Mercy Snow (4 page)

They’d come to Titan Falls in search of Pruitt, their long-lost father, but had found him dead, too, making the three of them official orphans, their legacy a plot of land that didn’t feel anywhere close to home. The terrain was slanty, choked with poison ivy, and full of unexpected hollows and drops. Right from the beginning, Mercy had a dread of it, with its Tilt-A-Whirl hollows and the river waiting down at the bottom of the ravine like a snake’s open throat. Mercy couldn’t swim.

“No Snow woman ever could,” Arlene had once explained to her. “We’re bound body and soul to the earth.” In return for that loyalty, Arlene was privy to a cache of secret riches, a cornucopia of antidotes and cures that bloomed right under her feet. From Arlene, Mercy had learned that a crush of mallow soothed and evened broken skin, that chicory made cold blood run hot, and that hemp leaves eased the mind. She’d been taught that the fat rendered from a white-tailed doe could grant a barren woman birth and that a squirrel’s tail, severed and bound with flaxen twine, could ward off bad dreams. But nothing good ever came from water, running or still. Even Mercy’s wild baby sister, Hannah, exercised caution around the springs and creeks that dotted
the North Woods, planting her boots square before she dipped a bucket.

Hannah wasn’t fooled by the ravine below them either. “If this place is supposed to be so great, why didn’t anybody else want it?” she grumbled the day Mercy steered the caravan from the crumbling logging roads of Maine onto the smoother interstate into New Hampshire, and finally onto Devil’s Slide Road itself, the vehicle teetering and skidding on the ugly yellow mud. Zeke was ahead of them, driving the barely better truck. All their worldly goods rattled along on uncertain wheels. Lord help them, Mercy thought, if any of them dared to stop spinning. It had been only a bare month since Arlene’s death, and there were times when Mercy missed her so badly she thought the ache might crack her teeth in half, but she tried to hide that sorrow from Hannah. She shifted now, wincing as the engine made another bone-crunching grind. She prayed that the transmission would hold out for just a few hundred yards longer. “Beggars can’t be choosers. Think of this as a fresh start. It’ll be good for us.”

Hannah bounced in the passenger seat. “What will there be for us to do when we get there?” They made their money wandering—doing seasonal work, foraging for fungi in the right season, picking apples in the fall, pulling in at logging sites, always moving on before they wore out the sweetness of their short welcome. They were down to the last five twenties in the old coffee can Mercy used as a makeshift bank, a fact she hadn’t yet told her two siblings and that made the walls of her stomach cramp.

Mercy tried to put on a smile and sound reassuring. “Things will be different. You’ll see. We’re planting roots now. Everything’s going to be great.” She put her foot down harder on the
gas, and the RV’s engine sputtered and whined, as if even it recognized a lie when it heard one and felt bound by honor to protest.

When they arrived at the clearing, however, Mercy’s heart sank. She barely remembered the place, but the impressions she did have of it were all bad. Mercy had only been days old when Arlene had left Pruitt the first time, Mercy and Zeke bundled on her chest like a pair of rabbits, and eleven when they tracked him down to Titan Falls for the briefest of reunions. Mercy could still recall the brass belt buckle Pruitt used to wear and how he would swing it when he got drunk or angry, and she knew that for Zeke—who’d taken the brunt of Pruitt’s rages—the memory must be even sharper. Before he met his father, he’d been a happy-go-lucky, gap-toothed boy. Afterward it was as if something inside of him had been irrevocably rearranged, like a box of dishes dropped, shattered, and then shelved for good. He retreated into days of silence. His reading—never good—dwindled down to the level of a very young child, as if by giving up the complicated world of words he could find a deeper, more dependable layer of the universe where things were simple to understand.

Zeke pulled the truck into the clearing and let the engine sputter and die. He climbed out, peering around him, as wary as the deer he went after during the fall. “Where is he?”

