Mercy Snow (11 page)

One by one, the women approached and kissed June on the cheek and thanked her for her hospitality. Margie Wall asked for her marble-cake recipe. Stella said she had a few questions about the upcoming Winter Carnival. None of them noticed the tremor in June’s fingers as she attended to the door or the way she bit the corner of her bottom lip, and none of them guessed, as she waved them into the darkening afternoon, that she was carrying, folded and tucked under the starched bib of her apron, a pinpricked length of dread stained a deep, unsettling scarlet.

I
t was strange in Hazel’s house without her. The air smelled of dust and pine, and the only sound was the grating of the clock on the sitting room’s mantel. Every time she came, Mercy checked it to make sure it was wound, then let herself into the kitchen, where the cupboards were stocked with all manner of good things to eat: noodles and bags of creamy rice, packets of powdered onion soup, canisters of apple tea. All of it free for the taking. Mercy thought of Hannah, growing so fast that her pants were short around her ankles, but she quickly pushed the thought of stealing out of her mind. The Snow name was low enough as it was. Instead Mercy took any spoiled food out of the fridge, then took the sack out to the row of metal rubbish bins lined up behind the house. Fergus used to haul everything to the dump twice a month, but now Mercy supposed that she would take over that job for Hazel. She’d do it gladly if it meant bringing Fergus back to life.

Telling Hazel what the police believed about Zeke had been the hardest thing so far. Mercy had been terrified that Hazel would fire her on the spot, and then what would she do to put food on the table for Hannah? But Hazel had surprised her by not reacting at all.

“I know all of this,” she’d said from the chair placed next to Fergus. Her head had been tipped back and her eyes were shut, so Mercy couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Up close, the bare skin on her neck was veined and papery like an insect wing, a thing both delicate and deceptively strong. “I’ve already heard. Now, here’s what I need you to do for the sheep…”

Hazel’s refusal to discuss Zeke was a frank relief. Every day since then, every hour she was in Hazel’s presence, Mercy had
tried to think of a way to say thank you, but Hazel was having none of it. And so Mercy was doing what she could to make it up to Hazel. She owed her more than she could ever say, she knew. Hazel was the first person Mercy could remember who’d opened her home to her, and Mercy was surprised to find how quickly she’d grown to count on the little comforts of stable domesticity, things no one else would think to notice, perhaps, but which touched her to the quick: a calendar with cats on it hung in the kitchen, to-do lists pegged on the fridge, a wall of photographs showing the progression of years—Hazel’s face starting off thin and smooth, then plumping and creasing—houseplants grown lush and lazy. Bits and pieces like this, Arlene had always dictated, would just drag them down on the road. Better to stay anonymous and uncommitted. For the first time, Mercy had begun to wonder at everything she and especially Hannah were missing.

In Hazel’s bedroom Mercy slid open dresser drawers and found clean socks and underwear, then fished a fresh pair of dungarees and a crisp shirt out of the wardrobe. The garments hung in patient order, placeholders for the absent couple, Fergus’s shirts nestled next to Hazel’s, work-worn trousers folded over the hangers’ neat halves, Fergus’s one suit zipped in a dusty plastic cover. If he passed away, would Hazel bury him in it? How wrong to go down into the ground in something you’d never really worn, Mercy thought. Surely the earth should receive you the way you’d really been in your life. It’s what they had done for Arlene—dug a grave deep in the woods and tumbled her into it wrapped in a dried deerskin and wearing her favorite black hat. But civilization had its own customs. Town folks, Arlene had always told them, buried their dead right under their feet, stomping on the bones as if that would ensure the departed remained that way.

Mercy shivered and closed the closet door. Fergus wasn’t going to die. She had to believe that. She pictured him in his hospital bed, shrouded in white, tubes and wires shooting out of him like tentacles. If only he would get better, he might be able to say what had really happened. Arlene would have known how to do it. She would have gone straight into the forest, plucked an assortment of flowers and buds, and made a miracle. But that was just wishful thinking on her part, Mercy knew. In the end even her mother hadn’t held sway over the whims of life and death. Her own passing had proved that. No, if Mercy was going to sort out the mess of the crash, she was going to have to rely on her wits, not magic. She shoved Hazel’s spare clothing into a duffel bag she found in the bottom drawer of the bureau. Problem was, she
wasn’t
her mother. These days she wasn’t even herself. She zipped the bag and left the bedroom.

Considering everything, maybe that was all to the good.

S
ome backwoods girls had a way with water. Give them a forked stick and a beat of time and they’d strike you a spring. Some had a feel for granite seams or knowing where game was hiding, but Hannah had always had an ear for bones. Deer carcasses whispered tales to her of tall grass and buzzing flies, dog bones growled tired and low, and bird skeletons twittered. But human frames were the trickiest. They swirled with echoes of laments or vibrated with unfinished business. They never brought good tidings. It wasn’t until she encountered Gert Snow’s remains, however, that Hannah learned just how tricky the dead could be.

Hannah sensed the bones within her first five minutes on the Snow place, and as soon as she was able, she’d gone exploring, walking half a mile up the road to find them.
Help me
, they
pleaded from their resting place, a bump of earth jutting out just at the beginning of the descent into the ravine, guarded by the delicate trunk of a bent white birch. Hannah approached it, drawn to the peculiarity of a bowed tree growing in a forest of razor-straight sticks. It was an empty, unfinished shape, she thought—half a heart, the curve of a broken cup. Curious, Hannah reached out to touch the milky bark but stopped, the hairs on her arms prickling, goose bumps shivering up and down her skin. She listened with her whole body.

