Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  She cut him off. “Margie Wall claims she saw a wolf in these parts, but that woman’s got an imagination.” She couldn’t say why she didn’t want Aggie to know the truth about the ram, and this bothered her almost as much as the crime itself.

  Aggie was concerned. “A wolf is a worry with lambing season around the corner.”

  “I’d take a lone wolf over a pack of coyotes.” Hazel shrugged.

  “Can’t argue that.” Aggie shook his head. “This town’s falling apart. First there was the accident, then that business with those old Snow bones. Now we’ve got wolves. Next they’ll be closing the mill down one hundred percent. I hear another operation over in Maine is shutting next month. There’s only Titan Paper and one other left around here.”

  Hazel double-checked the barn door. “That’s exactly why I’m in sheep. If worst comes to worst, I can always eat them.”

  Aggie waved his hat at Ivy to signal her to start up the truck, and the girl obeyed, a delighted grin on her face. Hazel’s heart hurt just looking at her. Aggie turned back to her. “I’m serious. Take care out here, Hazel. And if you need anything when the lambing starts, call me.” He grinned. “I can lend you Ivy.”

  If I had her, I might not give her back, Hazel thought. She knew what the women in town said about her and her sugar-baby stones. Well, half the women anyway. The other half had lost children just as Hazel had. Still, it was easier to mock Hazel for her grief than try to confront the reasons for their own sadness, but in the end it all boiled down to the mill and the river, she suspected. Gert and her family had allegedly always been complaining about the noxious water, and look where it had gotten them. In the ground, was where. Snows and McAllisters, Hazel suspected, went way, way back.

  Not that Hazel, or anyone else in town, was one to go bringing any of that up in polite company. Hurt was something you buried once and for all in Titan Falls—bones and everything. Hazel discovered early on in the Duncan Home for Girls that sorrow was as common as brickwork. There was nothing special about hers. Once an orphan, always an orphan. Or so she’d always told herself, until the day she accidentally learned that she might be less of a stray than she believed. There was a reason Hazel had moved to Titan Falls, but it was one she almost never dared admit to herself, much less anyone else.

  Now, as she trudged from the barn back to the house in the early spring twilight, she heard the distant sound of an owl calling in the trees and once again felt the stab of Mercy’s betrayal. In spite of all that, she still missed the girl. Having Nate around wasn’t the same, but it was an improvement over no one. Better the devil you knew, Hazel supposed, although it didn’t answer the question of what you were supposed to do when the devils you knew included absolutely everyone.

  On June’s wedding day, Hetty McAllister had sent her down the aisle with a warning and a curse. If June wasn’t careful, Hetty had hissed, fussing with her veil and handing her the bouquet, she would be driven to distraction by life in this town. Any number of things could do it: the vapors that fouled the place to high heaven in the warmer months, the constant noise, the calamity of a fall of logs jamming the Androscoggin, and the inevitable limbs that were fatally crushed in the act of freeing them.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Hetty had asked, and June, struck mute by love and wedding nerves, had nodded furiously. At the time what she’d loved best about Cal was how he wasn’t just from Titan Falls but actually of it. Every day she looked forward to his coming home from a day at the mill with the heavy odor of pulp hanging in his hair and wood shavings stuck in his trouser cuffs. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to June, as if, when it came to Cal, wood and flesh were one substance.

  But sprouting roots, it turned out, was a far more painful business than June had anticipated. Now, as the early spring shuddered forward, the days thawing and the nights still freezing, a vague malaise draped itself over her, worse than anything she’d felt before at this time of year, swathing her in perpetual ill will. The sewing circle was finishing up the wall hanging in Suzie’s memory, embroidering the tiniest buds on the apple tree’s branches with green silk thread the color of dragonflies, basting over their previous stitches again and again to make the bark rough.

