Mercy Snow (6 page)

But you couldn’t have a parade without the horns, Hazel told herself. And so, on the hottest day of that summer, she walked past the sugar bush and past the cluster of graves—one or two more of them every year—gathering chokecherry branches by the armful. Then she came home and stoked a fire on the old woodstove. She soaked the last three skeins of her homespun yarn in alum, waiting to sink the wool in the vat until the berries in the old nicked pot were oozing from fury and heat. The fiber bloomed to blush, then grew winey, then burst into the
color of flame. She stared at the spectrum of dyed and dried yarn piled along the porch and bit her nails raw, because what she saw before her was an awful truth: All the colors of the rainbow weren’t going to bring her Rory back.

She considered burning the whole mess of color she’d created, but that just seemed melodramatic and a waste, and if there was anything Hazel couldn’t abide, it was a waste. So she did the next-best thing she knew. She decided to try accepting what life had given her. She laced up her boots, gathered her wool, and set off into town.

“Why, Hazel. How kind! What’s this all about?” June McAllister answered her door in a blue apron starched to military rigidity, the ruffles on it ironed to razor sharpness. Hazel handed over the basket full of yarn balls, all neatly wound and prettily arranged, the scarlet one hidden down at the bottom. June’s house often smelled of cooking, and that day the air swirled with the scents of lemons, cinnamon, and sugar. In the front hall, Hazel could see a baseball glove and a pair of little boy’s sneakers.

June folded her hands dutifully at her waist. She was known for always welcoming callers politely if not a hundred percent warmly. “Would you like to come in? I have iced tea.”

Hazel shook her head. There was something about June McAllister that Hazel had never really cottoned to—and it wasn’t because she hailed from some fancy college, which was Fergus’s theory. There was something else about June that Hazel couldn’t quite put her finger on, and that was odd, since everything June did was perfect. Maybe that was simply it. In Titan Falls there was no reason to try that hard.

“I can’t,” Hazel said. “I just wanted you to have some samples. I’m going to be selling wool, hand-spun and hand-dyed. Come on out when it suits you.”

June ran one of her polished fingertips over the blue ball of yarn. “This is lovely. I bet you’ll be swimming in business before too long. I’ll make sure I get the word out.”

That’s what I’m counting on
, Hazel thought, but she kept that thought shoved under her hat. “Thank you so much. And you take care of that boy of yours.”

June’s face briefly lit up, and this made Hazel like her a little better. “Oh, I will. They grow up so fast, don’t they?” And then her smile faded a bit.

Hazel’s heart squeezed with that sentence—she wouldn’t lie. She nodded. “Yes, they sure do.” Before June could detect the stirrings of sympathy, Hazel turned and set off down the porch steps cursing. What had she been thinking? Giving away that basket of yarn hadn’t done a single thing to ease her grief. But at least she had company. The stones in the sugar bush were testimony to that—a hardened alphabet of grief spelled out on the ground—and what they said was simple. Everyone lost something once, no matter how beloved. There was nothing you could do. And thus a sorrow to one mother was a sorrow to all in this mill-pounded town, where the dead never really did go away but lingered, their woolen strings tangled up in everybody, knotted and frayed, impossible to snip no matter how hard you damn well tried.

F
or a decade Hazel handled the sheep just fine mostly on her own, but by the time of the accident the work was taking a toll on her. She was fifty, after all. Her knees weren’t what they used to be, and there were days her back pained her so bad she would have let a demon dance on it if she thought it would help.

Once Fergus determined that Hazel needed to get help in
with the sheep, he didn’t let the notion go until she agreed to follow through on his plan. Obviously he had a boy in mind for the job. A strapping high-school lad would do, he concluded, someone a bit like who Rory might have been. A youth who could work after school, or maybe even a fellow who couldn’t score a job in the mill but needed cash all the same. Hazel thought they should be fair about the opportunity. She would, she decided, place an ad in the
Titan Press
.

Sitting at her kitchen table, she chose her words with care.
“Wanted, a strong back for strong work,”
she wrote.
“Good with animals, trustworthy, flexible. Outdoor labor involved. Felons need not apply.”
A week went by, then two, and no one called. Hazel couldn’t understand it. She reworked her phrasing, removing the part about felons and adding in a promise for decent pay, but the telephone line stayed dead. Finally, at the end of October, on a frosty day that boded no good at all in Hazel’s mind, a flurry of footsteps crossed her porch.

“It’s about damn time,” she grumbled, pulling on a cardigan and stumping to the front door to see what the winds had thrown her way. She was disappointed to find a compact, black-haired girl standing at the door clutching a copy of the
Press
with Hazel’s advertisement circled in red.

“Hello, ma’am. I’m here about the job. I’m Mercy Snow.” She stuck out her hand.

Hazel declined to take it. “I don’t need a girl.” She folded her arms across her chest and tucked her chin.

She tried to close the door, but before she could, Mercy’s skinny arm shot out and stopped her. “Hold on. What’s the work, exactly? Your ad don’t say.”

Hazel leveled her gaze. “Sheep.”

“
Your
sheep.”

Not only was the girl stubborn, but Hazel was starting to think she was stupid, too. “Well, obviously.”

“But
you’re
female.”

Hazel couldn’t argue that perceptive detail. She sniffed. “What did you say your name was again?”

The girl’s voice came out a little quieter. “Mercy Snow, ma’am.”

“You related to that late scoundrel Pruitt?”

