Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  “It’s not peddling if it’s a gift.” Nate was suddenly sitting up straight in his chair, his eyes alert. “She’s not selling the maple sap. She’s just giving it away. Don’t you see? She’s trying to do something good.”

  Cal ignored him. “I still say the key is Zeke. Flush him out and his sisters will follow.”

  “Jesus, Dad.” Nate was on his feet, his food untouched on his dish. “They’re not rodents.”

  Cal’s eyes flashed. “Are you sure about that? Son, for the better part of a century, our family has been entrusted with keeping the balance of this town. There wouldn’t even be a Titan Falls if it weren’t for the foresight of the McAllisters setting down roots here and building from the ground up. One day the mill and all its responsibilities are going to fall to you, and I’d like to hear you say then what you think about a bunch of freeloading no-goods feeding off your honest day’s work.” The last bit of his message was shouted up the stairs after Nate’s rapidly disappearing back. “And you.” He turned to June. “I don’t think you’ve been trying too hard at all to get rid of the Snows. I heard you spent an afternoon parading that little one around Berlin.”

  June paled and began to gather the plates together. “Why, whoever told you that?”

  Cal leaned forward and caught her narrow wrist in his hand. “You know how small these parts are. I’m surprised at you.” He squeezed, compressing her tendons, her veins. “Suzie’s gone, June. Another girl can’t take her place.”

  The way another woman almost took mine? she thought. The chip in the gravy boat caught her eye again, and she frowned. One wrong move and the whole thing would fall to pieces right in front of her. She lifted her gaze to Cal. “And whose fault is that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  If she’d had the mitten then and there, June swore she would have done it—fetched it from its hiding place and slapped him right across the face with it, demanding to know just what he saw in a floozy waitress in Berlin.

  June freed her arm from Cal’s fingers. “Nothing.” The urge for truth was fickle, and June had lived in Titan Falls for far too long. She’d been trained by the rhythms of the river to know that there was a price for every gift bestowed by nature. Things required careful management. A full river could sweep over its banks, destroying everything in its path.

  On her way to the sink, June tossed the gravy dish into the trash.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Do you think there’s much more in there?” Nate was looking at the three taps he and Mercy had driven into the biggest sugar maple. Mercy removed the buckets and poured the accumulated sap into one of them.

  “Doesn’t matter. I have what I need. We can take the taps out now.” As the days had been heating up, the sap had been running faster. The bucket was half full. Soon sugaring season would be over. It was time for Mercy to cook some of the sap for Fergus. Any leftovers she’d somehow try to get to Zeke. Her brother needed some sweetness in his life, a reminder that not everything in the world carried with it the cold threat of metal on metal.

  “What did you put in that stuff anyway?” Nate peered into the bucket. “The whole town’s talking about it. My dad’s freaking out. He’s really pissed.”

  “Nothing that wasn’t already there.” That was the beauty of it. The townspeople were simply getting a taste of what had been around them all along.

  Nate unwound the brown-and-yellow scarf twisted around his neck. It had been made from the wool of Hazel’s sheep, the earthy colors steeped out of plants gathered from this very valley. He had never thought about that process before, but ever since he’d been working with Hazel, he’d been seeing all kinds of things in a new light.

  The lambs had finally come, for one thing. Nate had never witnessed anything like it. He’d arrived last Saturday to find twelve new creatures gamboling about on rubber-band legs and an exhausted Hazel trying to keep up with them all. “When did it happen?” he asked, spinning around and taking in the scene.

  “Started on Tuesday. Most of them came by Friday. But we’ve still got one to go.” Hazel patted a ewe with a red spot near her tail. She’d been marked to indicate that she was bearing twins. “I’m worried about this one. Aggie said something might be off with the pair, but we’ll have to see. If she doesn’t go into labor soon, I’ll have to call out Dr. Hemmings.”

  But Hazel needn’t have worried. That afternoon, as Nate laid down fresh bedding in the birthing pens, the ewe began to paw the ground and groan—a low, persistent sound, almost human.

  “Oh, Lord, here we go.” Hazel hurried around the barn, collecting her birthing kit. Nate spied gloves, surgical scissors, iodine, and a thick, soft rope. “What’s the rope for?”

