Mercy Snow

At the time of the accident in the mid-1990s, when the area's string of papertowns first began to wither and die, Titan Falls wasn't yet a hollowed-outsettlement stuck at the wrong end of nowhere, but it wasn't a far cry from thateither. While it was true that the sulfurous, stinking waters of theAndroscoggin were running much clearer than they had decades before, the villagewas still only just full enough of wood pulp, buzz saws, and good honest muscleto be barely tipped to the correct side of profitable. Now and then it struckJune McAllister—the mill owner's wife—that Titan Falls was nothingmore than a drunken jumble of timber and human grit, an accidental collision ofindustry and nature, but she was careful never to voice that thought out loud,especially not to her husband and most especially not to the other mill wives.To them she appeared to believe in the singularity of the town's fate with thesame blind assurance her fingers took on during the sewing circle she hosted. Atfirst, June had found the custom archaic, a throwback to her mother-in-law'stime, but, as with everything else in her life, she soon learned that personalwill was no match for force of habit where the women of Titan Falls wereconcerned.

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away," she found herself chirping weekafter week, doling out advice like she was serving up neat pats of iced butter.It was an old wives' saying she'd often heard growing up and had hoped by now tohave escaped. The ladies around her would pause, then shrug and bob their heads.One of them might snip a thread from her pile of sewing with a bare front tooth.Another would slide a new row of stitches across the cool steel of a knittingneedle. It was fine and well for June McAllister to sit there and orate in herown house, of course. The Lord did give and then take away. Theproblem—and the truth that none of them ever dared to utter—was thatin a town like Titan Falls, smeared up flush along the river and frequentlypummeled by it, it was often difficult to tell which was which.

It wasn't that the other women didn't like June (although in truth they didn't),it was just that they didn't trust her very much. She wasn't, after all, anatural-born daughter of the place. Instead she'd struggled to become one overtwenty years of marriage to Cal, the fourth-generation owner of the Titan PaperMill and, really, the sole lifeblood of the town. At first, as a scholarshipgirl fresh out of the ranks of Smith College and totally unfamiliar with themores and means of the North Woods, June had found the geography of Titan Fallsshocking in its stony glory. She'd been raised in a shaky-jointed, not-very-prosperous town on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The architecture of June'schildhood had been sandy and loose-slatted, all tin roofs and concrete blocks,peeling shutters and slow-twirling ceiling fans. The smell of sea salt hadcorroded everything all the time, clattering insects had made the sticky airvibrate, and colors were either vibrant and urgent—bougainvillea, birds-of-paradise opening on their stalks—or buffeted and past their prime.

Until Smith, June hadn't known that air could turn so crisp it was like gettinga first kiss, that a tree could burst into the color of fire and then changeagain into a skeleton of itself and then yet again, in the spring, haze intounexpected blossoms. She learned to drink tea hot from a silver pot instead ofsweet and iced, saved up for and bought herself a camel-hair coat, and dreamedof becoming a literature professor so that she would never, ever have to leavethis new and glorious world of leaded windows, mahogany library shelves,needlepoint cushions, and cathedral towers.

And then she met Cal on a weekend jaunt to Boston. She was at a house partyhosted by her roommate, Janey, who knew Cal's best friend from summers spent onNantucket.

"He's a senior at Dartmouth, and I hear he's a mill man," Janey had whispered inher parents' well-appointed living room, eyeing Cal's chiseled jaw and strongshoulders with appreciation as she handed June a warm beer. At first June hadmisunderstood. Her heart had skipped to think that finally, after almost two anda half years up north, she was meeting another soul like her, another workingstiff accepted into this rarefied world of college and summer houses but yet notof it.

"No, silly," Janey had said with a laugh, correcting June. "His family owns themill." One of the very oldest in the East, it turned out, and June's cheeks hadflamed like the autumn trees around her. She spilled some of her beer onto herskirt, but Cal didn't seem to notice, or if he did, he liked what he saw.

"Hello," he said, stepping right up to her and cupping her thin hand in hisgenerous palm. "You're Janey's roommate at Smith, aren't you? What are youstudying?"