The girl hung her head and stayed silent, and Hazel didn’t blame her there. If she were related to Pruitt Snow, she’d bow low, too. The man had been a disgrace, living out on that old place on the edge of the Devil’s Slide Road, poaching whatever he could put in his belly, and drinking himself stupid.

As for Pruitt’s children, Hazel had heard that the feckless boy had a record and time under his belt, but she didn’t know much about this sister of his.
And don’t want to know either
, she thought, trying to close the door again. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’re really not who I’m looking for.”

The girl was surprisingly strong. Before Hazel could stop her, she’d stuck her foot between door and jamb. “Why not let me work today and see how it goes? I’ll do it for free.”

Hazel considered. “Nothing’s ever free.”

“So pay me if you want.” The girl shrugged, but underneath the hard glaze of her eyes Hazel could see a slick of need. She ran all the rumors about Pruitt through her mind again. Several stories immediately sprang to her imagination, none of them very comforting.

On the other hand, the girl looked strong enough, and beggars couldn’t be choosers. It’s not like there was a team of young men thundering across her porch for the work. “Fine,” Hazel finally said, swinging open the door a fraction of an inch wider,
wondering who exactly was helping whom. “I’ll give you one morning. If my sheep take to you, you can stay.”

“Oh, they will.” Mercy scraped her boots carefully on the mat before crossing the threshold, trailing the scents of pine sap and bacon grease into Hazel’s clean hall. “You don’t need to worry about that, ma’am. Animals are just fine with me, I always find.” Her face clouded for a moment, and her eyes grew dark. “Folks are more often the problem.”

Hazel sighed and closed the door quick before the girl could drag in the wind, flies, or something worse. “Folks mostly are.”

A
ll through that November, Mercy delivered herself to Hazel’s doorstep early and lingered for the ostensible purpose of work, but the real reason she loitered on Hazel’s farm was for the company. Out in the barn, the Shetlands were constantly bleating and stammering over one another, and up above them a colony of starlings lived in the rafters and could set up a ruckus of their own. There was sound going on inside the house, too—the gentle hum of Hazel’s spinning wheel, the wheezing gasp of the vacuum that Mercy offered to run at the ends of her shifts, Hazel rattling sudsy spoons and forks in a sink full of dishes. Sounds that reminded Mercy that in spite of Arlene’s death, life was going on all around her and that it was fine; she could let her shoulders relax and her mind wander a spell the way she was never able to when she was looking after Hannah.

There was one spot at Hazel’s, however, that ran a chill up Mercy’s nerves the single time she saw it. Down at the end of the valley, where the pastureland narrowed and the forest took over, hidden under a bare canopy of trees, there was a smattering of stones, some of them roughly carved, some of them still jagged.
They weren’t large, but there were too many of them to be natural. Mercy rounded them twice before she found the stone with Rory’s name on it and a third time before she realized she was standing in a sugar bush—unused for quite some time by the looks of it. She paused for a moment, painfully aware that she was caught in a twin bower of sorts, bones spreading under the earth even as branches closed above it, and decided it would be a very good idea never to tell Hazel she had trespassed on the spot.

Tonight there was a cold snap whipping in the air, and Mercy was thinking about food. She and Hazel had just finished making sure the sheep were locked securely in the barn, that they had water and enough feed, that none of the rams were fixing to fight. “Margie Wall swore to Fergus that she saw a gray wolf out by Bretton Woods the other week,” Hazel said as they wound their way back to the house, her breath steaming into the night air. It made a spirited cloud to rival the size of her whole head. “Skinny thing. Quick, too, but I think she’s full of it. Margie Wall will say anything to bend somebody’s ear her way.”

Mercy thought about that. The green sway of the forest was the most familiar thing in the world to her, but at the same time it was full of leafy mysteries better left alone. Mercy knew that there were some things in the trees you didn’t want to have to answer for.

As they clattered into the kitchen, Mercy saw that Hazel had set a plump turkey out on the draining board to defrost. Thanksgiving was tomorrow. Mercy stared at the bird, picturing the spread Hazel would no doubt conjure up, and her mouth watered. The Snows’ celebration was always more of a paper-napkin-and-beer affair. Zeke had come home the other day toting an extra sack from the food bank and had proceeded to slam the wares one by one on the RV’s single chipped counter: a can
of cranberry sauce, a can of corn pone, and two tins of green beans. Combined with the venison he’d shot the day before, it would be a passable enough holiday, better than some they’d had, especially if Mercy could rustle up something fresh—it didn’t matter what to her—just something with some fiber in it and no tang of metal aftertaste.

She had an urge to make things nice for Hannah for a change. And maybe a real holiday would start to loosen some of the tighter angles of Zeke, prying him open and bringing back the daydreaming boy Mercy remembered from childhood.

A woman’s magazine sat on Hazel’s kitchen counter. The cover featured a sumptuous Thanksgiving feast laid out on a farmhouse table much like Hazel’s. In the background a fire roared in a brick fireplace, casting an appetizing glow on the bourbon-glazed turkey (according to the caption), green-bean succotash, and cranberry chutney. As quietly as she could, Mercy flipped through the pages and ripped out the recipe for the green beans, folded it, and slipped it into her pocket. There was no chance she would ever be able to reproduce anything like what it offered, of course, but she liked the idea of carrying the promise around anyway. It was like having a lucky penny or a road map to some other existence. Hannah had her pilfered library books for that, and Zeke had the hours he spent in the woods, but the only thing Mercy could rely on for transcendence was the coil of her own soft innards. She was never full of the things she wished to be.