  “Sometimes you have to shift a lamb if it’s coming out wrong, but it’s hard to keep a grip on the legs. You don’t want to lose them.”

  Nate winced. “Doesn’t that hurt the ewe?”

  Hazel regarded him. “You really are your daddy’s boy, aren’t you? All you’ve ever known is the belly of that mill. Trust me, when a lamb is coming, the worst thing you can do is hesitate. Once a birth is set in motion, your job is to keep that momentum going. You can’t undo nature once it gets rolling, son.”

  Nate thought about that. In the mill there was always a prevailing threat that things could come to a grinding halt at any moment. The men punched their cards every evening as they left the building for Lucky’s Tavern, their time briefly their own again, but they always jumped at the chance for overtime, and they grew edgy that if they screwed up badly enough, they wouldn’t get any more hours ever again.

  But you couldn’t control time by stamping holes in a card, Nate was beginning to suspect, and you couldn’t stack it up either, like so many reams of paper waiting to be trucked. You could only grab it by the slippery leg and yank.

  The last pair of lambs came quicker than even Hazel had been expecting. The first one birthed easily, a limp sack of a creature with impossibly tiny hooves. It was a good size, Hazel said, for a twin. Nate watched, fascinated, as she rubbed the side of the lamb gently with some straw and cleaned its broken umbilical cord with a solution of iodine and alcohol. Stirred to life, the lamb began wriggling.

  “Don’t worry about it now,” Hazel barked as she slid the creature up to let the ewe lick it off. “We’ve got problems here.” She rubbed her hand with lubricant and inserted it again into the ewe. “The legs are back.”

  Nate held the bleating ewe on its side as Hazel, elbow-deep, ran her hands over the unborn lamb, feeling and trying to position it. Eventually her fist emerged holding the tiny branch of a leg. Hazel slid the noose of the rope up past the first joints and tightened the loop. “Come here,” she ordered. “You do the next one. Rub your hands with that.” She indicated the lubricant. “And be gentle.”

  The inside of the ewe was shockingly warm. Nate gasped as his hand was swallowed into its uterus, and he exhaled again when he felt the slick mass of the lamb. He fumbled over what he guessed was the bulb of the head and then encountered the delicate stick of the other leg. As Hazel instructed him, he eased it forward out of the ewe, his heart pounding.

  Hazel was pleased. “Good. Now let’s see what we’re dealing with here.” She attached another loop of rope to the lamb’s second leg and pulled both cords as the ewe contracted. Just as before, the lamb slipped out in a floppy mass. Just like its mother, it had a black dot on its coat down by the tail, Nate saw. “It’s so small,” he said, and he was right. Compared to its sibling, this lamb was minuscule, almost as if it were a different breed entirely. Hazel rubbed its flank and cleared its nasal passages, but the lamb seemed reluctant to breathe. She patted it a little harder, and finally the lamb took a shuddering breath. Hazel brought it up to its mother to let the ewe lick at it, but the animal refused. Hazel’s face darkened.

  “What’s the matter?” Nate asked.

  “This doesn’t bode well.” The ewe, relieved to be finished with the business of birthing, gave a lurch and heaved
herself to her feet, ambling a few steps away. The first lamb wobbled after her. The second one remained where it was in the straw. “That’s no good at all.”

  Nate was surprised to find himself panicked. He gazed down at the helpless lamb, fighting an urge to scoop it up. “Doesn’t the mother want it?” He swallowed hard against the lump in his throat.

  Hazel went to fetch a tube of colostrum for the lamb. She seemed remarkably calm to Nate. “Sometimes it happens this way. I’ll put it with another one of the ewes and hope for the best.”

  “You can do that?”

  Hazel’s eyes were steady on Nate. “I’m raising a flock, not a hundred individual animals. They’re all part of the same family. What one doesn’t want, another will take. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”

  Nate blushed. “No.”