"Literature," June had answered without hesitation, and Cal had noddedthoughtfully. She held her breath, waiting to see what he would say.

"You know, Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass on paper made by my family'smill."

June gaped at him. It had never occurred to her to consider the physicalprovenances of the works she pored over day after day. That this wide-necked,blue-eyed boy would be able to lay such casual claim to what June consideredmythic amazed her. When he offered to fetch a second drink for her, she let him,and when he asked, one year later, for her hand, she said yes right away, eggedon by her girlfriends, who assured her that she was trading up—books forreal life, an unfinished education for a giddy leap up the social ladder.

But Titan Falls, it turned out, was nothing like the New England of Smith or,indeed, of the literature she'd studied so ardently and written so many essaysabout: the blooming lilac bushes of Whitman, the pin-straight woods of Thoreau.Instead the world of Titan Falls reminded her a little of her old life inFlorida, but on a much vaster scale. If she went five minutes out of town inthree directions, she found herself enveloped by a swath of forest so great itwas like stepping out of time. The river cut along the fourth face of thevillage, forming a line of currents, sludge, and rogue logs. June learnedquickly that in Titan Falls the wilderness was a bounty, yes, but that it couldalso turn around and swallow a man whole in a heartbeat.

The Androscoggin, June also discovered over time, came with its own problematichistory. It was a long-troubled stretch of water, beautiful on the surface butpoisoned underneath, like a ruined woman who'd kept up her face but let the restof herself fall to hell. Sulfur dioxide still escaped from the mills, and in thesummer the town sometimes had to put out bubblers to aerate the water enough tokeep the fish alive. In spite of that, clumps of algae continued to bloom likeroses every August, spreading a tangy phosphate odor across the back of June'stongue. During her first year in Titan Falls, she'd found the stenchoverwhelming, but her mother-in-law, Hetty, had assured her that she would getused to it.

"This is nothing. When I was a bride," she said, twisting her dentedwedding ring for emphasis, a ring so worn that June pitied her for it, littleimagining the coming stretch of years that would rub her own ring to dullness,"we used to say the river was too thick to paddle and too thin to plow. Mudwould turn yellow, and the paint on all the houses would peel. Kids used tobounce quarters off the scum that floated down here." Her expression soured."Now we're so regulated, fish can barely piss in the river. Not that it stopsthe damn town from blaming the mill for every last thing. You'll find that out,too."

Hetty died from liver cancer a short year after June was married, and a heartattack claimed Henry, Cal's father, soon after, and though June never said so,she often wondered how much the pollution from the river had to do with theirdemises, just as she wondered if it was the cause for the occasional flotillasof dead trout that popped up or even the babies sometimes born in the area withstunted fingers, cleft palates, or tongues so stubbed they couldn't suck theirmothers' milk. When she found out that she would be unable to bear any morechildren after the birth of her son, Nate, she spent hours pacing along thebanks of the waterway, staring at the swirling muck, a misgiving building insideher that she knew she could never voice.

For that was part of the deal she'd made by coming to live in TitanFalls—a private bargain she'd struck in the deep tissue of her heart. Aslong as the town spared her its eternal suspicion and took her in as one of itsown, she vowed, she would turn a blind eye to the soot clinging to roots of theplace. She would do as her mother-in-law suggested and ignore the little detailsof decay that snagged along the corners of her gaze, letting the dark surface ofthe river ripple in peace, the way it had for generations.

Over time June proved to be an apt pupil of Titan Falls. Even the other womencouldn't begrudge her that. In a blizzard her pantry was the best stocked, andshe was always ready to share. She possessed a whole cupboard of muffin tinsmolded for various holidays: bunnies for Easter, trees and stars for Christmas,jack-o'-lanterns for Halloween. Following in Hetty's civic footsteps, Juneoversaw improvements to the library, handpicking the leather chairs and theglobed reading lights as if she were outfitting a fancy gentleman's club. On theFourth of July, she helped festoon the tiny main street in patriotic buntingbefore handing out ice cream with the other Acorn Association ladies.

