Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  Some backwoods girls had a way with water. Give them a forked stick and a beat of time and they’d strike you a spring. Some had a feel for granite seams or knowing where game was hiding, but Hannah had always had an ear for bones. Deer carcasses whispered tales to her of tall grass and buzzing flies, dog bones growled tired and low, and bird skeletons twittered. But human frames were the trickiest. They swirled with echoes of laments or vibrated with unfinished business. They never brought good tidings. It wasn’t until she encountered Gert Snow’s remains, however, that Hannah learned just how tricky the dead could be.

  Hannah sensed the bones within her first five minutes on the Snow place, and as soon as she was able, she’d gone exploring, walking half a mile up the road to find them. Help me, they pleaded from their resting place, a bump of earth jutting out just at the beginning of the descent into the ravine, guarded by the delicate trunk of a bent white birch. Hannah approached it, drawn to the peculiarity of a bowed tree growing in a forest of razor-straight sticks. It was an empty, unfinished shape, she thought—half a heart, the curve of a broken cup. Curious, Hannah reached out to touch the milky bark but stopped, the hairs on her arms prickling, goose bumps shivering up and down her skin. She listened with her whole body.

  The bones were loud. They fizzed with leftover fury, as electric under the earth as live wires, humming with information. They were of a woman who had died with her heart cracked in two, Hannah deduced. Please, the bones begged, but before Hannah could bend down to them, to put her mouth to the earth and answer back, Mercy sneaked up behind her. “I thought I warned you not to go wandering,” she barked. “I had to track you all the way out here like a dog. Now, come on back to the rig. You need to get cleaned.”

  “There’s something down there,” Hannah had said, pointing at the birch.

  Mercy didn’t show a whisker of interest. She glanced around at the trees, then flicked her gaze down the ravine, swatting at a late-season fly. “There’s lots of things around here. And I’ll bet half of them are hiding in your hair. Now, come on back and let me comb you.”

  Reluctantly, Hannah had allowed herself to be trotted back to the RV, casting a worried stare over her shoulder. She’d stood by plenty of times while her sister and brother had gutted game, and she’d skinned and flayed enough rabbit and squirrel herself to know that you didn’t turn one of God’s creatures inside out—beastly or otherwise—and not expect some corresponding shift in the universe. Sometimes retribution arrived large in the form of a storm or a terrible illness, and sometimes it crept in small. A broken dish. A jammed gun. A blown tire. But that was the price of life. A body needed to eat. Arlene had taught them that first and foremost. Hunger called to be filled, she’d told them, just never for free.

  As soon as she heard about the crash, Hannah became certain that the skeleton was lurking behind the whole business of it, for it seemed clear to her that anyone with bones that loud wouldn’t be the kind of soul to let the great beyond interfere with plans for a long-awaited reckoning.

  The morning after the accident, Abel and his men returned to investigate the wreck and its environs in daylight. Hannah, crouching upwind in a prickly holly thicket, held her breath as Abel’s shepherd dog made straight for the birch where they had found the bones. Even from where she was hiding, Hannah could make out a clean length of white angled in the rocky loam. Abel sighed and spoke to his deputy, who was fiddling with the radio hooked to his belt. “Looks like we’re going to need some more digging equipment. I’m betting anything we just found Gert Snow. Who else would be buried out here?”

  “Gert Snow? Really? Then, I figure a plain old shovel will do.”

  Gert Snow. Hannah mouthed the syllables silently. Finally a name to go with the seething spirit. Someone from her own family, from way back. She whispered the letters again, this time her voice coming out as a tiny rasp, almost imperceptible, a moth wing scraping a leaf. Before the two lawmen could spot her, she took off into the woods.

  That night the ravine’s wind blew sideways through the trees, redistributing the snow in unusual shapes. Hannah woke to the ghostly forms of snow rabbits, horses caught in mid-gallop, even a man. The forms quivered in the breeze, assuming their contours for only a moment before shifting once again into something else entirely, gone but for Hannah’s witness.