  As the project neared completion, the women gathered more frequently in June’s parlor. Normally June relished such company, but now she felt smothered by it. For one thing, the mill was operating at half staff. After the first round of layoffs, Cal had let go another group of men, including Alice’s husband, and June could feel the unspoken resentment of the wives buzzing in the room like a ball of riled hornets. It made her careful in the extreme. Cal had promised that orders would pick up again with better weather, but June didn’t say that to the women sitting around her. She simply kept her head down and stitched, hoping to set an example of patient industry the rest of them would follow.

  She was beginning to regret the memorial panels for Suzie. The work was fussy, painstaking, and required the press of too many hands too close to June’s own. She sensed, in the women’s tense shoulders and tight lips, the same impatience from the other wives. Suzie was buried. The business with the accident should have been, too, but here they all were, led by June, pricking it over and over with their needles. How stupid she’d been, June thought. Knowing what Cal had done should have made her cautious. Instead what had she done but invite rumination over the incident? She took comfort in the fact that in another month or so the road out to the lake cabin would be passable enough for her to go find the cursed mitten and destroy it once and for all. After that she would feel better. Nothing would be able to touch her family.

  In the meantime June never wanted to see another needle in her life. The thought of hosting one more sewing circle made her want to tear her hair out and trample it like a woman lit on fire. The pricks of pins sliding along a hem were tantamount to someone performing voodoo on her nerves. She would glare at the townswomen she knew so well—at Dot’s face, bland as a winter tomato, and Alice’s double chin and widow’s peak—and wonder what she’d done to herself to end up trapped in a stuffy parlor with a bunch of ladies she knew almost everything about and yet cared so little for. She thought back to her student days at Smith and wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t married. Would she be an English professor as she’d planned? Perhaps. Or maybe she would have ended up back with her addle-brained mother in Florida as she feared, turning into a younger version of her. No. Cal had saved her. If nothing else, he had made that particular scenario impossible, and for that grace alone June felt she owed him more than she could ever give.

  The women in the sewing circle were blissfully unaware of June’s glum mind-set—a fact she was grateful for until she realized why. Somehow, without her noticing, they’d fallen into a tizzy of enthusiasm for the maple sap that Mercy was providing them. Even stalwart Dot was converted. “Look, my arthritis is gone,” she chirped, fluttering her thick fingers like they were butterflies.

  “My ulcers haven’t bothered me in a week now,” Alice chimed in, and Margie added that she’d dropped five pounds without even trying. Stella said she was waiting until her child arrived before she sampled her portion of sap, but there was rampant speculation about that decision.

  “Maybe you want to take it now,” Margie gently prodded. “I mean, look at all the good things it’s done for us. Maybe it will…” She hesitated, looking for the right words without bringing up the sugar babies buried out at Hazel’s. “Make your babe strong.”

  Stella chewed her bottom lip and appeared to consider what Margie was saying. She had a point. As Stella’s due date grew closer and the Androscoggin began to quicken under its thinning patches of ice, she had been thinking more often about those stones planted on Hazel’s land. They were touchstones in the realest sense of the word. When a woman had a healthy child, people said it had “come through just fine,” and when a woman bore a babe disfigured or dead—a sugar baby—folks just pressed their lips together and eyed th
e river uneasily.

  But what if there was a way around all that? What if Mercy Snow had found an antidote to the years of poison and sorrow that swirled in the currents of the Androscoggin? Politicians and river inspectors had famously tried to clean the waters up, but she suspected that getting the river to run pure was going to require more than a bunch of government men’s signatures, or even the reluctant efforts of Cal and the other mill owners. It was going to take the tongues of women and the stories of the children they’d loved and lost. Maybe change in Titan Falls was going to take someone like Mercy Snow.

  “Ow!” June had pricked her finger. A rosette of blood unfurled on her fingertip. The ladies watched it bloom.

  “Let me get you something for that.” Dot stood up.

