Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  Nate thought about that. March was when the layers of ice on the river finally began to crack just a little. At the mill the men started the month off in hats and thick gloves and ended up in shirtsleeves, still chilly but no longer frozen to the bone. The dull clouds eased up a bit then, not much but enough so that folks started to remember what the color blue looked like and then crave it even harder.

  Hazel laid her fingers on Nate’s arm. “You ought to see it.”

  “What?”

  “The lambing. Usually it all starts in the middle of the night. I stay out here to clip and clean the cords, and help the twisted lambs come out straight, and make sure the ewes are making milk. It’s like Christmas.”

  Two months ago Nate would have believed in that perfect story, but ever since the crash he’d been wary of happy endings. Accidents happened. Shit went down. So did buses. He folded his arms. “What if something goes wrong?”

  Hazel’s face grew dark for a moment, and Nate realized how much the crash still must reverberate in her, too. Here she was, dug in this valley with her sheep and Fergus, who he’d seen propped at the bedroom window like he was a bored angel stuck on earth.

  She shrugged. “Things go cockamamie sometimes. They do. I’ve lost girls.” She frowned. “And I’ve lost rams, although that’s a different matter entirely. In fact, there’s something I need to go sort out now.” She picked up a roll of baling wire. “Are you handy?”

  Nate took the wire and stared dumbly down at it. Then he looked at Hazel shamefacedly. Two days ago he wouldn’t have told her the truth. Two months ago he wouldn’t have dared to speak to her in the first place, but his life had been turned upside down in that bus just as Suzie’s had ended in it. He felt like he was still tumbling, uncertain about when or where he would land. “No.”

  To Nate’s surprise a tiny smile cracked Hazel’s lips. “At least you’re honest. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go in and sit a spell with Fergus while I go see about a missing ram?”

  Nate picked up the toolbox. He was aware that Hazel was giving him a test of sorts, and he was determined to pass it. “I’ll check on Fergus, ma’am, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll have a whack at that fence.” Out in the field, it occurred to him, there would be nothing to bother him but the raw scrape of wind against his cheeks, the rustling of birds and mice in the frozen undergrowth, and his own two hands, square like his father’s and pale as his mother’s, but trying for once to figure things out on their own.

  The scent of fresh blood greeted Hazel as soon as she stepped into the clearing where the smokehouse stood on the Snow land, and she knew immediately that her hunch about the missing ram had been correct. Growing up in the Duncan Home for Girls, she’d been made to work half her childhood in the kitchens, transforming whatever kinds of carcasses were thrown their way into food. Sometimes that meant plucking a batch of chickens or carving a side of beef. All these years later, she could still identify the metallic odor of an animal bled and butchered, and that scent was here right now under her nose.

  She walked around the smokehouse and then peered inside, but it was empty and dark. She paced around the RV, but the curtains were drawn and there were no signs of life, and then she heard a rhythmic thwack, thwack coming from the edge of the ravine.

  She was too late. She saw that at once. The ram was tied by his feet and hoisted over a stout pine branch, his thick bluish tongue hanging out of his mouth, his eyes bulging and blind. Mercy was skinning him, but her knife was too dull, and she was having to hack and tug at the skin to get it to slide off.

  “A greedy father has thieves for children.”

  Mercy jumped at the sound of Hazel’s voice and spun to face her, the knife still in her hand. In spite of the cold, she’d been sweating. Her hair was damp along her forehead. Hazel was startled to see how thin she’d grown. “Hazel, I didn’t hear you.”

  Hazel folded her arms and pitied the poor beast. He had been a magnificent specimen. Now he was just a raw sack of innards waiting to spill. “You’ve bloodied the fleece. Anyone with a brain would have shorn the animal first.”

  Even Mercy’s lips were pale, and there was a sore erupting at the corner of her mouth. She looked like she hadn’t washed in weeks. “Hazel… I know this looks bad.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a thief.”

  Mercy ducked her chin. “I’m not.” But my brother is. The unspoken words might as well have been shouted. Mercy inched forward a step, the knife no longer a potential weapon, no longer even a tool, just an afterthought dangling from her fingers. “Hazel, let me explain. Zeke found him already dead. Honestly. He would never take from someone who’d once been kind to me.”

