Mercy Snow

by Tiffany Baker

  Hazel wouldn’t have gone and pulled a rifle on Zeke Snow, but Abel was a lawman with a jumpy trigger finger and a job to do. Hazel realized that nothing good was about to happen as soon as Abel had gotten Zeke in his sights, and in that regard she’d proved absolutely correct. Abel had missed and shot Mercy instead, and then all hell had broken as loose as a cave of rabid bats.

  The minute she’d found the lamb and Hannah’s hat lying next to it, Hazel had deduced that something was fishy. The Snows were unfortunate and bad to the bone, but they were not wastrels. They ate what they took from the world, maybe not always fairly or entirely legally but regularly enough that their violence had a sound logic operating behind it. If Hazel knew anything, it was that no Snow would leave a perfectly good meal to bleed to death on the ground, and she could say that with confidence because she wouldn’t do it either.

  She picked up the hat thinking that maybe Zeke had dropped it on his way back across her valley. He’d come to her door just after daybreak, and though her first impulse had been to fetch her double-gauge, turn it on him, and advise him to start running, she’d chucked that idea like a hot coal as soon as he started talking.

  Plenty of men could worm their way into a woman’s heart with a smooth line of chat, but in a paper town it was only words drawn in ink that carried weight. And the words Zeke had come to show her, Hazel quickly saw, were as heavy as they came. “Where did you say you found these?” she asked again, the documents from the Duncan Home for Girls clutched in her fist like a pair of winning lottery tickets. But they were even better than that, for lottery tickets only cemented the perfect happiness of your present and future, while these two chits of paper confirmed everything Hazel had ever suspected about her past.

  Like hundreds of other poor souls up and down rivers in these parts, she’d been born and left an orphan, but unlike them she possessed a curious paper trail. During her last year at the Duncan Home for Girls, she’d assisted the head, Miss Blenheim, in the office, learning to type, take dictation, and file. It was during one of Hazel’s clandestine forays into the bowels of the Duncan Home’s records that she first found the list of annual donations from the Titan Paper Mill, all of them signed by Henry McAllister, all of them made in August, on the very same day as her admittance.

  Hazel’s decision to settle in Titan Falls hadn’t been accidental—not by a long shot. She and Fergus had found their perfect valley, yes, but Hazel also couldn’t resist the chance to live directly in the shadow of the mill, right under the gaze of Henry McAllister himself, so proud with his haughty wife and young son, surrounded by shifting currents of gossip that might tell her who her mother had been.

  She’d never wanted it to be Gert Snow, but now that Zeke had come to her and told her where he’d found the papers, she couldn’t deny her theory any longer. No wonder no one in town had ever mourned Gert’s loss. She must have died soon after giving birth, maybe even by taking her own life. Had Hazel really been left by the river as an infant, she wondered, or was she perhaps stolen in the night and left somewhere Gert could never get her back? Pruitt must have figured it all out somehow when he took up residence out in the clearing—and Lord only knew by what nefarious means he’d gotten his hands on these papers—and that’s why Cal McAllister had never tried to run him out of town. Hazel lifted the wrinkled pads of her fingers up to her lips in careful thought. She looked at the ragged-haired boy standing in front of her, his eyes sunk too far in his head to be good for anyone, his nerves as jittery as hers. Hell, his nerves were hers. He was a Snow, and so, in a roundabout way, was she. They were kin, and kin could tell each other anything. “Did you cause that bus crash?”

  Zeke didn’t blink. “No, ma’am, but I think I know who did. I just can’t prove it.”

  Hazel believed him. Mercy had been right all along. She jerked her chin toward the trees. “You best hightail it out of here. Don’t let yourself be seen. I’m going to go talk to Abel, see what he can do. Hannah didn’t kill that lamb, and you didn’t push Fergus off the road. Something’s not right about any of this.” She looked again down at the papers crumpled in her fists. Something hadn’t been right for quite some time.