  “No, it’s fine.” June stuck her finger into her mouth, savoring the metallic tang. “Leave it.” She pressed on the wound and held her breath, determined to keep the balance of the world—her world—in check, a dominion of steel pinpoints and paper edges, where the splinter of a log could pierce a man’s heart, a mitten of red wool could undo the years of a careful marriage, and a drop of sap could turn blood to honey.

  Cal was furious when he found out about the fondness the townswomen had developed for Mercy’s jars of sap. “You promised months ago that you were going to see to it that the Snows left,” he hissed as he sat himself down to dinner. “The whole mill floor is buzzing with talk about this girl’s so-called cures. Now some of the men are even questioning if her brother really caused the crash. I can’t have it, June. That family has to go.”

  “I’ve been trying.” June untied her apron and took her place at the table, set with lace and her wedding china, but really, she knew, she would be heartbroken if she woke tomorrow and found Hannah disappeared. She had a constant tug-of-war going on in her soul. On the one hand, she wanted nothing more than to snatch the girl out of the filth of her life and be the mother she’d clearly never had; on the other, she couldn’t bear the idea of the pain such a move would no doubt cause Hannah. “Shall we say grace?”

  Tonight she’d made beef en croute and green beans amandine, followed by Swiss rolls, the delicate chocolate sponge cake rolled oh so carefully around brandy-infused cream. Nate came down and silently took his place, and he and Cal stared at it all glumly, their napkins laid on their laps in predetermined defeat, neither one of them looking at the other. The food was too rich and too much, June knew, but these past few days she hadn’t been able to help herself. She’d been edgy and nervous and had to direct her energy somewhere.

  She hadn’t told Cal that Mercy had given her a jar of sap or about the message on it. Instead she’d hidden it deep in the bowels of the pantry, behind expired tins of anchovies and a jar of suspect-looking chutney that Dot had gifted her at Christmas. Even tucked away in the gloom, however, the substance asserted itself, calling out to her with its treacle thickness, its amber warmth, the scrawl of the word “forget” still a faint smudge on the bottom of the glass. Once or twice June took it out of the cupboard, intending to throw it away, but each time her hands hesitated over the bin and she ended up putting the jar back on the shelf, then closing the door to the pantry with uncharacteristic firmness.

  She’d begun craving sweets: hard sugar candies in lollipop colors, squares of dark chocolate that coated her tongue in oily cocoa, the fluff of cake stuffed against the lining of her cheek. Normally so careful about her diet, June nibbled and snacked her way through her days, filling her pockets with peppermint rounds for the times when she had to stand in line at the post office or the general store. She wondered if the raw sap in the jar was working on her even though she refused to test it. Maybe, just as it cured those who consumed it, the substance also affected those who refused it. Perhaps, June speculated, Mercy was working a spell on her in reverse. Instead of having her needs met, instead of rows upon rows of the neatest stitches, she was suddenly left with gaping holes in her life.

  “ ‘Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty,’ ” Cal muttered.

  June closed her eyes and let her mind wander to the prospect of Easter lunch. They were halfway through Lent already. Should she serve ham or lamb? Maybe an entire ham would be too much. After all, it was just the three of them, and she should be mindful that many tables in town were going to be light on substance this season. In years past they’d shared the holiday with the mill foreman, Tom Plimpton, and his family, and even once or twice with her entire sewing circle. There had been years when June had had to set up a children’s table in the kitchen, when the ham almost wasn’t enough, when there’d been so many side dishes brought by the wives that they’d run out of room on the sideboard.

  This year June was hatching a secret plan. She was going to prepare an Easter basket for Hannah, trimming it with fake grass, marshmallow chicks, and candy eggs wrapped in pastel foil. Nate was far too old for such fancies, a fact that pained June. She longed to hear the shrieking of him and Suzie as they tore through the backyard with their baskets slung over their skinny arms, poking in the bushes for hidden treasures. Life flowed along as fast as any river, it turned out, and though June had no idea where it was taking her, she was nonetheless determined not to sink in it, not to be swallowed whole by the currents of time. Hannah could help her turn back the clock and start over again, and June would do better this time around.