  She tiptoed down the RV loft’s ladder and silently eased herself into her boots and parka. Mercy had come home late again and was still wrapped like a pig in a blanket in Arlene’s old quilt, just the dark ends of her hair fraying out the top. Holding her breath, Hannah squeaked the RV door open and shut it fast behind her, slipping down the metal steps and high-stepping through the snowdrifts to the smokehouse.

  Mercy had warned her time and again to stay out of that place, but Hannah loved the little hut with its crooked roof and slanty walls and its ancient odors of rendered fat and burned spruce logs. Over the door there was a rusty horseshoe nailed up for luck. Mercy had gone inside to investigate when they’d arrived, but there hadn’t been much of Pruitt left to clean up after. Whoever had found his body had also apparently made off with most of his worldly goods, not that he’d owned much. Besides the trio of rusted iron hooks that were bolted to the rafters, there was a sagging army cot and a rough shelf of minor treasures Hannah liked to tinker with: a dented copper kettle, a length of wire knotted into a figure eight, a smattering of greenish pennies, and a funny kind of button she’d found in a tin can rolled under the cot. She took it out and inspected it now. It was two buttons, really, joined together by a little silver chain, and on the face of each one there was a letter M. She ran her finger over the points and wondered why on earth Pruitt would have had something so polished and sleek in his possession, especially since his name started with P.

  But today something was different in the smokehouse. Hannah noticed immediately. She tiptoed closer to the shelf, blinking, and there it was: a twist of yellow yarn. Hannah lifted it, and a row of thin wooden stars dangled and danced, some of them stained dark, some clearly whittled from the green wood cradled at the heart of a young tree. She smiled and tied the bauble around her neck, pleased with the way the stars fanned across her, decorating her. There was only one person she knew who would have left her something like this, and if he had, it surely meant that Zeke was fine and well.

  Mercy, however, was not as delighted with the trinket. She spied it as soon as Hannah entered the camper and stripped off her parka. “What is that?” She pulled at the neck of Hannah’s sweater.

  Hannah jerked away from her sister’s sharp fingers. Now she was glad she hadn’t tied the funny button onto the yarn, too, as she’d been tempted to do. Instead she’d left it back in the smokehouse, nestled in the can. “I found it outside.” That wasn’t a total lie. “I think the ghost left it for me. I see her sometimes, in the snow.”

  Mercy whipped around to face the counter. “There’s no ghost, and you know it.”

  Hannah tossed her braid.

  Mercy took a breath and knelt down in front of her sister. “It’s very important you tell me the truth. Have you been out in the smokehouse?”

  Hannah bit her lip, then nodded.

  “And that’s where you got this?” Another nod. Mercy sucked her teeth and sat back on her haunches.

  Hannah fingered one of the stars on the necklace as Mercy approached her with a pair of rusty scissors. She took a step away, but Mercy was too fast. She caught her little sister by the collar and, before Hannah could say boo, snipped the yarn from around her neck, pocketing the trinket, stars and all. Now Hannah was very glad she’d left the funny silver button in the smokehouse.

  Mercy waved the scissors to make her point. “Gert Snow didn’t leave this. You and I both know that. Zeke did.” Mercy patted her pocket. “And while we’re on that subject, you need to keep your nose out of that whole Gert situation. Hazel told me that the reason people hated our father had something to do with Gert. Probably Pruitt knew something about her death, and if he did,
I’m guessing it wasn’t anything good. So drop it.”

  Hannah folded her arms across her chest and stuck out her chin. “What’s going to happen to Zeke?”

  Mercy laid the scissors on the counter and considered. “There are lots of folks out looking for him, so I need to make sure I find him first.” She fixed Hannah with a flat stare. “If anyone asks, you ain’t seen him, you ain’t heard from him, you don’t even know him. He’s as good as dead. Got it?”

  Hannah pouted. “How’s it going with Fergus Bell? Do you think you can get him to wake up?” Even in a snit, Hannah could be persistent as a deerfly. “Do you think he remembers anything? And what if he doesn’t come back to his senses?”

