Mercy Snow (5 page)

Mercy cleared Hannah’s bowl and rinsed it, regretting that she couldn’t offer her another helping. “Berlin.” She turned to see Hannah making a beeline for the door. Before she could reach it, Mercy caught her by the collar and sat her down hard. “Where do you think you’re headed off to?” Though she knew full well. Hannah had an insatiable curiosity about the smokehouse, a place that Mercy still found unsettling in the extreme. “That thing’s bound to be chock-full of snakes, spiders, or both. You stay in here.”

“All the snakes are sleeping for the season.” Hannah crossed her arms and pouted, though she had a point. The ground was chilly as a widow’s heart. But Mercy had other reasons for holding her little sister back. She knew too well what could happen to a girl alone in the dark of the trees, and it was something she was determined that Hannah would never experience.

And maybe Hannah wouldn’t have to either, Mercy half hoped. She herself had recently found work with a woman named Hazel Bell, who kept sheep. Maybe Zeke would nab something soon, too. And maybe then they would settle in better. Zeke would find a way to change his reputation in town. Mercy would no longer feel the need to fall asleep with a knife stuck under her pillow.

And maybe hogs would sparkle and fly.

Hannah, sensing her older sister’s apprehension, moved in for the kill, pestering Mercy with a subject she wouldn’t drop. “Am I really going to get to go to school?” She leaned her scrawny body forward, all big ears and skinned knees, her teeth crowding together in the front of her mouth.

Mercy eyed her sourly. She’d known only a couple of schools
off and on throughout her own childhood, and she hadn’t thought much of them. “We’ll see. You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“Oh, it is.” Hannah clutched her fists to her bony chest. “It
is
.”

“Hush.” Mercy turned around and put a hand on her half sister’s shoulder. Hannah was literally a gift from heaven, but honestly, everything about the child was a mystery. Unlike Zeke, words were Hannah’s biggest problem. She never shut her mouth when she should, and when she wasn’t talking, she was reading or picking up some fancy words off the radio. The first thing she did whenever they pulled into a new campsite or town was find the nearest library, and the second thing she went and found was the closest school. “You’re
supposed
to be sending me,” she would harangue Arlene. “It’s the law.”

Mercy sighed now. Hannah knew far too much and not nearly enough for an eight-year-old, and it drove Mercy crazy. She’d never planned to have to mother anyone—she still needed her own mother—but the love she felt for Hannah was as simple and huge as the sun rising in the sky every morning, a phenomenon so primal and necessary that she knew she would die without it.

“Here.” Mercy fumbled in one of the cloth bags bundled near her feet. “Put on your hat. It’s extra cold in here today.” It was Hannah’s favorite one, a ridiculous swirl of rainbow colors topped with a pom-pom. They’d gotten it for fifty cents in a secondhand store. “Zeke needs to get us more propane.”

“You off to work?”

Mercy bundled herself into one of Zeke’s old jackets. It broke her heart leaving Hannah alone, but what choice did she have? A handful of twenties in the coffee can wasn’t going to get them through the coming winter.

“Yup. Off to take care of the sheep.” She didn’t want to be late. It was a half mile into town, and Mercy had another mile to go on foot after that.

Hannah’s face lit up. “Can I come see them, too?”

Mercy rubbed a hand over Hannah’s delicate shoulder blades, which stuck out of her back like hopeful little nubs. They were Mercy’s favorite part of her sister. “I’m afraid not. Not this time anyway. How about this? If you promise not to talk to
anyone
, I’ll drop you at the library. At least you’ll be warm.”

Hannah sulked her way into her parka. There was a new tear at the elbow, Mercy saw. She couldn’t believe how rough Hannah was on cloth. “I’d rather see the sheep.”

Mercy bit her lip. “I know, but maybe let’s wait. Nothing terrible ever came from that.”
Nothing wonderful either
, she thought as they clattered down the RV steps into the cold, but given the life they were leading, she didn’t feel like she needed to point that truth out.

O
ver the slow course of years, Hazel Bell would lose sight of why or how Mercy Snow first landed in Titan Falls, but when she thought about it, it seemed that the girl had sneaked up on her the same way keeping sheep did: out of plain nowhere and without Hazel’s permission, a necessary evil, or maybe a blessing in disguise, though, really, Hazel suspected, the difference between the two was about as small as the pulpy space squeezed between the walls of the devil’s own heart.