  Was it Hazel’s imagination, or did Mercy stress the word “once”?

  “Look, I can prove it.” She turned the carcass sideways, revealing the half-stripped flank. “See where the fleece is all ragged and torn? Do you really think Zeke would slaughter an animal so carelessly? Hazel, I warned you something was lurking around your barn. Didn’t I?”

  Hazel bit her lip. She didn’t know what to believe. With a lurch she remembered the open latch on the barn door this morning. Maybe a predator really had gotten in, or maybe the ram had slipped out, but how unlikely that was. There had been no signs of a struggle in the barn, and sheep were herd animals. They moved either as one or not at all.

  On the other hand, she couldn’t imagine that the Snows would be dumb enough to pull more trouble down on their heads. This was it, she decided, the final inch she was going to give any of them.

  She took a fortifying breath and pulled her spine as straight as she could get it. “June McAllister was right. The only thing you Snows ever make is trouble.” She sighed at the mess in front of her. There was so little of the creature left to salvage, whatever had really happened to him. “I want the fleece, such as it is.” That, at least, belonged to her. The ram’s wool would go back to his flock.

  Mercy bowed her head. “I’ll bring it to you. I promise.”

  “If I see so much as your little toe on my land, I’ll have it for my own, followed by your head. You can give the wool to Nate McAllister. He’ll get it to me.” Hazel drew herself together and prepared to hike back to her car. There was nothing left to do.

  Mercy’s voice floated up the hillside after her. “Hazel, I’m sorry for it all.”

  The girl’s apology floated and then dropped, heavy and final. Hazel didn’t even turn around.

  Inside the RV, Mercy cracked the last of their eggs in half and dropped the yolk into a clean jar. Zeke hadn’t killed the ram—she was positive. But still, did that make giving it to her and Hannah any less of a crime? Without the animal she and Hannah risked starvation. With it they most certainly wouldn’t hunger, but was it worth it, Mercy wondered, to trade the last shred of Hazel’s goodwill for something as fleeting as full bellies? Once again Zeke had acted according to his own impeccable moral code—he’d found a dead ram that would have been wasted, and Mercy and Hannah were in desperate need—but in doing so he’d missed the bigger picture. In trying to care for his sisters, he’d threatened to undo any inch of progress Mercy might have made with people’s bad opinions in town. She bit her lip in frustration. She would have to ramp up her efforts.

  To the mix in the jar, she added a flurry of powdered and dried mushrooms that she’d foraged with her mother on the border of Canada last spring, a pinch of chili flakes, and a measure of vinegar, and then she stirred everything with the blade of a knife. She cleared her throat and turned to Hannah. She loved everything about her little sister, but it was exhausting being her sole guardian. Still, if she didn’t take the time to explain the nuances of things to her, Hannah might end up just like Zeke—well-meaning but always somehow in the wrong, no matter what. “Even if he didn’t kill it, you know that Zeke still shouldn’t have taken that ram, right?”

  Hannah yawned and flipped a page in her book. Her stomach was rumbling. She wasn’t sorry about Zeke’s ta
king the meat. She couldn’t wait to feast. “There’s only so many birds in the woods this time of year. Besides, I bet she loses a few animals every season. Or she sells them.”

  Mercy slammed the jar back on the counter. “That’s not the point. How are people going to care about Zeke if they think we’re a bunch of thieves?”

  “Zeke’s looking after us. You should be grateful.”

  “I’d rather have some answers.”

  Hannah pursed her lips and quoted Arlene. “Better to let all the dogs lie.” She nodded at the jar. “You going into town to drop that off?”

  Fred Flyte had been drinking Mercy’s remedy steadily, and even though Mercy never asked him to, he always pressed some kind of payment into her hands when she brought him the stuff: a basket of dried apples, a loaf of bread, a pair of striped socks hand-knitted by Dena. “I know it’s nothing much,” he’d say, “but how do you repay a true miracle?”

