Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker
She was alone. Cal was leaving straight from the mill for the lake cabin, where they always spent Thanksgiving if the road wasn’t snowed in yet. She was supposed to wait for her seventeen-year-old son, Nate, to return from a trip with the church youth group to the movies in Berlin, then head out to the cabin with him, where she would finish baking her cake, infusing the air with a bittersweet haze before she finally slept. All around her on the counter, neatly boxed, were the trappings for their holiday feast—the plump turkey, legs folded like those of a portly gentleman taking his ease, a sack of dusty yams, a bag of marshmallows, and a stalk of brussels sprouts. Two cans of pumpkin. A tin of lard. Cream and pearl onions and white bread already cubed and mixed with sage for the stuffing. June could name the contents with her eyes closed. Too much for three people, and certainly too much for June to load into the car with no help, but tradition called.
She ran her hands over her hips, ruing how square they were growing. Nothing helped. Every year there was just the littlest bit more of her. June’s mother had been a wide-set woman, too, and it was one of the things June had sworn she wouldn’t repeat in her life, even if it required ever-increasing severity. She baked cakes and cookies. She grilled steaks, and she creamed potatoes, and she buttered bowls of peas, but she rarely ate any of it. Maybe that was why, more and more frequently, she felt like an observer when it came to her own life.
In the earlier years of their marriage, Cal used to come home early from the mill and help her carry the Thanksgiving items out to the car, fitting boxes in the trunk like he was doing a puzzle, laughing and trying to grab June’s hips when she swished past him for another load. But that was before—back when Nate was still in elementary school, when the mill could barely keep up with orders, and most definitely before Cal returned from a business weekend in Boston with another woman’s bra rolled inside one of his dirty shirts.
Although it was five years ago now, June could still close her eyes and see the black scrap of a thing like she was peering through a freshly washed pane of glass. It had been lacy and so cheaply made that June hadn’t even had to ask if the woman was someone Cal was serious about. When she confronted him, Cal had admitted everything and then promised it wouldn’t happen again. And it hadn’t either, as far as June could tell. Still, ever since then it seemed as if Cal had come back to her in body but not completely in spirit. Normally it didn’t bother June—much. Marriages cooled. Their strings loosened and stretched, like the sagging plastic straps on old lawn furniture. It didn’t mean you had to rush off and buy a whole new set. Until tonight, in fact, June hadn’t even thought of that other woman.
The phone rang. June jumped and wiped a smear of flour off her forearm and then very slowly laid down the rubber spatula she was holding. The back of her neck stiffened, and the little hairs on her forearms stood up. She glanced out the window. The evening had gotten genuinely nasty. When it was icy and wet out like this, when the dark started to come early and the days grew short, evening calls were never very welcome things.
“Hello?” Just as she feared, through a terrible cloud of static, she heard the gruff voice of Abel Goode, the sheriff. “Abel,” she said, untying her apron and trying to keep herself calm. “What can I do for you?”
She and Cal received calls all the time from Abel—some of them serious, some of them less so. Titan Falls had never had a proper mayor. Instead it relied on generations of McAllister men and their wives to function as de facto arbiters of the town’s disasters, windfalls, and disagreements. The phone might ring at midnight—indeed did on many occasions—and Cal would be summoned to help break up a bar fight, or negotiate a round of gambling gone bad, or help someone haul a drunk friend out of the river: men’s business, always, matters of blood, whiskey, money, and fists. The stickier details of town life—the pain of childbearing, for example, or the ways you could feed five children on one mill man’s salary, the consequences of early widowhoods and pregnancies—were left to the women to solve with common gossip and tight purse strings.
The line crackled as June forced herself to concentrate. It turned out that this time Abel wasn’t saying anything good. “June, I don’t know how to tell you this, but there’s been an accident with the St. Bart’s youth-group bus. It’s plunged off Devil’s Slide Road. You’d best come quick.”
All June could do was form an empty balloon of noise, an ineffective syllable sent heavenward. She closed her eyes. No one ever got close to the edge of Devil’s Slide Road unless it was someone who deliberately wanted to take the long way down, but surely that couldn’t be the case with Fergus Bell, who’d been driving the youth group’s bus for thirty years and who could make those slippery turns with one hand roped to his chest.
June felt the backs of her knees start to buckle, but Abel barked an order. “June, listen. I’m taking care of Nate. Call Cal.”
The command strengthened her resolve. She drew in a fortifying breath. Now was truly not the time for panic. “Yes, of course. I’ll do it right away.” She hung up and dialed the mill, her fingers moving from rote memory, but the phone simply rang again and again, maddening as a single note struck over and over on a piano, not even going to the answering machine. June replaced the receiver, frustrated.
She gathered her coat and hat, leaving the cake batter a sticky mess in its bowl. She thought about trying Cal one more time but knew it would be useless. He must already be on his way to the lake cabin. People would be expecting him—broad-chested and bossy as a bull—to arrive at the accident scene, his shirtsleeves rolled to the task, his rumbling voice giving orders in the night, but she was going to have to do. Maybe it was even for the best. After all, in Titan Falls sorrow usually did end up being women’s work.