When it came to honest company, there was nothing like a flock of Shetlands, in Hazel’s opinion, and honest animals needed honest people to care for them. Sheep were trusting creatures, susceptible to everything from thievery to coyotes to hoof disease, and while this made them placid and easy as pie to corral, by the time Hazel met Mercy, she was starting to have her days when she resented having to think of every little thing all the damn time. More often than not, she was finding herself in a state of blind worry. Would the ewe with the spot of black near her tail produce white offspring or speckled? Would the ram with the broken horn be bullied to kingdom come by his brothers? Poor Fergus would come home from a long day of driving buses or tow trucks wanting his recliner and a hot
plate right quick, and Hazel would just about natter his ear off. “What do you think?” she’d stew. “Should I put paper and straw down in the barn or wood chips? The paper turned straight to mash last year, remember? But I’m worried those chips might combust.”

There was only so much gab a man could handle, even an extremely patient specimen like Fergus, and finally, after two long months of Hazel’s rising anxiety, it got to be where he’d plain had enough. “You need a hand,” he told his wife the night she started in on the wood chips. “Your knees are giving out. Your back hurts. It’s time to get someone.”

Fergus never wanted sheep in the first place, Hazel knew, but the man was nothing if not a soft touch. One blustery spring night ten years ago, he was called to a towing job down near the Franconia Notch, and when he stomped back in to their front room, still shaking the March wet off his coat, Hazel saw that he was holding a dirty towel all bundled up. It worried her whenever he was out in the weather. “What the Sam Hill—” she started to say, but before she could finish the words, Fergus unfolded a corner and showed her what he’d brought. It was an orphaned Shetland, hours old, all legs and bleat, its white wool marred by a single black spot.

He slid the creature right onto Hazel’s lap. “The farmer doesn’t want it. Said he was going to let nature take its course if I wasn’t interested.”

Hazel eyed the stony March clouds piling on the horizon, then the lamb, and felt such a clamping around her heart that it was as if the Almighty himself had shoved his fist down her throat and given her soul a squeeze. She started to protest—what did she want with a barnyard animal when she didn’t even have a barn?—but the little beast skittered its hooves around
her thighs, then looked up at her, and that was that. Hazel was a goner. The fact was, the lamb needed her and she needed it. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she growled at Fergus. “Go fetch a box or something.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Fergus tried to put on his hangdog look, but Hazel could see a sneaky half smile dancing around the corners of his mouth, and she knew she’d been had.
Fine
, she thought. Sheep it would be, then.

Sheep turned out to be her salvation.

T
he real reason Fergus brought that sorry animal into her life, Hazel realized full well, wasn’t wholly to do with her tender heart. In actual fact, it had more to do with her broken one. It wasn’t Fergus’s fault, though, this flaw of Hazel’s. She’d warned him before they got married that she had a crack running right down the middle of her soul and that over time it would very likely only get worse, and in this she turned out to be correct.

Simply put, Hazel had been born with a shaky foundation. Orphaned at birth, she’d been found fifty years earlier laid out naked and blue on the banks of the Androscoggin. It was a rare but not totally uncommon occurrence at the time. Lots of girls back then got themselves in trouble and couldn’t fix it, and some of the poor wretches made the decision to let the elements do their work. In Hazel’s case mankind interfered, specifically an itinerant Portuguese logger who gave her over to the Duncan Home for Girls in Gorham while she was still wet behind the ears. There she was brought up right quick. The place wasn’t bad, but it was hard on a body. Hazel and the other girls always had just enough and not a thread more to their names: two pairs of woolen stockings kept going with strategic darning
and cut down to socks when they outgrew them, an itchy hemp pinafore that Hazel couldn’t stain if she tried, and a rickety cot she learned to crimp her bones into as they stretched. She wasn’t sorry to leave when she turned seventeen and wasn’t unhappy either when she heard that the place shut down a few years later, right after she met and married Fergus.

Fergus had enough gentleness in him to make up for a whole world of sorrow, and right from the beginning he did just that for Hazel. They saved their money, Fergus from his driving and Hazel from odd jobs cleaning or waitressing in local diners, and they eventually bought a place outside Titan Falls in the pocket of a grassy valley where life was good.

Much as she wanted to, Hazel couldn’t find it in herself ever wholly to leave the river or the woods where she’d been discovered. Maybe because the Androscoggin had spawned her—or was the closest thing she would ever know to what had—it both repelled and attracted her. When she went too far away from it, she grew anxious and irritable, feeling she was missing something, and when she traveled too close, she grew panicked and afraid. So she compromised, setting up house with Fergus near enough to Titan Falls that the mineral smell of the mud drifted faintly in the air during the muggy summer months but otherwise kept a respectable distance.