  Hazel pressed her lips together and said nothing, but it was clear what her opinion of that was. Nate watched as she carried the tiny spotted lamb over to one of the pens where a ewe was contentedly nursing a single lamb. “I think she’ll do nicely,” Hazel said, and dropped the orphan in. Immediately the ewe began to nuzzle the new lamb and lick it. Hazel smacked her hands together, pleased. “See?”

  As Nate stood under the maples with Mercy a week later, he still wasn’t sure what to think about everything he had seen that afternoon. It was only seven days on from the lambing, but the pair had bonded just like a natural mother and her offspring. Only Nate and Hazel knew the truth, and this bothered him. He had a sudden urge to share what he knew. He realized he was taking a risk, but he couldn’t help it. He turned to Mercy. “The lambs are here. Do you want to see them?”

  Mercy cocked her head. “And have Hazel shoot me with a double-gauge? No thanks.”

  Nate smiled. “She went into town for the afternoon. I’m keeping an eye on Fergus. Hazel won’t be back for hours.”

  Mercy hesitated, the bucket of sap hanging heavy in her hand. She still felt guilty about the ram that Zeke had taken for them, but she missed Hazel with an ache so hard it sometimes made her teeth hurt. She knew she shouldn’t go anywhere near the sheep, but the temptation was too great. Also, if she wanted to move things along between her and Nate like she’d planned, she had better get a move on it. She put the bucket down. “Let’s go.”

  In the barn Nate led Mercy to the tiny lamb, telling her the story of how he’d helped it be born. “It’s funny. I kind of feel like it’s mine in a weird way. Did you ever help birth anything?”

  Mercy shook her head. “I’m only there for the other end of things. When we shoot a deer, for instance, or trap rabbit. I don’t think it’s the same.”

  Nate didn’t reply. Unlike most of the boys in town, he hadn’t grown up hunting, and he’d never been curious about it. But there was something he wanted to ask Mercy. Gently he slid his elbow closer to hers on the railing of the lambing pen, relieved that she didn’t pull away. When she stood still and really stared hard at something, he’d noticed, her features softened and she became very pretty. Each time that happened, his pulse always sped up a little. “Speaking of hunting and all that…” He trailed off, trying to pick his words carefully, afraid he would send her temper flaring and scare her away. “Well, what was the deal with Hazel’s ram? Did you or your brother take it?”

  She flinched. For a moment he thought she might swing at him, but she took a deep breath and looked him straight in the eye instead. “A coyote or a wolf or something got it first. I know it wasn’t right, but it was too late for it anyway.” She didn’t bother to point out that hunger made its own rules. Nate wasn’t the kind of boy who would understand that.

  “So Zeke’s still around?”

  Mercy shrugged. She wasn’t dumb enough to give up information like that to Nate McAllister. He’d helped her in the sugar bush, but she still wasn’t sure how much she could trust him. It didn’t matter, though, just as long as he fell for her. That was her plan—to conquer June’s son, the person June loved best, and then see what she had to say about things. Only problem was, Mercy was surprised to find out how much she really liked Nate. She inched her arm away from his, immediately missing the pressure that had been building between them. “I better go.”

  “Wait.” Nate grabbed her by the shoulder. Mercy tensed, the memory of what had happened to her in the woods filling her with panic, but Nate’s eyes were kind. He relaxed his grip but didn’t take his hand off her shoulder, and Mercy found that she didn’t want him to. “Are you in contact with him? You can tell me. I promise I won’t say anything.”

  Mercy shook her head. “Sometimes I think I see a flash of him in the trees, but he’s never really there. Or maybe he always is. I don’t know. I feel him around me all the time but never spot him.” Except for the once, when they’d spoken down by the river and Zeke told her that Cal McAllister might very well be a murderer.

  “That sounds familiar. Sometimes I think my father’s a kind of ghost, too. He’s always working.” Nate had never thought of it before, but what did he really know about the man he came from? Mostly that he ran the mill with an iron fist and that one day he expected Nate to do the same. And Nate always thought he would. Here in the barn with Mercy, however, feeling her warm skin underneath his nervous fingers—so like Suzie’s—Nate was starting to wonder if maybe he’d been a kind of ghost, too, for most of his life. He didn’t want to be one anymore. Without saying anything else, he leaned forward and kissed Mercy, gentle at first and then with more passion, letting the heady mixture of the scent of fresh straw and the rush of maple sap from Mercy’s tongue and the tingle of cold spring air mix inside him until he thought he might burst. I’m alive, he thought as he drew Mercy closer, and I want to stay this way.