  Abel was a man of action first and talk later. When Hazel arrived at his office with the story of the sheep, Hannah’s hat in her pocket, she barely had time to follow him to his squad car, much less school him on fifty years of back history. Against her better judgment, she shut up and went along, staying silent on the drive to Devil’s Slide Road. They could sort out one problem at a time, she decided. When they got to the Snow turnoff, however, they found a pair of cars parked on the side of the road.

  “What the holy hell is June McAllister doing out this way?” Abel muttered, slamming his door and adjusting his belt.

  “Do you hear that?” Hazel put out a hand. From down in the ravine, they could hear the cries of Hannah. They slipped and stumbled their way down to the river, where they found an ashen-faced June pleading with Hannah and the frightened girl running as fast as her skinny legs would take her straight in the direction of the river. Hazel hung back along the bank, watching with horror as Hannah tore into the river and sank, and then as Mercy followed. They can’t swim, she remembered, but just as she began moving forward to point this out, Abel raised his gun and a dark figure burst out of the trees from the opposite bank and plunged in after Mercy. There wasn’t time to protest that Zeke Snow was doing a good thing, to tell Abel everything she now knew about the crash, to beg him to lay off his fool weapon and stand down. Abel aimed and fired. Mercy fell.

  Across the river Nate lay drenched and shivering on the bank, Hannah in his arms. At first Hazel was worried that the girl had drowned, but soon she saw tiny signs of movement. The child rolled onto her side and began throwing up river water. June stood near them, frozen to the root with guilt, her mouth moving but producing no sound. Someone please do something, her gaze said, and though Hazel wanted nothing more than the power to turn her back on the whole sorry scene, stump her way up the ravine, and reenter the peace of her valley, she knew she never could, not after seeing what was on those two papers Zeke had given her. The image of the first lamb that Fergus ever brought her arose, the poor thing wrapped in a sodden blanket, bleating for its life. Once sheep had been her salvation. Now it was her turn to do some saving, and she guessed that was going to start with another little girl orphaned on the banks of a river, only this one would grow up knowing exactly who she was. Hazel would see to it, and if that wasn’t a promise, Hazel thought, already stepping forward into the wet mud, then the sky wasn’t blue, sheep didn’t flock, and the only thing people could do with the innocence they’d lost was to remember it and weep.

  “Hush, now.” She reached Hannah and threw her coat over the shivering girl. No weeping allowed on her watch. Not now. Not ever. Or so help her, Hazel vowed, sweeping back Hannah’s dark hair so she could give her a kiss, she’d be a monkey’s butt straight up, and that’s all there was to it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Every Tuesday at a quarter to three, in the very tiniest of Florida branches, the local librarian began the children’s story hour word for word with the same chapter and verse. Pity the sinned against, but pity more the sinner. If the twenty-odd children settled cross-legged on the floor—some of them swiping at runny noses, some sleepy-eyed in pigtails, some twiddling strands of the ancient carpet in between their chubby fingers—found this homily strange, they never showed it. But then they were used to the librarian, comfortable with her scratchy voice, hard in its vowels the way northerners’ voices sometimes tended to be, even though she’d been born in this very town. Today, however, for the first time in her tenure, instead of launching straight into one of her stories, the librarian paused, fixed the children with a quizzical stare, and posed a question: But how do you know which is which?

  Startled at this violation, the children blinked up at her. One boy, redheaded and freckled to kingdom come, lifted a thumb to his mouth and began to suc
k in thought. The librarian fought the urge to pry the boy’s digit gently from his lips, the way she used to with her own son when he had been small. A spasm rippled across her chest, coming to rest in between the tender muscles of her ribs, but whether the pain originated from the rickety valves of her heart or from the memory of her long-missed son, she could no longer say. Absence, it turned out, had worn this organ down to a blood-filled rag beating in her chest, and not necessarily filled it with fondness.

  Finally a small girl in the back raised a tentative hand. “A sinner does bad things.”