It was cold on the road when June arrived—cold enough to freeze the treacherous mud from yellow to brown, cold enough to mute the usual hooting of the owls. She parked as close to the accident scene as she dared and climbed out of her car, peering down into the ravine where the river flowed and where she could see the ancient bus smashed on its side, its windows blown out, part of its roof dented, its back end sunk in the river’s icy water. In front of her, lit by panicked bursts of flashlights and too-bright ambulance sirens, paramedics scurried and bustled. They slipped and grunted as they ferried first-aid boxes, stretchers, and lanterns over to the lip of the gully, taking deep breaths and descending into the blackness like reluctant divers entering a toxic sea.
“Nate!” June cried into the pandemonium, praying he wasn’t one of the children being brought up on a stretcher or, worse, left behind in the half-deluged bus. “Nate!” Where was he?
“Mom.” Out of the darkness, Nate suddenly appeared beside her with a tartan blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a piece of gauze taped over a bloody notch above his left eye. He was walking—slowly, but still on his own power—and he appeared severely chilled. He had the beginning of a shiner, but otherwise he was fine, June saw, blessedly, wonderfully fine.
“He’s the best of both of us,” Cal had been fond of claiming in the early days of Nate’s infancy, when parenthood had still been a fresh bruise for him and June, leaving the two of them tender in spots they weren’t accustomed to yet. They would hang over Nate’s crib as he drifted off to sleep, watching his tiny chest rise and fall.
“He’s the best of everything,” June would answer back, and she still felt this way. By all rights Nate should have been off at prep school like his father and his grandfather before him, but June had been unwilling to end his childhood so soon, and Cal, who was happy to save the exorbitant tuition, reluctantly agreed to break tradition and let Nate attend the local high school. “As long as he keeps up his grades,” Cal had warned, glowering. “He has to do that. McAllister men go to Dartmouth. End of story.”
Other seventeen-year-old boys sulked and stole beers from their parents’ refrigerators. They slouched over bowls of cereal in the morning and listened to cacophonous rock music. They wore dirty blue jeans and smelly shirt
In any other boy, such goodness might take a turn to treacle, June recognized, but Nate was too much his father’s son for that. Without even trying—certainly without June’s help and without much of his father’s either, who was always at the mill, always fretting over the endless business of grinding wood into pulp—he seemed to have absorbed the unwritten rules of male conduct to perfection. On the football field, he slapped his teammates’ backs and told filthy jokes, with teachers he was able to distinguish himself without getting called a suck-up, and when it came to girls, he always seemed to have a date if he needed one, even though June suspected that his soul secretly belonged to Suzie Flyte, just two weeks older than him and his devoted childhood friend.
Closer than playmates, Nate and Suzie had grown up almost as cousins. They’d had the chicken pox together, and learned to swim at the same time, and had run away from home to a fort they’d made out of one of the old worker cabins behind the mill. So far there had never been any indications that Suzie reciprocated Nate’s affection, but the thought that one day the girl might declare her love always gave June a bittersweet pang. She didn’t mind sharing her son, but she wasn’t quite ready to lose him for good yet.
She folded as much of Nate as she could into her arms now, trying to collect all of him against her. It’s okay, she reassured herself. He’s okay. The bargain she’d made with the river all those years ago had apparently held. June had never once crossed it, and it hadn’t crossed her back. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t question the gift. She straightened her arms. “What happened?”
Nate appeared dazed. “I don’t know. There was a car behind us or something, and then the bus jerked, and then I don’t remember much. Just that we rolled and then slid until we hit the water.”
June brushed her fingers over the cut on Nate’s forehead. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. The paramedics checked me out.”
“What about Suzie?” June peered around her, trying to find the girl in the confusion.
Nate frowned and slid his eyes away from his mother’s. “I don’t know. We weren’t sitting together.”
June wrinkled her brow. That was odd. She opened her mouth to press Nate for more information when she saw something that stopped her tongue cold. Two of the paramedics were struggling up the incline with the slender body of a teenage girl slung between them, a single red mitten dangling from one of her coat pockets, her long silvery hair wet from the river.
“Oh, my God,” June choked, turning her face into the chest of Abel Goode, who’d silently materialized beside her. The brilliant scarlet of the wet wool vibrated behind her closed eyes. She knew that color well.
“She’s the second-to-last one,” the stouter of the two paramedics puffed to Abel on the edge of the ridge. “Just got the driver to deal with now. He has a heartbeat going on and not much else.”
Beside her, June could feel Nate go stiff. “Is Suzie…?” He trailed off. June could understand his not wanting to finish the sentence.
She did it for him. “What’s the condition of that girl there?”
The paramedic bowed his head. In the glare of the ambulance’s lights, June could see how thin he was, as if he himself formed the dividing line between life and death. “I’m real sorry.”
June reached out to take Nate’s hand, but he moved it away from her and said nothing. Abel filled the silence. “Jesus. I’m sorry as hell about all this, son.”
“What happened?” June asked.