Mercy stalked over to the smokehouse—the only structure standing on the place, albeit wonky as a jack-in-the-box—and tapped on the door. When there was no answer, she opened it and stuck her head inside. Dust particles stirred to life and floated in a kaleidoscope of neglect, but nothing else moved. A trio of iron hooks barbed out of the ceiling, patches of black were burned onto the foundation’s cinder block, and a rusty cot stood
in the far corner, its blankets stripped and folded, but there were no signs of life. Mercy closed the door again, her brow furrowed. “He’s not here. Doesn’t look like he’s been for a while either. Guess we’re on our own.”

Zeke folded his arms in front of him. “That’s fine. Better than fine.” His chest expanded, and Mercy realized how carefully he’d been breathing up until now.

They didn’t grieve when they learned two days later that Pruitt had been found dead in the woods by some townsmen. Hannah had never met her father, and Mercy and Zeke only wished they’d been so lucky.

“So we get a fresh start,” Mercy murmured, laying her head on her brother’s shoulder. “How about that?”

Zeke didn’t respond, and Mercy didn’t half blame him, for she knew as well as he did that there was no such thing as a brand-new start for the likes of them. There was only starting over.

T
he morning of the accident on Devil’s Slide Road, Mercy heated a pot of coffee on the camper’s wheezing stove and rummaged for the last of something to eat, feeling about as crotchety and sag-hipped as a girl her age could. She sat grumbling on the “banquette,” the fancy word Arlene had liked to use for “bench,” as if, Mercy thought, the walls around them weren’t really dinged aluminum and the light on the table didn’t come from a stinking pot of kerosene.

Eventually Zeke came banging through the door, letting in a blast of cold. He courted the chill and preferred to sleep out in the smokehouse on Pruitt’s old cot. Mercy, however, was still wary of that space. If there was anywhere on the property that
was haunted by Pruitt, she thought, it would definitely be the smokehouse. She wondered if Zeke chose to bunk there in spite of that fact or precisely because of it, battling his demons in the dark, where no one but a ghost of a man could see him.

“Best fetch a tank of propane when you head over to Berlin,” Mercy said, sliding a bowl of stale food-bank cereal over to him, though what he’d buy the gas with, she didn’t know. Even the change in the coffee can was scant.

Every morning Zeke disappeared in the wheezing truck to hunt for work, but sometimes, Mercy suspected, he simply slipped into the woods, where he felt most comfortable and could at least track some game for a few hours. Mercy couldn’t really fault her brother for that. Hell, there were days when she wanted nothing more than to vanish, too, but someone had to make sure they had clothes on their backs, figure out a way to make expired cans of tuna and stale rice taste like something better, and generally keep Hannah alive.

More and more, Mercy missed her mother. Arlene had been their glue. In addition to a talent for healing, Arlene had possessed other, far more practical gifts. She could track a squirrel through the brush and skin it so fast it barely had time to bleed. She knew the dark and loamy spots where morels and oyster mushrooms sprouted in lush colonies. And most important of all, she’d owned the gift of flight, sensing when to pack up and hit the road before the long arm of the law could reach out and tap them on the shoulders. Or at least she had until that arm caught Zeke six months ago now and popped him in jail for something that wasn’t his fault. It had thrown all of them for a loop, stopping them in their tracks, forcing them to circle the imprisoned Zeke like unsettled planets, just waiting until he got out and they could hit the road again.

Mercy didn’t like to think about the incident, but sometimes the memories pierced the fragile skin of her days anyway, like a new hole in her jeans exposing a patch of flesh underneath. When Zeke caught her floundering in those recollections, teeth tearing at one of her ragged cuticles, her brow furrowed, he would give her a secret gesture from their childhood—a finger under the chin that meant
Eyes up, head up
. It was the way he’d taught her to sit in a blind, finger ready to pull the trigger, her shoulders relaxed, her back straight and strong. It was the way she should always be in the woods, she knew, but wasn’t, which was why a pair of hunters had grabbed her on that dusky evening half a year ago, when she was coming back from a spring with a bucket. Mercy still flinched whenever she remembered the wet feel of their breaths sliding down her neck and on her bared stomach, their teeth on her shoulders. What they did to her was bad, but she couldn’t imagine how it would have ended if Zeke hadn’t come along, fists flying, and told her to get up and run.