  Hannah always was able to articulate a conundrum as clear as morning—a simultaneous gift and plague. Across the RV, Mercy spied the book of Greek myths Hannah had stolen from one of her libraries and went to pick it up. “Don’t worry, little pickle. Why don’t you come here and read me something out of this?” She opened to a page with a picture of a winged goddess on it. “Athena,” the caption said. “Goddess of wisdom. Goddess of war.” Mercy ran her fingers over the drawing, wishing it could speak. Maybe it would have some answers for her.

  Even before prison Zeke had far preferred the company of trees to that of men. Only in a forest could he breathe deep, all the way down to the bottoms of his lungs. Only among the trees did he feel a true ease and connection with the world, what he supposed other men found in church or in the arms of women they said they adored.

  Zeke had only ever loved Arlene and his two sisters. Not in that way, of course—though they’d once come across a family where that had appeared to be the case—but in the manner it counted, where he would die for them without a second thought, or go to prison for that matter. Zeke had never been around so many men as he had during his time in jail, and he’d hated every minute of it. He’d slept crammed into his bunk, his bulky cellmate tossing and turning on the mattress above him, mashing the springs. He ate elbow to elbow with men who stank like old meat and sometimes like blood, showered hip to hip in a line with them, worked silently in the steam of the laundry with them, loading and unloading the big round machines, his ears filled with the insufferable roar of the dryers.

  It took him weeks after his release to get rid of that sound, a constant grumble in his inner ear that made it impossible for him to hunt or even navigate brush in the same unthinking way he used to, with all his senses, like one of the animals he was tracking. It was ironic, he thought, that in prison he’d finally become fully human and found that it was a disaster. Everything he did felt too deliberate and decided. With every branch he broke underfoot, with every bush he accidentally set aquiver, Zeke was made painfully aware that he was never again going to be the boy he once was. And this, he realized, was the real genius of incarceration—not the time you did behind bars, which eventually ended, but the extension of the sentence afterward into everything you did.

  Maybe it was for this reason he found himself drifting into Lucky’s Tavern after he and his sisters had arrived in Titan Falls and learned that Pruitt had passed away. Instead of finding the long-missed connection to his father that he could almost not even admit to craving, Zeke had gone and done the next-best thing: sought trouble. Lucky’s, it turned out, wasn’t too different from prison. The men there, especially the ones who had congregated that particular evening with their shoulders hunched over doubles of gin or rye, wearing boots worn to the shank, could also talk with their stares, and it was a language Zeke now spoke fluently.

  But he’d been sober as a judge the night of the accident, and that was what made everything so frustrating. After getting the shit beat out of him at Lucky’s, Zeke had walked the straight and narrow just like he’d promised Mercy he would, and even though his mouth watered more often than not for the quick burn of a shot, he ignored it. Mercy mixed some weird concoction for him when the craving got really bad—something that tasted like juniper and cinnamon—and it gave him the strength to stay dry for a few more hours.

  He’d spent the entire day wandering around Berlin and its outskirts. He almost landed a job in a body shop, but when he admitted to the owner that he was an ex-con, the man’s face turned to granite. “I’ve been held up three times,” he said, shooing Zeke out the door. “You don’t want the kind of handout I’ll give you, son. Don’t show your face here again.”

  By evening his legs and feet hurt so bad he thought his bones might have finally given up and decided to crack, collapsing him from the inside out like an empty building packed for demolition. The truck, when he found it again, was parked in front of a bar. He hadn’t noticed in the morning, when the establishment had still been closed, but now, in the thickening dark of a town he didn’t know, the cheery red script of the neon sign and the sounds of music coming from inside were almost too much to resist. He closed his eyes and let himself imagine the surgical whiff a shot of tequila would provide or the fizz of a cold beer sliding down his throat, the bubbles energizing him, going straight to his head. He stuck a fist in his dungaree pocket to feel for any change or the chance of a dollar or two, but there was nothing. He sighed and opened his eyes.

  In the space of a few moments, evening had ceded to night. The temperature had dropped, and snow flurries danced and swirled in the air. Mesmerized, Zeke threw his head back and jigged along with them, illuminated by the glow of the tavern’s neon sign. Across the street the entrance to the town’s movie theater blazed. A pretty blond teenager in red mittens came out, fished in her coat pocket, then slipped into the alley next to the theater and lit a cigarette. Zeke cocked his head. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her.

