Mercy Snow (10 page)

J
une woke in the cabin far later than she meant to, well after Cal and Nate, and when she came down into the kitchen, they were both there, Nate silent as the grave with a plate of eggs and Cal making a pot of coffee. June tensed as he opened the drawer next to the one with Suzie’s mitten—he was looking for the coffee filters—and exhaled as he crossed the kitchen to another cupboard. “They’re on the third shelf,” she said, going over to help him, her hip butting up against his. She cursed herself for not getting rid of the thing last night.

She wanted to ask Cal right now, right here, just how he’d come to have the mitten, but Nate was behind them, alternately brooding and watchful. June thought she could handle whatever Cal’s explanation might be—maybe even the fact of his lying about it—but she wasn’t sure Nate would be able to square himself with a betrayal like that. Much as they argued lately, Cal was still his father, and Nate hadn’t left childhood all the way behind yet.

Outside, it had begun to snow, the flakes dizzying down in a confused flurry, gentle at first and then faster. During her freshman year at Smith, June had run outside every time a burst of
winter weather started, spreading her arms wide and tipping her face up to the sky to feel the crystals kiss her forehead and cheeks. Her friends had teased her, but June hadn’t cared. She was baptizing herself, being reborn as a New England co-ed, a girl who wore circle pins and cheered at football games and quoted Whitman, not one who ate gator, fended off her mother’s bad boyfriends, and only wore shoes when she had to.

It had been twenty-odd years since June had stood in the dizzying swirl of being two people at once, the one you let people see and the one you kept buttoned close to your chest. With the mystery of Suzie’s mitten shut up in the drawer, she was both horrified and surprised to remember how exciting it was—that sense of boundless possibility. In the monotony of married life, June sometimes forgot that she’d become who she wanted to be after all, even if she’d had to drop some of her dreams along the way. She looked at the drawer where the mitten resided, and she suddenly knew: She was not about to let a scrap of red yarn undo her life’s work.

Cal gave up on the coffee and joined Nate at the table, where he had his own plate of eggs waiting. How similar they were, June thought, father and son, both left-handed, both averse to jam on their toast, both shot through with the famous McAllister stubbornness. They ate without speaking, heads down, avoiding eye contact. The night’s catastrophe had made them careful with each other, June saw, though she couldn’t tell yet if this was a good thing or not.

After breakfast Cal helped her wash and dry the plates, the egg pan, and the butter knives. June let him, saying nothing about the mitten and nothing about the mud streaked on his car. She watched as he pulled the winter sheets over the faded couch and chairs, closed the shutters, and piled the cooled ashes
from the fireplace into a metal bucket. He didn’t move like a man with a secret, but he was capable of them, she remembered, thinking back to the horrible afternoon when she’d found that strange lacy scrap of a bra hidden in his shirt.

“Here.” She handed him his coat, watching with interest as he shrugged on the garment. She noted—she was almost sure—a slight awkwardness when he plunged his hands into his pockets. First his square fingers patted the jacket’s exterior pockets—one, then the other—and then they fluttered to the pocket hidden in the lining. He glanced up, his face dark.

June watched him, her hand on the front doorknob. Nate was waiting for her in her car. “I noticed last night there was a hole in one of your pockets, so I patched it up,” she lied. She was glad for the cool air licking down her bare neck. She’d stripped the beds and unplugged every appliance. All they had to do was close the door. The secret of the mitten would be safe until late spring, when she could return to burn it or bury it for good. By then everything would be back to normal.

June’s heart pounded as Cal gave her a probing look and then stepped through the door. Suddenly she was desperate to get back to Titan Falls, where she would mend the hole in his pocket for real. If there wasn’t one there, she’d make one and then fix it. Some rips, she thought, you could manage to repair, providing you were quick with your thread, but there were others not worth bothering over. The real trick to holding two things together, June was coming to see, wasn’t how tightly they were bound but how well. Sometimes a loose thread was a saving grace.

T
ime slowed and warped in a hospital. Hazel remembered this from Rory’s illness—how a minute could stretch itself out like a whole damn day and then how the instant of death itself tricked you, sneaking up and stealing your loved one so fast you couldn’t believe it had really happened. In that vein, Thanksgiving passed without Hazel’s caring one fig. Maybe the turkey had defrosted and rotted on the counter. Or maybe Mercy had wrapped it up and hauled it out to her place—Hazel didn’t know, and she didn’t rightly care. Hours turned to days, and all the while Fergus hovered between the here and now and the hereafter, his brain occasionally beeping out a blitz of activity but otherwise unresponsive. He was breathing on his own. His heart was pumping. Fluids were going in and out of him, but he simply wouldn’t wake up.

Hazel knew without a doubt that the man she’d wed and to whom she’d given over the better part of her life was in there somewhere, but the doctors didn’t seem partial to her belief. If his situation didn’t improve, they kept warning her, she was going to have to make a difficult decision. Was she prepared for such an event? they wanted to know. A fool question she didn’t
see fit to answer. Of course she wasn’t ready. Who in her right mind would be?