The bones were loud. They fizzed with leftover fury, as electric under the earth as live wires, humming with information. They were of a woman who had died with her heart cracked in two, Hannah deduced.
Please
, the bones begged, but before Hannah could bend down to them, to put her mouth to the earth and answer back, Mercy sneaked up behind her. “I thought I warned you not to go wandering,” she barked. “I had to track you all the way out here like a dog. Now, come on back to the rig. You need to get cleaned.”

“There’s something down there,” Hannah had said, pointing at the birch.

Mercy didn’t show a whisker of interest. She glanced around at the trees, then flicked her gaze down the ravine, swatting at a late-season fly. “There’s lots of things around here. And I’ll bet half of them are hiding in your hair. Now, come on back and let me comb you.”

Reluctantly, Hannah had allowed herself to be trotted back to the RV, casting a worried stare over her shoulder. She’d stood by plenty of times while her sister and brother had gutted game, and she’d skinned and flayed enough rabbit and squirrel herself to know that you didn’t turn one of God’s creatures inside out—beastly or otherwise—and not expect some corresponding shift
in the universe. Sometimes retribution arrived large in the form of a storm or a terrible illness, and sometimes it crept in small. A broken dish. A jammed gun. A blown tire. But that was the price of life. A body needed to eat. Arlene had taught them that first and foremost. Hunger called to be filled, she’d told them, just never for free.

As soon as she heard about the crash, Hannah became certain that the skeleton was lurking behind the whole business of it, for it seemed clear to her that anyone with bones that loud wouldn’t be the kind of soul to let the great beyond interfere with plans for a long-awaited reckoning.

The morning after the accident, Abel and his men returned to investigate the wreck and its environs in daylight. Hannah, crouching upwind in a prickly holly thicket, held her breath as Abel’s shepherd dog made straight for the birch where they had found the bones. Even from where she was hiding, Hannah could make out a clean length of white angled in the rocky loam. Abel sighed and spoke to his deputy, who was fiddling with the radio hooked to his belt. “Looks like we’re going to need some more digging equipment. I’m betting anything we just found Gert Snow. Who else would be buried out here?”

“Gert Snow? Really? Then, I figure a plain old shovel will do.”

Gert Snow.
Hannah mouthed the syllables silently. Finally a name to go with the seething spirit. Someone from her own family, from way back. She whispered the letters again, this time her voice coming out as a tiny rasp, almost imperceptible, a moth wing scraping a leaf. Before the two lawmen could spot her, she took off into the woods.

That night the ravine’s wind blew sideways through the trees, redistributing the snow in unusual shapes. Hannah woke to the ghostly forms of snow rabbits, horses caught in mid-gallop, even
a man. The forms quivered in the breeze, assuming their contours for only a moment before shifting once again into something else entirely, gone but for Hannah’s witness.

She tiptoed down the RV loft’s ladder and silently eased herself into her boots and parka. Mercy had come home late again and was still wrapped like a pig in a blanket in Arlene’s old quilt, just the dark ends of her hair fraying out the top. Holding her breath, Hannah squeaked the RV door open and shut it fast behind her, slipping down the metal steps and high-stepping through the snowdrifts to the smokehouse.

Mercy had warned her time and again to stay out of that place, but Hannah loved the little hut with its crooked roof and slanty walls and its ancient odors of rendered fat and burned spruce logs. Over the door there was a rusty horseshoe nailed up for luck. Mercy had gone inside to investigate when they’d arrived, but there hadn’t been much of Pruitt left to clean up after. Whoever had found his body had also apparently made off with most of his worldly goods, not that he’d owned much. Besides the trio of rusted iron hooks that were bolted to the rafters, there was a sagging army cot and a rough shelf of minor treasures Hannah liked to tinker with: a dented copper kettle, a length of wire knotted into a figure eight, a smattering of greenish pennies, and a funny kind of button she’d found in a tin can rolled under the cot. She took it out and inspected it now. It was two buttons, really, joined together by a little silver chain, and on the face of each one there was a letter
M
. She ran her finger over the points and wondered why on earth Pruitt would have had something so polished and sleek in his possession, especially since his name started with
P
.

But today something was different in the smokehouse. Hannah noticed immediately. She tiptoed closer to the shelf,
blinking, and there it was: a twist of yellow yarn. Hannah lifted it, and a row of thin wooden stars dangled and danced, some of them stained dark, some clearly whittled from the green wood cradled at the heart of a young tree. She smiled and tied the bauble around her neck, pleased with the way the stars fanned across her, decorating her. There was only one person she knew who would have left her something like this, and if he had, it surely meant that Zeke was fine and well.

Mercy, however, was not as delighted with the trinket. She spied it as soon as Hannah entered the camper and stripped off her parka. “What is that?” She pulled at the neck of Hannah’s sweater.

Hannah jerked away from her sister’s sharp fingers. Now she was glad she hadn’t tied the funny button onto the yarn, too, as she’d been tempted to do. Instead she’d left it back in the smokehouse, nestled in the can. “I found it outside.” That wasn’t a total lie. “I think the ghost left it for me. I see her sometimes, in the snow.”

Mercy whipped around to face the counter. “There’s no ghost, and you know it.”