Abel’s mouth withered into a knot of distaste. “Looks like one of those new Snows just arrived out on the old homestead—namely the boy, Zeke. We found his truck a little ways up there.” Abel gestured into the night. “He plowed into a tree on the bank side of the road.” The sheriff inched his arm to the left a little, indicating a different arc of road, and furrowed his considerable brow. “The thing is”—he dropped his arm—“there’s another set of tracks coming from that direction, too.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a mess out there.” He hesitated—never a good sign in a man as resolute as Abel. “There’s one other complication. Not even a complication, really, but I guess you ought to know. In the mayhem of everything tonight, we think we somehow managed to uncover Gert Snow’s remains. There.” He pointed. “Just a ways up from the crash.”
June considered this information. After Gert’s disappearance the Snow place had stood empty for twenty-some years until Pruitt had put down his boots in the 1970s and lived in much the same seclusion as had his ancestor. When he’d died recently, the town had breathed a sigh of relief, looking forward to some peace, only to have a whole new clot of his relatives show up. The discovery of Gert’s remains would no doubt make Abel’s investigation into the crash much harder, since Snows had a reputation for being elusive on the best of days and downright shady on the rest of them.
June bit her lip, wishing she could summon Cal, but he was probably already at the cabin, and anyway, in their twenty-odd years of marriage, beckoning him was something she’d never managed very well. Instead she’d done all the bending in the relationship, giving up city life for tiny Titan Falls, sacrificing her dream of graduate school for wifehood, letting him be when he declined to answer his damn phone. She turned her attention back to Abel. At least he was here in front of her right now, when she needed him. She decided to ignore the issue of Gert and focus on the more immediate panic of the crash. “You arrested Zeke Snow, right?”
Abel shook his head. “Tried to. I sent my deputy, Johnny Stenton, out to the old place, but when he got there, Zeke was gone. Not a soul to be found.” He eyed the dark mud uneasily. “Don’t worry, Junie. On a stretch of road like this, it’s passing tough to get to the bottom of things, but we’ll be hunting that boy down.”
In front of June, the paramedics slammed their ambulance doors and flicked their sirens to life, spraying salt and dirt in their wake as they departed. The commotion made her shudder and draw her scarf closer around her throat as she tried to expunge the image of Suzie’s limp arms and that sodden red mitten. Suzie’s mother had borne three boys before Suzie, and then, finally, along had come a daughter. My compensation, Dena always called her to the other ladies in the sewing circle, stitching up pair after pair of torn boy trousers, her recompense, she liked to say, after years of balled-up sweat socks and fart jokes and jeans pockets that arrived in the laundry filled with dirt, stones, and sometimes living worms.
Back in September, Dena had arrived at the sewing circle with the intention of making Suzie a little something. “I don’t know what yet,” she’d said, sighing, “just something to catch her fancy.” Then her eye had fallen on the ball of red yarn nestled in the sewing basket that sat near June’s feet. “That’s pretty. Is it from Hazel? It’s such a color, isn’t it? I never saw anything like it from her before. I wonder how she got it so red?”
June had laid her embroidery in her lap. The wool was a long-forgotten offering from Hazel Bell, who raised sheep in a valley at the end of town, but in truth there was something about the sulky richness of the color that had always offended June. She handed it to Dena with relief. “Take it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Are you sure?” But already Dena was drawing out a pair of knitting needles.
“Absolutely.” To be honest, June had never been sure just what to make of that gift from Hazel, whom half the ladies in Titan Falls feared and the other half just didn’t trust. Among all of Hazel’s peculiarities, maybe her biggest was the makeshift graveyard she’d created in a disused sugar bush on her property after her only son had died. Whenever a woman in town lost a child, Hazel would put a stone out in the wood. “Sugar babies,” the ladies called them, and June could never quite tell if the term was a fond one or not. Personally, she thought it was all superstitious poppycock, and she frequently said so,
June had returned to her embroidery, feeling vaguely guilty, like she did the time Mr. Collins had given her change for a twenty in the hardware after she’d only given him a ten, and she didn’t tell him. There hadn’t been any good reason for it, but June had taken the money anyway just to see if she could. All that afternoon a fizz of guilt had bubbled in the middle of her, electrifying her and terrifying her in equal measure, until finally, hours later, she’d snuck back into the store and left the difference on the counter when Mr. Collins wasn’t looking. With Dena she suspected she ought to mention how glad she was to be rid of the red ball of wool, but a mean kernel inside her thrilled to see the other woman so happy with what was essentially a castoff. She sighed and reached out for Dena’s knitting needles. She needed to be a little nice. Their children were the best of friends, after all. “May I? I’ll teach you the new pattern I learned last week. You slip two stitches after the knit. Here, you try.”
Across the road now, June saw that Dena had collapsed into a heap on herself, her head bent over her knees, the frayed edges of her coat splayed in the yellow mud. A concerned knot of mill wives was gathered around her, some of them stroking Dena’s hair, some of them glancing at one another and shaking their heads. June put a foot forward to join them but stopped, arrested by the fact that she had no idea what she should possibly say to Dena in this moment. Relations had been cool between them ever since Cal had gone and fired Dena’s husband for drunkenness on the mill floor.