Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker
“There was a bunch of metal meeting wood, tree branches whacking me when I got out, and shitloads of broken glass.”
“Didn’t you look in the ravine?”
Zeke shrugged. “I don’t know.” He ran a hand over his bruised face. “Jesus. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve seen enough in my time, okay?”
Mercy wriggled her legs to keep her blood going in the cold. “There must have been noises. Voices. Something.” Or maybe there hadn’t been. Maybe Zeke had been ahead of the bus all along. Zeke possessed a hunter’s walk, Mercy knew. Even in heavy boots or in the wettest of mud, he rolled heel to toe, heel to toe, his breath held tucked in his lungs for later. He owned the timing of a hunter as well—not the discipline of a warrior’s rush and charge but the wait-and-see of a stalker followed up with deadly aim. If there was something to be found, Zeke always uncovered it.
Up high above them, Mercy could hear the faint, rattling approach of a vehicle—probably Abel or one of his minions. Because of the complication of Gert’s bones, they kept returning. Men like that would last five minutes against her brother in the wild, Mercy thought, but if they caught him, it would be a different matter entirely. She leaned forward. “You know if you don’t fight this tooth and nail and come up with some proof that you’re innocent, they’ll put you up for murder, and that will break my heart.”
For a moment her words almost had the intended effect. Zeke’s eyes watered, but all too soon he overcame the emotion, clearing his throat and leaning away from Mercy. He stood up, brushing off the seat of his dungarees. Frustrated, she joined him. One jail, she could see, had become much like another for her brother. Innocent, guilty—he didn’t seem to care anymore what he got labeled. He was both. He was neither.
Zeke regarded his sister. “So you aren’t fixing to leave.” It wasn’t a question.
Mercy put her hand in her pocket. Inside was the knife with the carved stag’s head. She didn’t feel like giving it back to Zeke just now, though. “I can’t. Hannah wouldn’t make it in the cold, with nowhere to go. We have no money, and wherever we go, there’d still be a warrant out for you.” But there was another reason, too, one that, once she acknowledged it, resounded in her like a bulging iron bell. Someone had to make things right—for Fergus and Hazel, for the Flytes, for her brother—and if Zeke wasn’t going to, then Mercy would.
“Then I’m not going anywhere either.”
This was exactly what Mercy had been afraid of—Zeke’s noble tendencies coming out again in exactly the wrong way. “Zeke, you have to leave. Only for a little while. It’s just dumb not to. You’ll get caught for sure.”
He grinned. “Not if I’m right smart.” And with a quick kiss on her cheek, he was gone. As he slipped back into the woods, Mercy felt a tight ball of grief forming in her chest. She’d heard plenty of variations of stupid applied to the Snow name over the years, but “right smart” was one thing none of them had ever gotten called. She was about to begin picking her way back up to their clearing when she heard the rustle of Zeke behind her once again.
He hesitated and then spoke in a rush. “I did see one thing. Something in town, before the crash. I saw Cal McAllister talking to that blond girl who died. Outside the movie theater. She dropped her glove when she went in, and he took it. He was with another woman—someone who wasn’t his wife—and that girl, she saw the whole thing. It seemed like he was promising her something, but I don’t know what.”
Mercy’s mind swirled with this information. She almost didn’t feel Zeke’s lips as he touched them to her numb cheek. The sensation pulled her back to herself. “Wait.” She drew the knife out of her pocket. “You forgot this.” She eyed him sternly. “If you’re going to risk getting caught just to carve necklaces and trinkets for Hannah and leave them in the smokehouse, this blade does a better job.”
Zeke colored, then took the knife and folded it into his own pocket. In a quick blink, he was gone, leaving Mercy to head back toward daylight and the deputies, wondering what a man like Cal McAllister was doing holding on to the mitten of a dead girl, not to mention being seen with a lady who wasn’t his wife, and what a woman like June McAllister would do if she happened to find those things out.