Visitors from town came and departed, but Hazel didn’t talk to any of them, and finally the nurses starting asking people to stay away. Wherever Fergus was—some icy, dark place—Hazel wished to be there, too, and so she clutched his hand, closed her eyes, and hour after hour hunkered down with him, praying for a miracle.

The only soul she allowed near her was Mercy, who arrived daily with updates on the sheep and the state of the farm. Fergus might have stopped in his tracks for the time being, but the rest of life didn’t work that way, Hazel knew. Of course she’d heard the news about Zeke supposedly causing the accident and being on the run, but the situation was complicated. For one thing, it was breeding season for the sheep, and if matters weren’t managed right in that arena, Hazel would end up paying for it later. Each afternoon she waited for Mercy’s arrival, pouncing on her with furious questions, throwing all the living she wasn’t doing at the girl’s feet. “Is the big ram eating the littler one’s share? He can be an awful bully, and you can’t let that happen. Did you pen the white ewe with the black ears in with the big ram? In a week or so, it will be time to bring them all into the barn for the season. You think you’re up to the task?”

Mercy responded to Hazel’s demands with resigned calm and few words. “Yes, ma’am. All done. The feeding’s going fine.” Then she’d stare gawp-mouthed at the shrouded figure of Fergus, her lips working themselves around the silent apologies Hazel imagined she must want to get out and never did, whether from pride or fear, Hazel couldn’t determine. It didn’t matter anyway. What was done was done. There was no putting
that bus back up on the road, no turning back the clock. All her married life, Hazel had worried about her man driving that icy stretch of road, and now that her blackest fear had come to pass, she was almost very close to being actually relieved. The worst had happened, and she would no longer need to live with the dread of wondering.

When the nurses found out that Mercy’s brother was wanted for the crash and was on the run, they fell into a flurry of indignation. “You don’t have to receive her, you know,” the little blond nurse told Hazel, her nose twitching as she watched Mercy’s scrawny shoulders disappear down the hall. “I wouldn’t.”

Hazel hesitated. She hadn’t been out to the crash site, but Mercy had, and she described a scene of confusion: panicked divots of footprints leading everywhere, stray bits of metal, the hollow scoop of earth where they’d reportedly found Gert Snow’s long-lost bones, much to everyone’s uneasy astonishment.

Gert’s disappearance was a story that had always haunted Hazel. It seemed wrong to her that a woman so allegedly rooted to a spot of earth would have left it in such an open-ended way. Now it turned out Gert had been there the whole time, and Hazel wasn’t sure she considered that idea any more comforting. No, not at all. She sighed. Any way you sliced it, the Snows—all of them—were double helpings of nuisance and trouble. Still, Hazel found herself praying that Mercy was different, and it bothered her in the extreme, this unaccustomed little sun of optimism burning away inside her. When she replied to the nurse’s concerns about Mercy, her voice came out far gruffer than she meant it to. “The girl says her brother didn’t do it.”

The nurse scoffed. “My brother’s in law enforcement down in Concord, and that’s what all the lowlifers say, honey. None of them ever did it.”

Hazel picked up her spindle. “You don’t understand. I need her help with my animals. There are so few people I trust.” But there was more to it than that. The terrible truth was that Hazel half enjoyed the guilty way Mercy skirted around Fergus and his machines. It gratified her to watch Mercy’s head snap to eager attention when she gave the girl instructions, for it meant that there was someone else in the world who wanted Fergus to get well even more than she did.

The nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Fergus’s unmoving arm. Her nostrils flared again. “You’re a more forgiving woman than I am.”

Hazel worried her spindle between her fingers, coaxing out inch after inch of yarn, the pile of fleece growing thinner and thinner on her lap. Maybe it took an accident to uncover something that had been there all along. Maybe that’s what that nurse was trying to say. Hazel stared at the wooden tool in her hand. She hadn’t been paying attention. She’d reached the end of the thread, she saw, and now had nothing to do. Somehow, without even knowing it, she’d come around full circle, empty-handed, right back to the same damn place she’d started.

A
fter death there was still always some kind of life. It was the unofficial dogma of Titan Falls—a creed long ago arrived at not out of civic hope or optimism but simple practicality. When a man was churned to bone in a mill accident or simply wore his skin clean out, when a wife turned her toes up to the sky and closed her eyes for good, there was always someone left behind: snotty-nosed children not yet out of diapers, twin sisters or brothers who’d never married, sometimes just a dog—long in the tooth and matted, perpetually hungry—but
always someone. The women of Titan Falls recognized this. Of the many things they did well, they excelled at carving order out of mess. They rose at dawn to smooth the wrinkles from threadbare sheets and scrub the black off kettles, to sort odd socks and wrap the day’s sandwiches in squares of waxed paper. Because life required attention to the little details, they knew. Because sometimes those small things were all a woman had.

Three days after the accident, Stella Farnsworth sat in the comfort of June’s parlor, like a cat preening its fur. Twenty years old, Stella was a recent bride and expecting her first child in April. To June she seemed still to be half child—twig-limbed and doe-eyed—but so far she’d approached her pregnancy with a hypnotic calm.