  Cal sawed at his beef. “The Loomer account is four months past due, but what am I supposed to do? Go over there myself and shake the change out of their empty pockets? They’re in the same boat as us. Broke as thieves. And the Blakes have started buying from an outfit overseas with fewer restrictions.” He sopped up his sauce with his bread. “How am I supposed to compete?”

  June bit her lip. Since the holidays Cal had been pulling longer hours than ever before, trying to cope with the precipitous slide of the mill. New lines stood out around his eyes, and his face looked thinner. But even though he was working late, June was confident he was right where he said he was—hunched over his desk in his office and not in the arms of that waitress in Berlin.

  She knew it had been wrong to seek her out, especially with Hannah of all people in tow, but she’d wanted to assure herself that the woman was really no one special, that she was someone whom Cal really could snip out of his life as easily as a stray thread hanging off a shirt cuff. Face-to-face with her, June had been totally satisfied. The downcast expression the waitress had borne was proof enough of recent heartbreak, and June had detected something more in the woman’s gaze as well—a flash of recognition. Maybe she’d seen June’s photograph in Cal’s wallet or recognized her from an article in the local paper about June’s charity work, but it didn’t bother June, this tacit acknowledgment. If anything it made the groundwork clearer.

  June was trying. She really was, but everything still felt wrong between her and Cal. Part of it, she knew, was his confession about his responsibility for the accident. He’d almost killed their son, not to mention many of the other town’s children, and he had killed Suzie, and June could only watch as the guilt ate him alive from the inside out. At night he tossed and turned, muttering and sweating, and he’d taken to driving at a stately speed, rounding corners with his knuckles gripping the steering wheel. Last week he’d changed the sedan’s tires, and June had to confess she’d been glad. If she could have gotten rid of the whole car, she would have.

  If it weren’t for the accident, she wondered, where would they be in their marriage? Nate would be leaving for Dartmouth in the fall, and June was having trouble imagining just her and Cal sitting across the table from each other. Although it galled her to admit it, maybe waitresses in Berlin weren’t the problem. Maybe the two of them were. She regretted having only one child, not that it had been her fault. It’s just bad luck, Cal had always insisted each time she lost a baby. The very worst, she’d agree, tearfully nodding, but inside she always secretly wondered if she weren’t being punished for escaping the childhood
she’d so hated, for trying to trick fate into somehow granting her a better deal.

  June spooned a portion of beans onto her dish and reached for the gravy boat, but when she tipped it, she got an uneven drizzle of glaze across her plate and a spot of sauce on her blouse cuff. She swore under her breath and dabbed at the stain with the corner of her napkin, but then she looked closer and saw that the dish was chipped, right on its spout. For a moment she fought a wave of rage. She could order a new one, but that wasn’t the point. Some things couldn’t be replaced. Some things shouldn’t be.

  Cal had filled his wineglass a little too full. The bottle sat close to his left elbow. Nate was slouching in his chair, his head bent over his meal, but this had been his manner ever since the accident. He slinked through his days with the silent concentration of a feral cat, avoiding his mother’s eyes and most especially her conversation.

  June turned to him now. “How’s Hazel? Are you getting on all right with her sheep?”

  Nate provided a noncommittal shrug.

  “How’s poor Fergus? Is he getting any better? Any memory yet of…” June trailed off awkwardly. “Well. Is he improving?”

  Another shrug.

  Cal poured himself more wine. “Abel said he found what looks like a camp spot in the woods out near her place. Rumor has it one of her rams went missing. You know about that?”

  This time Nate didn’t even twitch.

  Cal’s face grew dangerously red. He turned back to June. “You know where I’m going with this, June. Those lowlifes are causing all kinds of trouble. Do I need to handle this?”

  Oh, I think you’ve done enough, June thought sourly. She twisted her napkin in her lap. “What if Abel cites them for illegal peddling? Surely that sap that Mercy is handing out must violate just about every health code on the books.”