Tucked alone in the very last pew of St. Bart’s, a shabby watchman’s cap pulled close around her ears, Mercy shifted uncomfortably, unsure of what to do while she waited for the funeral of Suzie Flyte to begin. Arlene hadn’t exactly been a wealth of church etiquette. Up front, Mercy could hear the whispering of the town wives—no doubt wondering how she had the nerve to show her face at this event. In the very foremost pew, she could see the back of the woman she knew to be Suzie’s mother. Unlike the other wives, she was sitting with a fierce stillness that was familiar to Mercy. It was the posture of a woman struck so many times with hard luck that she could only wait to see what more the world would throw at her.
The town wives had arrived at St. Bart’s with time to spare, fully ready to engage in conversational battle, winter scarves loosened, handbags clutched reverently, lips cocked for a round of whispering. They cast uneasy glances at Mercy, swapped knowing looks, and then set to work trading information. Mercy leaned forward to glean what she could.
“When she’s not out with Hazel’s sheep, I hear she hangs over Fergus in his hospital bed, like that’s going to do any good,” Alice Lincoln hissed to Dot and her husband in the third pew from the front of the church.
Next to Alice, Margie Wall wore a face clouded with the misgivings of a devout woman. “Those Snows are bad news, mark my words.”
Alice nodded. “The boy certainly is. And I don’t even need to go into that old business with Pruitt and Gert.”
“What did he do anyhow?” Pregnant Stella Farnsworth had slipped into the pew next to Margie, her eyes rounder than usual. Margie licked her lips. When a morsel of gossip was this good, it was best delivered low and slow. “It’s not what he did. It’s what he supposedly knew.”
Stella wrinkled her brow, not understanding where Marge was leading. Dot sighed, exasperated. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stella. He was always insinuating that Henry McAllister was responsible for Gert’s death. Lord knows what Cal was paying Pruitt to keep quiet about his father, truth to the tale or not. Gossip like that’s not what you want on a mill floor.”
Stella’s eyes flickered open even wider. She was far younger than the other women, not even born when Gert disappeared. “Do you really believe Henry McAllister might have killed her? Why would he do that?”
Margie shrugged. “I don’t know. No one does. But it’s suspicious, don’t you think? I’ll tell you one thing. Cal’s certainly kept the issue hushed. I’ve always wondered about that.”
The women sat back in their pews, hands folded in their laps, and thought about this. They’d been warned by their husbands never to interfere with any of the dealings of the McAllisters, however large or small they might be. Did they want their livelihoods to dry up like the river in a drought year, leaving them bare-bellied and parched? they were warned. Or did they prefer to work together to protect what they had the only way they knew? Mill business wasn’t always pretty—no one was trying to say otherwise—but when was anything ever lovely in Titan Falls?
A new pair of footsteps rapped up the center aisle of the church’s bare wood floor, and the ladies fell silent at the familiar, authoritative rhythm. Without a word June McAllister took her customary pew up front, her back straight, her arm cradled firmly in her husband’s grip.
“Do you think they heard?” Stella Farnsworth whispered loudly, and Margie shushed her, glancing nervously over at June, who didn’t twitch but simply bent forward as if in pain or prayer, indicating with her silence that she had indeed heard more of the conversation than she was in a mood to let on.
Apparently now the service could begin. The Reverend Thomas Giles, eighty if he was a day, Mercy guessed, and so shortsighted he almost had to lick the prayer book to read it, appeared in the front of the church with a meek ?
But their son did not sit with them. Instead he lingered at the back of the church near Mercy, hands jammed in his pockets, a heavy scowl gathering on his face, the kind of frown Arlene would have said she could scoop up and slice cold. Mercy glanced out the church window. Today ground and sky, heaven and earth were equally frozen and gray, and none of them looked to be a place she’d want to send a loved one. On the other hand, the same thing stood for the woods Zeke was running in. Mercy startled as Nate began to sit down next to her, bumping her hip. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and frowned harder when he recognized her. Mercy produced her own unpleasant expression. We’re all God’s children, dirty or clean, she wanted to point out, but something in Nate’s posture—the broken angle of his bowed head, maybe—made her look closer at him, and what she saw tugged at her heart.