  As Mercy relaxed into Nate’s embrace, the little orphan sheep danced into the corner of her vision. Her eyes focused on the fleck of black down near its tail, and it gave her hope. This is all a game, she reminded herself as she wrapped her arms around Nate and returned the kiss, but for a moment it was nice to believe that everything in the world, even the most flawed creature in a flock, found a home for itself eventually.

  Hazel rarely came into Titan Falls if she could help it. Even before Rory’s birth and his unexpected death, she had her reasons for keeping herself separate, just on the edge of things. It had never been Hazel’s intention to weave the strands of her own life into the warp of the community—or at least not to let anyone know that’s what she was doing. Before Rory passed, she used to attend church, switch out her week’s library books, and grab an occasional bite at the diner, but after Rory’s death, and now with all the distractions of her sheep and the burden of caring for Fergus, Hazel could honestly say that she craved town company about as much as a bucket of ice come the middle of winter.

  Still, she couldn’t totally avoid society if she wanted to keep her small amount of business humming. At the beginning of each wool season, just as she was ready to start combing and spinning her fleeces into different weights and textures of yarn, she reluctantly made her single annual appearance in June McAllister’s sewing circle, and this year she couldn’t afford to skip it.

  Hazel thought of the appointment purely as a fact-gathering mission. She had no idea what the ladies termed the visit behind her back—and didn’t care to know either. She tended to keep the hour in June’s parlor businesslike, inquiring about upcoming projects the ladies thought they might be undertaking and advising what weight wool they might want to use, learning which colors they fancied and how much and how soon they could pay. It was rarely an extravagant sum. Hazel made most of her money selling surplus sheep—the ewes who were too old to breed anymore, the male lambs—and sometimes, if she really needed money, one of her better specimens.

  This year she had seven male lambs she could part with, including the bitty one with the smudge at his tail, not that he would fetch much. It hurt Hazel a little to think of auctioning him. For a split second, she was tempted not to, remembering that first lamb Fergus had ever brought her—i
t had been an orphan, too—but she gave herself a shake and put a quick stop to silly thoughts. Necessity called, especially with Fergus in his current state. She didn’t know if they’d ever see another paycheck out of him, and his pension was smaller than she’d been counting on.

  The tow-truck company had tried to insinuate that the reduction in his pension was due to the accident, but Hazel had given them a solid piece of her mind. “First of all, you’re stacking apples up against oranges. Fergus wasn’t even in one of your vehicles. And you know as well as I do that he was in no way responsible. Why, I bet if he hadn’t been driving, everyone on that bus with him would have been killed instead of just the Flyte girl, and if he was wholly himself, he’d be telling you this instead of me.” Of course, if Fergus were himself, Hazel wouldn’t have been having the conversation in the first place.

  She patted the loose ends of her frizzy hair back into the knot she wore at the nape of her neck and took a deep breath. June McAllister’s front porch was not the place for entertaining self-doubts. Behind the door she could hear the buzz of the town ladies as they waited, their gossip punctuated by the clatter of teacups and then, cutting through the convivial hum, the authoritative ring of June’s voice, encouraging them to take their customary seats.

  “Hazel! Welcome!” June threw the door open without warning, catching her off guard and putting her in an even worse mood. “We’re all already gathered and waiting. Please, come in.”

  Every time Hazel stepped into June’s home, it occurred to her that the woman really did live a paper life. Everything that Hazel could see was swept clean and was as squared as a fresh sheet of parchment. All the rooms were decorated with antique patterns of wallpaper—intricate swirls and paisleys in clashing colors that made Hazel’s head ache. Meekly she followed June to the parlor.

  The ladies stopped their chatter when she entered. Alice Lincoln half rose, but Dot shot her arm out and stopped her. “She’s not royalty, you damn fool,” Dot hissed, and Alice plopped back down on her ample bottom.