  Mercy would blush ferociously as she accepted the gifts, uneasy with Fred’s accolades. Healing was turning out to be a simple business, really. It was all just a matter of bringing opposites together. To tame a fever, for instance, Mercy cooled it with a paste of rue and mallow. To thin out thick blood, she watered it with cucumber and spirits. Even waking Fergus from his cave of darkness after the accident had been uncomplicated in the end. All it had taken was breath and willpower—his or hers, Mercy still didn’t know for sure. But she had held his head in her hands and sent him a message: Do not go. That was it. And it had worked, sort of. Fergus had come back, but not the same. Mercy frowned. Thanks to Zeke’s gift of the ram, Hazel might well be a stranger now, too.

  Mercy looked at the fleece lying on the RV’s banquette. She’d trimmed what she could off the animal’s skin and had tried to sponge the wool clean, but it was still smeared and dirty. She knew she had to give it back—a promise was a promise—but she longed to hold on to it for a few more days, the last bit she would ever have of Hazel. Lost in thought, she rolled the fleece and tucked it under her mother’s old quilt.

  What if she could give Fergus back his memory? she mused. Would Hazel forgive her then? But if healing was simply a matter of mending, bringing back a man’s memory surely carried further complications, for that involved a wholesale type of retribution—something Mercy wasn’t quite sure how to go about in Titan Falls, skinny little lick of a town that it was, full of narrow eyes and narrower minds. She sighed and slid the jar into the palm of her hand. If she was going to put Fergus back right, she was starting to suspect, she was going to have to make some kind of exchange: one soul for another, sister for brother, the damned for the innocent. If only it were so easy to tell which was which anymore.

  By Nate’s third Saturday at the Bells’, the fence didn’t really need any further repairs. The ones he’d managed to complete weren’t that fail-safe, but Nate didn’t tell Hazel that. He suspected she knew it already, and he appreciated her reserve on the matter. The more he got acquainted with her, the more he liked her. He knew she’d lost her own son sometime back, and he was guessing she must have been a tolerant kind of mother, quite unlike his own, who bustled around him constantly, as annoying as an extra thumb, readjusting his scarf before he left the house, overpacking his school lunches with food he didn’t want to eat, and asking him all sorts of questions he didn’t feel like answering: Why had he quit the hockey team? What did he want to do after church on Sunday? Who was he going to ask to the winter formal?

  When Hazel spoke, it was simply to impart information and nothing more. Most of her conversation wasn’t even of the human variety. All her syllables were for or about the sheep. By Nate’s third weekend, he’d gotten used to it. One thing he never asked about, however, was the overgrown sugar bush down at the end of the valley, where a profusion of stones stood. The first time Nate stumbled upon it, he almost tripped over one of the boulders, which was half sunk in the snow and rounded. Then, righting himself, he spied all the other rocks set under the trees, and the hair on his arms stood up. He’d backed slowly away, stepping in the footprints he’d made. He couldn’t say why he suddenly had such a strong desire to leave the smallest trace possible behind him, but it was so. Even when he and the other high-school kids broke into the abandoned worker cottages down near the river in the spring and summer, he’d never felt such a sense of trespass, but maybe it was because those buildings were, in a roundabout way, his. This place, however, was clearly private. Everything from the low-hanging boughs to the stippled shade in the center of the glen forbade entry. In spite of that—or maybe precisely because of it—the very next week, as soon as Hazel set him free with a set of tools and more wire, Nate found his way back.

  When she wanted to, when she really concentrated, Mercy could thread a path through the woods with the easy cunning of a fox. Zeke had taught her this—the way to rock between footsteps, transferring her weight from one heel to the other, rather than pounding her feet into the ground. How to curve her body up against the trunk of a tree, melting into its shadow and musty bark, when to freeze and when to run like a mad dog. The only time these skills had failed her had been in the woods with those two hunters. That was the one thing Zeke had forgotten to impart to her—that there was always someone out there stealthier than you, that hunter could turn prey in the thud of a heartbeat. She thought of Zeke lying hunched in a cold cave or walking in aimless circles around fallen trees. A caged hunter, Zeke had always said, was worse than a downed one.