She followed his gaze to the back of his mother’s head several pews forward. In every town, Mercy had learned over her years of wandering, you could always find a woman just like June McAllister—glossy-haired, fond of pert little scarves, a woman whose front porch was reliably and seasonally decorated. Sometimes she was a schoolteacher. Sometimes she was the preacher’s wife. It was the kind of woman who social services would no doubt say Hannah should have as a mother. As a girl, in fact, Mercy used to imagine just what that would be like—to have a pair of feathery hands soothing her forehead before sleep and hot breakfasts waiting when she woke up, to be followed wherever she went with a solicitous gaze. But that was before the men in the woods had gotten hold of her. Now, Mercy was grateful for the absence of such a figure, who would demand to know what had happened that day and, in doing so, would open up the wound fresh again, like shooting a buck twice to kill it once.
Mercy glanced at Nate again. In his looks he resembled his father more, she would have said. He had Cal’s wheat-colored hair and blue eyes but June’s graceful bearing. Rich and handsome. A combination Mercy suspected she was never going to get to experience in this lifetime, not with her mud-puddle bloodlines. But maybe Suzie Flyte had had herself a taste for that kind of life. Mercy leaned a little closer to Nate. She couldn’t say what prompted her mouth to spit out what it did next, unless it was the simple fact that she had almost nothing to lose. “Was she your girlfriend?”
Nate clenched his jaw. “She was too smart for that.” His blunt reply surprised her. Mercy leaned back a fraction of an inch and stole another peek at him. Maybe the angle of his head wasn’t broken after all, she decided. It could simply be bitter. Here was a boy with the weight of a legacy teetering on his shoulders—something Mercy knew nothing about—along with a heap of accounts he was probably going to have to grow up and settle if the rumors she’d heard around town were true. At that moment June turned her head, peering anxiously back at her son. When she spied Mercy, she shot her a nasty look.
Mercy waited until June turned back around and the congregation had risen for the opening hymn. Aside from Hazel, she hadn’t had occasion to talk to anyone in town about the accident, never mind someone who’d been a part of it. This was probably neither the time nor the place, but Mercy knew she wasn’t going to get another chance. Maybe he’d seen a second car or something. She leaned closer to Nate, careful not to let anyone hear. “Do you remember anything from the crash?”
His answer was quick. “No.” The organ crashed and hit an off-key note, and Mercy flinched. Nate turned his full gaze on her. “That land’s not any good your family’s sitting on, you know. You all should clear out.”
Mercy set her chin. “And go where? Some of us don’t have a mill to our names.”
Nate snorted, but his voice had a little tremor hiding in it. “Believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
The congregation rustled and seated itself, Mercy and Nate included. They didn’t speak for the rest of the service, but Mercy couldn’t stop thinking about the boy sitting next to her and how, were their fates reversed, the last thing she would want would be to inherit the din of the Titan Paper Mill, just as Nate probably wouldn’t relish all the miles she and Zeke and Hannah toted up in a typical year. Surely, she mused, there had to be a middle way of passing through the world, something between the crunch of time clocks and packing up and drifting wherever the wind blew you. But what would that kind of life look like? Mercy had no idea. Whenever she let her mind run along those lines, all she could ever picture was Hannah’s small face with the pinch fattened out of it and a burst of laughter lighting up her eyes, and Zeke no longer feeling the need to check over his shoulder before he took a step.
The last trill of the organ warbled into nothingness, leaving a gaping hole in the air of the church that felt to Mercy like possibility—a silence that could be filled with anything at all and folks would choose to believe it—before the moment was swallowed by the rising tide of the townspeople’s feet.
All through Suzie’s service, June struggled to keep her chin steady and her eyes dry. St. Bartholomew’s was packed, and the McAllisters were tardy, so much so that they found themselves having to squeeze in shoulder to shoulder against Archie Lincoln and his wife, Alice. June looked behind her as she settled herself, concerned that there was no room for Nate, and out of the side of her eye she caught him lowering himself into a pew in the back, right next to Mercy Snow. Alarmed, she half rose to go fetch him, to have him sit anywhere except in that one spot, but the Reverend Giles appeared and asked them all to stand, and June knew that her chance to correct the situation had passed. Nate would have to stay where he was.