  If he hadn’t been watching the girl, he might never have seen the couple coming around the corner. The man was tall. His hair was too slick and cheeks too well shaved to belong to anyone but a man of means. Zeke squinted through the snow, not fully trusting his eyes, but it really was Cal McAllister, the owner of the Titan Paper Mill. Even if you clung onto the very edge of Titan Falls like Zeke and his sisters, you couldn’t live there and not know the man. In fact, Zeke knew him very well. Last month Zeke had approached the foreman at the mill to ask about work, but the encounter hadn’t gone well, for he turned out to be one of the souls who’d beaten him purple at Lucky’s. Cal himself had ended up coming onto the floor and throwing Zeke out of the mill with the stern warning that if he saw that boy’s sorry ass hanging around again, he’d set dogs on him. Not wanting trouble now, Zeke stumbled into the street shadows, automatically reverting to the hunch-shouldered stance he used in the woods. When he wanted to, he could be damn near invisible. And given what was unfolding in front of him, Zeke suddenly thought going low-visibility might be a very good idea.

  The woman with Cal was peroxided and big-breasted and very, very pretty in lots of red lipstick and bright earrings, but by no stretch of the imagination was she his wife. As they came around the corner, she laughed and said something in an accent that Zeke didn’t catch, then giggled again as Cal reached under her coat and squeezed her buttocks while he drew her into the alley where they wouldn’t be seen. The fun didn’t last long, though, as Cal saw that the alley was occupied, and then by whom.

  Zeke watched as Cal left his companion in the dark and grimly marched the blond girl back to the front of the movie theater by the elbow. “What do you want?” he was saying, and the girl wrenched her arm free and practically snarled at him. Zeke tipped his head, unwilling to move too much and give away his location, but he thought he could make out the words “my father.” He swayed and put a hand out onto the sooty bricks next to him for balance. The world tipped and lurched in a hundred snowflakes, and Zeke’s stomach danced with them. He hadn’t eaten since the morning, and his head felt like a balloon, much lighter than the rest of him.

  When he looked up again, Cal was standing alone in front of the theater. At his feet one of the girl’s blood red mittens nestled in the snow, dropped and forgotten. Zeke watched a
s Cal bent over and considered it, then slipped it into the pocket of his camel-hair overcoat. He glanced about him, then stepped around the corner to fetch the woman he’d left waiting in the alley.

  “Not tonight, Bryga,” Zeke heard. “I have to get back. I told you it was a stupid idea to meet here like this. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, for Christ’s sake.” With a final pat on the woman’s ample rear, he left her shivering alone, her earrings quivering and flashing in the shadows.

  Zeke had seen enough, he decided. Besides, he was freezing his ass off. And tomorrow was Thanksgiving. He owed it to Mercy and Hannah to try one last time for work before he headed home empty-handed—again. Taking a fortifying breath, he pulled open the door to the bar and stumbled into the comforting stink.

  “What’ll it be?” The barkeep—a human Goliath—swiped at a puddle on the bar with a filthy rag and eyed Zeke. He didn’t look eager to pour him anything, but that was fine since Zeke wasn’t asking.

  He took a deep breath and tried to make his voice low. In lockup he’d learned that to talk to a group of hard men in anything less than a growl was a basic invitation for a fist headed straight at him. “You need any help in here? I could sure use a gig right about now.” One of the men down at the opposite end of the bar was biting into a Polish sausage covered with mustard and sauerkraut, and Zeke felt his stomach lurch like a dog straining on a rope. He was so hungry he almost wanted to cry, and the sensation was even worse when he thought about what Hannah must be feeling. But Mercy had that job with the sheep now. That was something.

  The barkeep put one of his pawlike hands on the counter. “Sorry, but no.” He hesitated. “You okay, son?”

  “Sure.” Zeke shrugged and bobbed his way to the door, though nothing could have been further from the truth. At least he hadn’t gotten into a fight, he thought. There was that. At least he hadn’t reached across the bar, swiped a bottle, and just gone to town with it, pouring the booze into himself like feed down the gullet of a goose. What he wanted to do with himself and what he could do were not very often one and the same. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.