“Oh, Paul already put the crib together,” she said, giggling and waving her hand when June asked if she needed any furniture. “It took him half the night, but he got there in the end. He’s started in on painting the nursery now. Apple green, we chose, because we don’t know if the Nugget here”—she lightly touched her belly—“is a boy or a girl.”

June thought back to her own expectant days, when Cal had taken one look at the crib’s instruction sheet and then called Tom Plimpton, the mill foreman, to come and sort out the whole thing. “He can fix the pulp screens in ten minutes flat,” Cal reasoned, staring at the diagrams of instructions. “He ought to be able to figure this out.”

Now, sitting surrounded by the women of Titan Falls, June wondered if maybe she’d skipped some important step of wifehood. She’d made sure everything in her domestic life had always gone so seamlessly, so easily, just as Nate’s crib had been assembled without one wrong step but also without any of
the laughter or the shared intimacy that small failures created between couples.

Soon, as June hoped it would, gossip began to flow. “What do you think it means that they’ve gone and located poor Gert Snow after all this time?” Alice Lincoln started in, her eyes goggling. “Isn’t it just the strangest thing?”

Dottie waved one of her meaty hands. “Never mind that. It’s the living we ought to be focused on. I hear that the Flytes are down to the bone in their savings. I don’t know what will happen now with the funeral expenses.” The women darted little accusatory glances at June, as if it were
her
fault that Fred Flyte was an incurable souse and a piss-poor provider.

Alice laid down the pillowcase she was needlepointing and turned to face June full-on. “Have you been to see them yet?” Alice’s husband handled the incoming logs at the mill. She’d had a daughter of her own on the bus, a ten-year-old who’d escaped with a broken wrist and a bracing new fear of the dark.

Dottie glared at her. “That’s a terrible idea, Alice. If you were stuck in Dena’s shoes, would
you
want to speak with June right now?”

Alice bowed her head and slid her eyes away from Dot. “No. I guess not.”

Dottie shifted her considerable bulk. “I didn’t think so.”

June wondered at Dot’s change of heart. “Have
you
been to see her?”

Dot fixed her with her gaze and sniffed. “She’s not in a good way.”

“I heard that Snow boy was in some previous trouble in Maine,” Margie Wall broke in, trying to change the subject a bit. Everyone knew that the mill was teetering on the edge of
another round of layoffs. That wasn’t technically June’s fault, but it was hard not to hold it against her all the same. “That’s what Abel said, at least. I heard the little bastard was drunk when the bus went down but that no one can find him.”

June picked at the stitches she’d looped onto her knitting needle. With the women of Titan Falls, there were always two sides to things, she knew, never more. The good and the bad. The black and the white. The innocent and the damned. June’s mother-in-law had taught her that lesson right off the bat, and, once dispensed, Hetty’s advice had not been optional. If June didn’t take it, Hetty would hound her until she submitted. It was a skill that came in handy during gatherings like these. “Ten to one if they don’t go and charge Zeke with murder,” she said now, dropping a conversational pebble to see what kind of ripple it made. Not the sort she was expecting.

“But it was an accident!” Stella cried.

This was worrying. June hadn’t expected to hear sympathy for the Snows. “The court won’t see things his way when they catch him, I can guarantee.”

Stella cleared her throat. “I’m just saying, I don’t think the crash was intentional. Those Snows are awful, but I can’t believe they would go and deliberately hurt the Good Lord’s children.”

Pregnancy was making Stella soft in her head, June thought. She wrapped a tail of yarn around her knitting project. It wouldn’t do for the whole damn town to go tender on any of the Snows just now, not with Suzie Flyte’s funeral right around the corner and Abel still looking for Zeke and that mitten sitting in the cabin’s drawer. The story of the crash was going to have to go the right way, and if she had to, June would make it. Once she’d been very good at that kind of thing. Once she’d written
her own better ending. “Justice has to be served.” She tried to say it gently, as if she truly lamented this state of affairs. “What kind of world would it be if it weren’t?”

That stumped Stella. She rolled up her needlework and opened the lid of her sewing basket. Her top lip was set in a stubborn curl. “What kind of world would it be without the benefit of the doubt?”

Dot came to the rescue. “That’s no way to talk, Stella. We’re all women of faith here.”

Just then the front door slammed and Nate walked past the open door of the parlor into the kitchen without saying hello. The women started gathering their loose threads and patterns, shoving fabric scraps into bags and shrugging on coats. The sewing circle was over. The next time they met, they all thought but no one said, they’d be gathered together under the rafters of St. Bart’s to bury Suzie. Maybe Zeke would be caught by then and his bail would be set. Dena would have to pull herself together, and Cal would once again lead the town in resuming its normal routine. Hopefully, the mill would keep churning out its white rolls of paper and the river would run clean. No one would ever know about the mitten in the drawer at the cabin—a little scrap of Suzie stuck behind on earth, all but forgotten.