy could see through the sliding glass doors that the news was not good in one of the vehicles. The first team of paramedics was already bursting out of its rig, shouting out codes and confusing acronyms to the waiting doctors, pushing a boy on a stretcher, but for the second set of paramedics there was no such hurry. They pulled their stretcher out of the back, but the girl on it was too still and too completely covered to suggest any chance of recovery. Mercy watched as they momentarily drew back the sheet for the doctors and conferred in hushed voices. She took a step forward and then stopped.

  The girl had been beautiful. There was no doubt of that, even in spite of the bloody contusion where her hairline met her forehead. Her hair, Mercy saw, was drying to the color of clean straw. Already her skin had lost the color of life, taking on the waxy sheen of the dead. The paramedics had strapped her arms down by her sides. On her chest someone had laid a bright red mitten, knit in a chevron pattern. Mercy wondered where the other one had gone.

  Hazel reappeared at Mercy’s side as a group of nurses wheeled the girl away. Hazel stared after her for a moment with her hand over her mouth, but if she knew who the girl was, she didn’t say. “They’ll take us back now. I’d like it if you’d come, if that’s okay. I don’t…” She trailed off, then cleared her throat. “They say he’s alive, but in bad shape. I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing I want to see alone.”

  “Sure.” Mercy squeezed Hazel’s hand. If there was anything she was good for, she knew, it was beholding the kinds of things most people would rather not.

  They made their way to one of the individual rooms on the far side of the ER. That right there was a bad sign. Those rooms were reserved for serious cases. They stopped at the third door. Mercy tiptoed up and peered in. The privacy curtain hadn’t been pulled closed, and she could see Fergus laid out on the bed, unconscious from the looks of it and not breathing on his own. Two doctors seized Hazel and began trying to explain his condition to her. Mercy caught their words midstream.

  “… a chance he’s injured the brain stem.”

  “… no apparent cognitive awareness.”

  “… we’ll run tests, obviously, but does he have a living will?”

  Hazel’s growl cut them off. “I’m not letting you shut those machines down.”

  A silence ensued before the first doctor spoke. “Mrs. Bell. You should prepare yourself for the possibility that your husband may be in a persistent vegetative state.”

  Hazel’
s reply was as good as a slap. “You gentlemen do your jobs and I’ll let the good Lord do his.”

  Just then the younger of the two doctors glanced up and spied Mercy lingering in the doorway. He scowled and, without further warning, twitched the curtain across the door. Mercy took the hint and backed out the doorway toward the nursing station. The staff was abuzz with the circumstances of the accident.

  “Maybe they’ll put up a guardrail on that stretch of road now,” the charge nurse sniffed. “It’s a death trap.”

  A much younger nurse sighed. “Jimmy in rig two told me that the bus only rolled off the road like that because of another car. Some dude in a pickup. Drunk, probably. They found the truck crashed into a tree a little ways from the scene, and I guess they went out to make an arrest. An ex-con from Titan Falls. Name of Snow, or something like that.” Mercy let out an involuntary gasp, and the charge nurse looked up and frowned.

  “The night before a holiday no less,” a third nurse injected. “It’s terrible. Little kids and everything.”

  The charge nurse was more direct. Her voice flew to Mercy’s ear like a wasp with its stinger cocked. “I hope they punish the bastard who did this. I mean it. Someone should pay for this. Someone really should.”

  Mercy needed fresh air. She made a beeline for the waiting room and the front doors. As she passed through them, she shivered. Even when she left the woods, it seemed, she was never really out of them.

  Chapter Four

  June and Nate didn’t speak in the car after the accident. It really was brutally cold, the night so absolute and dark it smothered like a hangman’s hood. June, completely shaken by the events of the evening, drove as if she were narrowly escaping some unseen danger—a lurking wolf maybe, its yellow eyes plotting, or contact with some poisonous species of spider.

  Nate gazed out the black passenger window, and June knew without asking that he, too, was picturing the still form of Suzie on the stretcher, the blob of her red mitten falling out of her pocket like the heart of a gutted fish. June put her foot down and drove a little faster even. She couldn’t erase that image from her son’s mind (or indeed her own), but she could take him somewhere safe. It was lucky, then, that they were headed to the lake cabin—the safest place June could think of. It sat ten miles west of Titan Falls—not so far that driving to it was any kind of trial, but wild enough that the press of woods around it always felt dark and dangerous to June, and never more so than tonight, when something terrible, something no one could take back or put right, really had happened.

  Cal’s great-grandfather had hewed the cabin’s logs himself and thrown up the frame using hand tools and the famous McAllister gumption, but he’d gone overboard and the place had ended up turning into more of a bunker than a true house, fortified against bears, snowdrifts, and the passage of time itself. An enormous, rough-cut porch overlooked the egg-shaped lake and the scrappy dock, while inside, the cavelike rooms offered respite from high summer’s humidity and vague clouds of biting insects. In the summer, though, when the house was opened up, the character of it completely changed. It became the kind of place where people felt comfortable walking dripping wet into the kitchen, grabbing a cold one from the fridge, and slamming the screen door on their way out. In fact, there was a line of water stains dotted across the living-room floor from generations of McAllisters doing just that.