For a good long while, Hazel managed to forget that she was a soul who’d been put on the earth untethered. She bore a son and tended a garden of sweet peas and roses right outside her kitchen, but the river played its tricks and orphaned her all over again. When Rory was two, he passed away from a hard-sucking blood cancer. Hazel didn’t want much to do with life after that—any of it—and she knew in her marrow that most mothers would feel the same. To be a mother, after all, was to know the most
perfect fullness on earth followed by the most terrible emptiness. Even with healthy children, you were always losing them a little, Hazel figured, right from the moment the cord was cut and you heard that first cry. With Rory it just happened faster and more painfully, catching her by surprise.

She puzzled the town by refusing to bury her son in the tiny cemetery adjacent to St. Bart’s, overlooking the Androscoggin. Instead she convinced Fergus to lay their boy to rest in the sugar bush at the end of their little valley, surrounded by trees, cradled by nothing but good black earth.

In spite of that, though, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the damn river, insolent in its foulness, capped by the belching smokestack of the Titan Mill, had somehow stolen her child, and Hazel was nothing if not obdurate. She would be a monkey’s butt if she was going to give Rory over to the Androscoggin for all eternity. Fergus, knowing the futility of resisting his wife’s opinions, dug a deep hole under one of the maples and marked the spot with a crude granite block he carved himself. When a woman in town gave birth to a stillborn a few months later, Hazel added a second stone out near Rory’s, for remembrance, she said. Soon another stone was placed as another child died in a car accident, and then another when an infant succumbed to cot death, until a small unofficial graveyard of the unconsecrated grew upon the spot, feeding the trees with unrealized sweetness.

For the next decade, as the stones in the sugar bush slowly increased, Hazel foundered. She let her garden sink to weeds. She respectfully declined to attend St. Bart’s with Fergus. The townswomen, horrified by the graveyard that Hazel was curating at the end of her valley, kept their distance, choosing to take their chances with the river. None of it mattered to Hazel. Nothing at all mattered to her, in fact, until the night that Fergus
walked in the door with that lamb. It was the first thing since Rory that Hazel cared about the end of. Without her, Hazel saw, the creature would die, and she didn’t have the energy to go through that misery again, not even with a stupid bleating sheep. So she roused herself, fed it by hand, kept it warm by the stove, and when it was ready, Hazel got it a mate. Two Shetlands became four, and four became ten, until she had built herself a little family in fleece, all of it blessedly white except for two spotted ewes, which Hazel kept anyway because she of all people knew that nothing on this godforsaken earth was ever perfect no matter how much she wished it might be so.

T
here were three basic choices with sheep: fleece, meat, or milk, and after a long, hard think, Hazel chose fleece. It turned out to be the correct one, because she didn’t have the heart for butchery or the patience to wait for cheese to age, and except for that pair of spotted rogues her babies produced beautiful ecru wool, perfect for spinning and dyeing.

Hazel’s coming to color was the second half of her revival, but she arrived at it slowly, the same way she took to husbandry. The first time Aggie, the shearer, visited, Hazel didn’t have the foggiest clue what to do with the raggedy pelts he stacked in front of the house at the end of his time. When she said so, he stared at her with his mouth cricked open, showing all the stumps of his teeth. “Why, you skirt them, woman, and wash them, and go from there. These can be whatever you want them to be.” And that was when Hazel first understood that she’d been given much more than wool. She’d been granted the stuff of life.

She began her experiments in dyeing with the shade of black, because ever since Rory’s death that was what had filled her
heart. When summer arrived, she took herself out gathering up and down the swath of her valley, returning with her arms full of sumac branches. Then she fetched an old pot, boiled a batch of the leaves, and watched with satisfaction as the alum-soaked skeins she’d spun turned a sickly gray and then a dusky black. She lifted them out, staining her fingertips, and hung the wool to dry off the side of the porch.

When the cornflowers bloomed later in the season, they lightened Hazel’s mood to blue, and she added drips and dots of cerulean to the black smears on the porch railing. Dandelion roots gave her brown, lichen and lilac provided a dulled gold and orange, and lily-of-the-valley produced a toxic green quite suited to her general interior mood. Slowly the railings and boards of the porch splattered, then smudged, then erupted in the muddy rainbow of her grief.

For all that, Hazel only ever made the color red one single time, with the most peculiar result. First she edged up to the shade with pink (roses mixed with the tips of lavender) and purple (pulped huckleberries), then danced around it with a peachy brown leached from the branches of a weeping willow tree. She wasn’t sure yet if she was ready to let red—the happy buzz of paper valentines and velvet Christmas bows—back into her soul.