Across from her, June could see Dena’s shoulders shaking, though she wasn’t making a sound. Fred Flyte’s thick arm girded Dena’s waist, and the more she shook, the tighter he squeezed, until June wondered that Dena could breathe anymore at all. June glanced sideways at Cal to see what his reaction was, half of her wishing the guilt of what she suspected he’d done would come spilling out of him right then and there, the other half praying it never would. His face, however, remained a mask betraying nothing. When did he learn to do that? she wondered. And why did I never notice until now? She cracked a hymnal open in front of her and sang the appointed hymn, rose for the Lord’s Prayer, and did not look at any of the faces around her.
When Suzie was younger, she’d been just like the daughter June had always longed for and never been able to have—a blond slip of a child with a gap between her front teeth and eyes that picked things apart. She’d had a bottomless appetite, June recalled, bigger than Nate’s, even. Her eyes would light up at the sight of June pulling a fresh tray of sugar cookies from the oven or dishing out a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and before June knew what she was doing, she’d be laying one extra place at the table.
“I can’t seem to keep the child in food,” Dena used to apologize over stitchwork during sewing circles, her own cheeks gaunt from years of getting by on beans and bread. “She’s got a hollow leg and then some. Next time you send her on back to us.”
“Oh, I don’t mind having her over here one bit,” June always replied, and what could Dena say to that, when she knew about June’s inability to have more children? Dena had too many. She was happy to share. After feeding Suzie, sometimes June would offer to comb her hair, braiding the mass of it into two shining plaits and tying their ends with bits of clean satin ribbon she fished out of her sewing bag. She longed to make a dress for the girl—something with a big skirt and smocking—or whip her up a rag doll with yellow hair and blue button eyes, but she knew that Dena wouldn’t let her daughter accept such gifts. Mill pride had its limits, and June knew her place. Suzie continued to wear her brothers’ old cast-offs, and truth be told, she seemed happy in them.
Or at least she had until a few months ago, when Suzie and Nate suddenly seemed to have become painfully aware of their differences. Nate had grown busier with sports and studying, and Suzie had started hanging out with a crowd of girls who lined their eyes in swaths of hard black kohl, collected boys’ class rings as trophies,
“ ‘In the midst of life we are in death; from whom can we seek help?’ ” intoned Reverend Giles, and a sob escaped from the congregation, floating up among the church’s dusty rafters. “ ‘From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered.’ ”
What could Suzie’s sins possibly have been? June wondered. Surely nothing more than the usual trespasses of a rambunctious teenage girl. Maybe a case of loving the wrong boy from one of the outlying rival towns. Maybe even something petty, like shoplifting an eye shadow from the drugstore in Berlin or swiping a bottle of rye from the package store. Things Nate had maybe even tried himself, though June didn’t think so. Not her son. Not when he had the whole of the McAllister reputation to uphold and the threat of his father’s temper looming over him. Unlike Suzie, Nate had something to look forward to and expectations to fill. One day, Cal coached his son again and again, the mill would be his, and he couldn’t very well run it with the ghosts of rumors haunting him. “The McAllisters don’t have skeletons to hide,” he always said. “We’re all backbone, pure and simple. Remember that.”
June tucked her hands in front of her and recited the Lord’s Prayer, considering the constitutions of the two men she loved best in the world. If what Cal said were true—and based on her late father-in-law’s rumored behavior, she had her doubts about that—if the McAllisters were all spine up and down, then what place had they left for hearts?
After the service a ragged receiving line formed on the way out of the church, and Mercy Snow stepped up to Dena. At her touch, to June’s surprise, Dena quit sobbing and calmed enough for Mercy to press a twist of wool decorated with roughly carved wooden stars into Dena’s hand. “This is for you. It’s just a little thing my brother once made, so you don’t forget to look up at the stars from time to time and remember there’s a heaven.”