She never saw what Zeke did to the two men, but she knew it was serious enough that one of them would never walk right again. Zeke was arrested that same night and sentenced for battery and assault. No one in the area believed his story about protecting his sister over the word of two locals.

“Let me say what happened,” Mercy pleaded, but Zeke had refused to entertain the idea.

“What they would do to you… it would be worse than what went down with those men. It would be like it happening twice, and it would hurt more the second time around. Keep your mouth shut, Mercy. Trust me.”

When Zeke was finally released from prison, he exited leaner in his stomach and thighs and chiseled in his jaw, an effect
heightened by the scruff of beard he’d kept and the buzz cut he was still growing out. He’d come back different inside, too, Mercy had noticed. It didn’t matter now if he was out shooting in the woods or scanning a crowded bar for lit-up women—it seemed that everything had become a kind of hunt to him.

Never a drinker before, he started occasionally losing himself in a bottle or two, although now that they had Hannah to look after, he’d sworn to Mercy that he would stay away from the stuff, especially after the brawl he’d gotten into at Lucky’s Tavern their first week in Titan Falls. Over the occupancy of a barstool of all things, at least ostensibly. The real reason, Mercy suspected, was the death of Pruitt, but when it came to that subject, Zeke was as cool and secretive as a rock buried under snow. She knew that something sat frozen at the center of him, yet all she could see of it on the surface was a white suggestion, nothing but shadow and innuendo.

The only time he’d let his opinion of Pruitt slip was the night of that bar fight. “He was a bastard, right?” he’d rasped, tipping himself into the RV long after dark with a bloody nose and a swollen jaw before doubling over in a coughing fit, holding his ribs, which were probably bruised and maybe even broken. He’d come out of jail with a wheeze in his lungs that wouldn’t respond to any of Mercy’s remedies, and Lord only knew what she would do to fix these new injuries. They couldn’t afford a doctor, and Arlene had died before Mercy could learn enough about healing from her. She needed her brother whole and strong, the way she remembered him before jail, not heaped in a drunken pile. She reached out for Zeke’s hand and took his fingers in hers. She kept her voice low so Hannah, asleep in the loft of the RV, couldn’t hear, and she whispered fiercely into his ear. “Yes, he was a bastard.”

Zeke’s head lolled against Mercy’s chest. His eyes filmed over with grief. “God, I hope I’m nothing like him.”

Mercy gripped his hand for dear life. “No. You’re nothing like him. At least not if you don’t want to be.”

Now Zeke stayed away from anything alcoholic and mostly avoided Titan Falls unless he was looking for work—always stone-cold sober, his hands folded in front of him, hat clenched tight in his fingers as if to prove that he could hold things in check—but it didn’t help. The town had labeled him a ne’er-do-well, a chip off the dead block of Pruitt, and they closed their doors on him hard.

To make it up to Mercy and Hannah, Zeke was being extra solicitous, almost courtly. He brought Hannah a collection of rabbit pelts he’d skinned and dried, and he promised that when there were enough, he would sew her a cloak with a hood. He wouldn’t let Mercy lift anything heavier than a flour sack, and when he chopped wood, he sang all the bluegrass ballads Arlene used to love, one by one, until his voice gave out and grew as rough as the wood chips by his feet. But there were still moments when Mercy saw an unfamiliar rage bubble up in him, and those instants scared her, for just as her time in the woods with those two men was a memory she wished to keep to herself, as stagnant and singular as a puddle drying up on asphalt, she knew that Zeke also had pockets of similar disquiet that wouldn’t evaporate in him either, and she prayed every morning that he would make it through one more day without those waters breaking.

“Where’s he going?” Hannah climbed down from the loft of the RV and began gobbling the bowl of cereal that Mercy had set out for her. Outside, the engine of their old truck shook to life like a reluctant dog being roused to herd. In the months since Arlene’s death, Hannah had become particularly attuned
to Zeke’s comings and goings. She reminded Mercy of a miniature weather vane, always spinning in the wind.