  The librarian nodded. “Yes. But what happens if he also saves someone?”

  The girl considered. “Then he’s not a sinner anymore?”

  “That ain’t right.” The toothless boy with curls furrowed his brow. “He’s still a sinner.”

  “So once a sinner always a sinner, is that it?” The librarian’s gaze drifted over the heads of the children and landed on an embroidered wall hanging framed next to the window. It depicted a single tree and the four seasons. The yarn was faded and frayed with age, but the stitches were still sturdy and even, and the librarian would know because her fingers had made many of them.

  “Ma’am?” The shyest boy in the group, a little older than the others, raised his hand. He was almost too old for the story hour, but the librarian had always liked him. “Would the story help us figure your question out?”

  “Perhaps.” The librarian nodded. The children were clever. She would give them that, but they were innocent still. They knew only the panoramic and exaggerated villains of cartoons and video games: horned creatures with scales and spindly fingers, pneumatic men with oversize guns and black visors, aliens with blasting, menacing ships. But real badness wasn’t like that. It masked itself in the faces of the people you loved, arrived in the form of accidents and misunderstandings, paraded through your life on quiet wheels before it exploded everything all at once.

  Yet here she was doing it, too—speaking of evil in sweeping generalities when the problem with it was that it was always very, very specific. One bad choice even though you knew better. A decision to keep quiet when a word was required. Sometimes your own face reflected in the mirror, an accusing echo.

  These poor children, she thought, spreading her skirt across her knees. They had no idea what kinds of things lay ahead of them. The shine would start rubbing off them soon enough. In the meantime they still had so many lessons to learn and disappointments to suffer, not least of which was the fact that although June was sitting right here, plain as a sunny day, not one of them seemed to recognize the sinner in their midst.

  In a buttery puddle of light, under a row of neat square windows in the library of Smith College, a young woman sat reading. Her lips moved slightly as she scanned the page, uttering the complicated syllables of a language not quite lost although certainly no longer in general circulation. But that was exactly why Hannah liked ancient Greek. Every time she uttered a line of epic poetry or quoted a stanza of a drama, she marveled that a world long since disappeared could be brought back to instant life. Hannah had always had an affinity for ghosts.

  Sometimes, when a rattle of wind shook the fiery-leaved trees on the quad as Hannah walked back to her dormitory or the moon rose and filled her windowpanes like a curious face, she would smile and remember Mercy, wishing that her sister could see her now. The Greeks, Hannah knew, were excellent interpreters of auguries and omens, but after Mercy’s death Hannah had quit believing in the power of the dead to send signs and signals. Instead, she thought, it was enough just to remember.

  Hazel had been concerned when the time had come for Hannah to make a decision about college. She had several offers. “Are you sure you want to go to Smith?” Hazel had fretted. “She went there, you know.” She being June McAllister, of course, a name none of them ever invoked unless they could help it. But June was the whole reason Hannah was attending college in the first place, Hannah pointed out. She was providing the money for it, and anyway, Hannah argued, just because one woman walked in the path of another didn’t mean their journeys would be the same. For one thing, Hannah wasn’t running away from anything. When she thought of June, Hannah recalled afternoons in the Titan Falls library, and her first time at a restaurant, and a Cinderella watch. But she also remembered rushing into the river and the frigid shock of going under, then waking up and finding out that Mercy was gone. When June had offered to pay for Hannah’s tuition and all her needs, Hannah had thought long and hard and then accepted. This apple was an offering of peace, she determined, not poisoned. In the end June was just a woman with much to atone for—not so wicked as a queen written down on paper, but not so easily categorized either.