  Like all the other McAllisters before them, Cal, Nate, and June spent their summer evenings crouched over an ancient, tattered Monopoly board. They ate beef franks and potato chips at lunch and grilled steaks for dinner, hung their faded swimsuits on specified hooks on the cabin’s back wall, and they’d been using the same clutch of gnarled fishing tackle since before Nate was born. Every year, on the first day of summer, even if it was smack-dab in the middle of the week, the three of them would bump down the dirt road, unlock the front door, and flick on the kitchen’s overhead light, holding their breath and hoping it didn’t spark. If the snow held off enough, they used the cabin one last time for Thanksgiving and then performed the whole arrival routine in reverse, layering sheets over the threadbare couch and sagging armchairs, fixing the latches on the shutters, and, finally, snapping off the murderous kitchen light.

  During the thick of winter, the cabin sat unused, hunkering under snowdrifts and ice. Unless a person chose to ski or snowshoe in, the little dirt lane that ran around the lake was impassable, and in the early spring even skis couldn’t plow through the mud, never mind whole automobile tires. Over the course of the season, bands of snowmobile drivers occasionally congregated on the house’s porch, scattering cigarette butts and beer cans, but, daunted by the cabin’s fortresslike exterior, they never tested the windows or doors. With the furniture covered and all the sporting equipment put away, the cabin was as bland and lifeless as a boulder, and that was its genius. When it was time to walk away, the McAllisters could do so with complete confidence, forgetting all about it until summer.

  As June pulled up to the house now, she saw with relief that Cal had in fact arrived and parked crooked across the drive as usual. He simply must have been en route when she’d phoned the mill and tried his cell. All her worries had been for nothing. She pictured him passing down the long mill hallway and out into the night, stretching his arms overhead and wrapping his scarf tighter around his throat, fishing in his corduroy pockets for his car keys. Familiar actions performed in the familiar and careworn geography of their life together. He had no idea how close the accident had come to stealing Nate and erasing the whole map of everything that mattered.

  She cursed as she tried to maneuver her own car close enough so she and Nate wouldn’t have to tramp too far in the dark, stumbling over branches and clods of mud. All that summer she’d been bugging Cal to do something about the cabin’s so-called drive—to pave it, or at least spread some gravel, but things at the mill had been awful lately, and Cal was never in the mood for spending what he didn’t have to. Orders had plunged, jobs were all going overseas, and recently several parts on the kraft converter, the machine at the very heart of the mill, had broken. Just yesterday Cal had come home, poured himself a double scotch, and bent over his drink with his fingers thrust in his hair, an old habit when he was thinking too hard about matters with no clear answers.

  “I should upgrade the equipment,” he’d moaned, “but with what? I’ve got payroll to worry about.”

  June had stepped behind him and squeezed his shoulders, which were still as broad and strong as the day she met him on that college weekend in Boston. Right from the start, Cal had reminded her of nothing so much as a tree. He was physically solid, yes, tall and tapering through his hips, but more than that, to June he’d seemed rooted, completely planted in the life of Titan Falls in a way she envied. Even now, after twenty years of marriage, it still felt almost like a trick that he was hers along with everything else—the churning mill, the gabled house with its neat rows of windows and decorative trim, the front pew at St. Bart’s, a new car leased every two years, a slot waiting for Nate at Dartmouth, just because he was a McAllister. She was safe, and she’d let nothing—not even that damn fling he’d had—take that away from her.

  “It will be fine,” she’d told him, massaging his shoulders, rubbing hard, down to the bone, the only way to get the kinks out of a man of Cal’s size. “You’ll see. Anyway, the river’s so much cleaner these days, and that has to be a good thing.”

  Cal had pushed her hands off his shoulders then and looked at her like she was stupid. But June’s attempts at reassurance didn’t come from ignorance. If anything, they came from knowing too much and wishing against wishing that it weren’t so. Cal blinked at her, then turned his gaze away and told her something she already knew, a damning trace of pity lacing his voice. “It’s still the same water, June. It’s a dirty old river. All the rules in the world aren’t going to change that.”

  As June stumbled out of her car now, she noticed something strange about Cal’s sedan. Like hers, it was splattered w
ith mud from the lake road, the tires caked, but—she squinted and peered closer—there were also yellow mud splatters along the shiny red paint. She paused in the dark, confused. There was only one road in a fifty-mile radius with mud that color, and Cal’s car had been clean that morning, June remembered. So when had he been on Devil’s Slide Road?

  “Mom?” Nate stumbled up behind her, and June snapped back to her senses. It was the first time he’d spoken since they left the accident, and she was tempted to reach out and hug her son, to prolong this moment between the two of them, but Nate shifted uneasily, and so she spared him and tugged her glove off, reaching for the cold lock of the cabin’s front door, already anticipating the relief she would feel once she told Cal about the accident.

  Just then she felt one of Nate’s bare hands take hers. Her son’s nearly grown fingers were surprisingly strong. The November air prickled against her cheeks, and the press of the brass doorknob was a shock of cold against her palm. I haven’t lost him yet, she reassured herself, and immediately wondered whom she meant: Cal or Nate, father or son. Before she could formulate an answer, the door groaned and budged, and she and Nate tumbled into the darkened front hall, where they were rewarded with an olfactory flood of pine shelving, musty sofa cushions, and lemon disinfectant, a complicated mix of rot and clean that suggested that no matter how hard June tried with the place, no matter how good her best intentions, something was always going to escape her. Something would always linger.

  Inside, Cal was reclined in the dark on the sagging couch with a glass of scotch, his legs crossed on top of the nicked coffee table, a small fire blazing in the hearth in front of him. He didn’t look up when the door banged open, but this didn’t surprise June. It had been like this between them of late, as if she were a ghost whose presence he’d grown bored of. As June and Nate crossed the kitchen, Cal lifted his head. He frowned and shifted his bulk. “Do you want me to go and get the boxes?”