  Mercy folded the ram’s fleece she was carrying tighter to her chest and swung her gathering basket over her arm. Out here in Hazel’s sugar bush, there was no need to take precautions. It was a deliberately abandoned space, and though Mercy didn’t understand who all the stones belonged to, she intuited enough to comprehend that they were to be left undisturbed. In her travels with Arlene, she’d often run across strange totems in the woods: mysterious runes incised into tree trunks, weathered twig crosses half rotted and leaning toward the grave themselves, and, once, a log carved into a fantastical creature, half woman, half bird. These places, her mother had taught her, were often the best for gathering plants. “They breed the unexpected,” she’d instructed Mercy. And as proof, under the chimera, she’d found a smattering of tiny orange-capped mushrooms that she wouldn’t let Mercy touch but cut with gloved hands at their stems and carefully bagged.

  Mercy scanned the low growth in front of her. Occasionally she leaned down and plucked a twig or snapped some rushes into her basket. She was so focused on the particular as she wandered from tree to tree that she was startled to come across Nate McAllister bent over a fence post at the far edge of the space, a ball-peen hammer tossed at his feet. Mercy stifled a cry, and then her panic quickly turned to amusement. She surveyed the mess he’d made—the hole dug too shallow in the snowy mud, the fence post cracked along its bottom, a tangle of wire snared up with a pair of pliers and a hacksaw. Only a fool would try to fence a sugar bush, especially this one. Mercy sidled up on him, pleased with the opportunity to speak freely. “Do you even have a backside idea of what you’re doing?”

  Nate turned around. He seemed equally startled. “Jesus.” He scowled at her. “I thought maybe Hazel would like it if this place was… set apart, I guess. She never talks about it, but it seems like maybe it should be enclosed or something. What are you doing out here? Hazel will have your head if she finds you.” His eyes fell on the basket Mercy was carrying, filled with all manner of twigs and rushes and roots she’d dug up out of the snow, and then on the fleece still clutched to her chest. “Seriously, what the hell are you doing?”

  Mercy decided to take a chance and tell him the truth—or part of it anyway. Ever since she’d run into him outside his house, she had larger plans for the two of them, but she decided to keep those to herself for now. She handed the fleece to Nate, who seemed reluctant to accept it. “Making amends. Give that to Hazel. She’s expecting it.” She lifted her basket a little. “And making memories. Or at least trying to.”

&nb
sp; Nate scowled. “I don’t understand.” Even though it was frosty, he’d worked up a sweat. He wiped his brow. He was just as handsome as she remembered, Mercy was pleased to note.

  She bit her lip. Except for Hannah and Hazel, it had been weeks since she’d spoken properly to anyone, much less a strange boy. Her voice came out sounding as scratchy as a bargain-bin sweater. “They’re not for me. They’re for Fergus.”

  Nate regarded her, still suspicious. To hear his parents talk, Mercy was a she-devil who was responsible for everything from the exhumation of Gert Snow to the crappy downturn in the paper business. Nate thought his parents were full of shit. “Does Hazel know?”

  “Not yet.”

  Mercy watched him weigh this information. Everything depended on how he reacted to her right now. He picked up the hammer and swung it from one hand to the other. Finally he laid it back down. “You’re the one who’s making that stuff Mr. Flyte drinks to keep him off the sauce. I heard my parents talking about it. They say it’s illegal peddling and that if you’re not careful, you’re going to poison him, not that they would care. My mom’s put Abel Goode on the case.”

  Mercy paled. If Abel stopped Fred from giving her his small trade, she wasn’t sure she and Hannah would finish pulling through the winter, even with the ram meat, a situation that would no doubt suit June McAllister just fine.

  Nate screwed up his face. “What do you put in that stuff anyway?”

  Mercy shrugged and shifted the basket. “To dry a man out, sometimes you just need to keep his insides watered proper, that’s all.”

  Nate’s gaze slid into the distance. “I wish you’d been around to see Mr. Flyte before the accident.”

  Mercy bowed her own head, remembering what Nate had said to her the day of the funeral when she’d asked if Suzie had been his girlfriend. She was too smart for that. At the time she’d thought he’d meant Suzie wouldn’t have him, but now that Mercy had tangled a bit with June McAllister, she wondered if maybe Nate wasn’t correct after all. It wasn’t that Suzie hadn’t loved Nate back. She’d just known her place, and it hadn’t been at the right hand of the mill owner’s son. Neither was Mercy’s, but she didn’t plan to let that stop her.