  The real reason Hazel was worried about her going to college, Hannah knew, was that she thought Hannah would forget them. “Things are changing so fast around here you won’t know tops or tails when you come back,” Hazel fretted, packing a trunk for Hannah the week before she was due to depart. She had a point. After Cal’s arrest and sentencing, the mill had stuttered along at half capacity for almost a decade, but it had just been sold to a Canadian outfit that was promising to overhaul the whole place. They were the lucky ones, Hannah thought. All up and down the river, mills sat empty-eyed and shut. On the other hand, without the extra pollution, the Androscoggin was running cleaner than it had in years. Fish jumped in the summers, and people even dared to wade out in some spots, laughing with their pants rolled over their knees. But who knew how long that would last? Change was the one thing you could always count on in a river town.

  When she thought Hannah wasn’t looking, Hazel stuck a jar of maple sap into the corner of the trunk. Hannah watched her do it and smiled to herself. Then she went over to Hazel and embraced her, feeling how thin her shoulders were growing. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I might be leaving, but how could I possibly turn my back on Titan Falls? Everyone I’ve ever loved is right here.”

  All Hannah had to do to prove that point was walk past the sheep out into the sugar bush. Fergus’s stone—two years old now—lay in a dapple of sunlight under the biggest maple, and Mercy’s sat next to it, covered in a feathery moss the color of green apples. Every winter Hazel tapped the maples herself and distributed the sap to everyone in town. The people who remembered the accident and the terrible events in the ravine received their portions with a nod and a solemn murmur of “Mercy,” both a name and a blessing, for Mercy had taught them that sorrow flowed in this life, but so did sweetness in equal measure, perfect halves of a whole, and that you couldn’t dam them up. Better to let them run, the town had decided, like color into wool.

  The college library had darkened. It was ten minutes to closing. Hannah rummaged in her bag and pulled out her current bookmark. She liked to use photographs so she always felt close to home. This one was of Zeke and Ivy’s new baby girl. Zeke had settled down with Hazel, and last spring he’d married Aggie the shearer’s daughter. Zeke had a way with animals, it turned out, maybe from his years of stalking and hunting them. But these days Zeke didn’t kill so much as a fly. Instead he waited openhanded and let creatures come to him.

  In the snapshot the child lay on her back in her crib, her face tipped up to the camera, her hands extended like pink starfish, her mouth bubbling into a smile. Suspended over the crib, a flurry of wooden butterflies hung on invisible strings, a constellation of complicated beauty. Hannah remembered the box of butterflies of her own that she’d opened for Christmas one year and the way their powdery wings had brushed her cheeks and hair, but these, she thought, were even better. They would never fly away. These were carved to last, their bodies and wings shellacked, their antennae and legs minutely jointed. No matter what happened, these specimens would live forever.

  When the letters arrived, it was always spring, the sticky Florida air heating into a furnace of salt and swamp grass, the sky swarming with jeweled insects and migrating birds. The envelopes appeared as if by magic, the paper battered and water-stained
, decorated with the delicate and upright calligraphy of foreign characters. The marks were indecipherable in their stark beauty, an alphabet of mystery, often embossed with stamps of flowers or animals painted in startling colors.

  Once there was a vermilion dragonfly smeared like a seal across the lip of the envelope so that to open it June had to tear the creature’s wings. Another time the postal stamp bore the image of a red star with a golden crescent moon nestled in its belly. Sometimes June wondered if these symbols were secret messages to her, a code she was supposed to know somehow. Other times she accepted them as simple accidents of communication, a one-sided burst of a language that she was only just now, for the first time in her life, learning to speak.

  One year Nate’s letter informed her that he was giving vaccinations in East Africa, where, he said, the earth was the color of rust. The next he was tending an outbreak of cholera in India, where the cows were so sacred they could lie for hours in the road and be perfectly safe. Security, June knew, was all-consuming for her son. After the terrible events in the ravine and the death of Mercy, Nate had left Titan Falls as soon as he could. He wandered for a year, then attended university and medical school in Arizona, where the land didn’t hold the burdens of either many rivers or many trees. And then, because that wasn’t far enough away from the memory of Mercy, he’d left the country for good, doing clinic work in the places that called to him, permanently unfixed.