The parts of Titan Falls to which she couldn't turn a blind eye, she simplyavoided. The derelict mill cottages, for instance, down by the river, where herson used to love to play in the summer when teenagers weren't carousing in them.The mill itself, since it was a largely male domain except for Gracie, Cal'sphlegmatic secretary, and the quiet woman who came in on Friday night to cleanthe office. And most of all, the old homestead out on Devil's Slide Road, wherethe river folded back in a crook and stewed in such foulness that no one wasvery surprised when a lone woman named Gert Snow went missing out there in theearly 1950s.

As a very young child, gossip had it, Gert had been waspish and sour-faced, butas a young woman she'd grown into a great beauty—so lovely, in fact, thatit was rumored she'd even turned the acquisitive eye of Henry McAllister. Firebroke out in the family home and killed her parents during the great drought of'42, when the river stank so hard that all the silverware in town tarnishedovernight and even the flies out that way dropped dead. People said Gertsurvived the disaster out of pure spite. Some folks even suggested she mighthave been the one to light the blaze, but absolutely everyone agreed that thegirl's behavior after the tragedy was not right. Instead of accepting thebaskets of vittles and wares people left for her on the edge of Devil's SlideRoad, Gert hurled them into the ravine with curses, then proceeded to buildherself a shack barely fit for livestock. She stalked the woods of her familyland with a rifle and perfect aim, bringing back the corpses of deer and hares,skinning them and leaving their remains hanging in the trees as a warning tointruders. The chimney of the little smokehouse, untouched by the conflagration,belched at all hours of the day and night, and people assumed that Gert must beliving on the hardest foods imaginable: smoked jerky, roots, and the bitterberries of the North Woods.

A halfhearted search party tramped up and down Devil's Slide Road when shedisappeared a decade later, but not much effort was made and she was neverfound. In truth, no one would even have known how to bury the likes of Gert.Since she was godless to her guts, it wouldn't have been right to mix her bonesup with the town's good Protestant ones. The other Snows had always been laid torest elsewhere by their kin—no one was sure where—but there wasn't asoul left in the immediate family to do that now, and no need anyway. Thetownsfolk simply bowed their heads that week at prayer and then let a slow tideof moss and rot pull the empty shack back down to the earth for the next twentyyears, when a distant relative of Gert's, a man named Pruitt, showed up to claimthe place. People tended to drive slow past the Snow stretch, even in all sortsof weather, and they were wise. The river cut a notch deep down to the bottom ofa ravine there, and the mud oozed a peculiar yellow color. "Brimstone," thelocals called it, and knew enough to take it easy on those patches.

"Let the river lie," was Hetty's advice on the matter the first time June askedabout Gert's history, shortly after her marriage. When June pointed out thatshe'd been talking about a woman and not the Androscoggin, Hetty simply smiled."In Titan Falls," she said, "everything begins and ends with the damn river.You'll see. If you're smart, my dear, you'll stay clean out of all of it."

Cal had put it another way. "What you don't know can't hurt you," he'd said, andfor many years—right up until the crash that changed everything—Junechose to believe this.

She was mixing the batter for a cranberry cake on the evening when it happened.Thanksgiving was tomorrow, and the recipe was one of the deceased Hetty'sholiday specials, a combination of sweet and sour that perfectly recalled herdisposition. Later it would occur to June that perhaps this casual whisking andstirring was what ended up muddling her future, but eventually she decided thatcouldn't possibly be. After all, providence wasn't something you could stick aspoon into and mix to your own devices. If it were, June would have done so longago. Any woman in Titan Falls would have.

She was alone. Cal was leaving straight from the mill for the lake cabin, wherethey always spent Thanksgiving if the road wasn't snowed in yet. She wassupposed to wait for her seventeen-year-old son, Nate, to return from a tripwith the church youth group to the movies in Berlin, then head out to the cabinwith him, where she would finish baking her cake, infusing the air with abittersweet haze before she finally slept. All around her on the counter, neatlyboxed, were the trappings for their holiday feast—the plump turkey, legsfolded like those of a portly gentleman taking his ease, a sack of dusty yams, abag of marshmallows, and a stalk of brussels sprouts. Two cans of pumpkin. A tinof lard. Cream and pearl onions and white bread already cubed and mixed withsage for the stuffing. June could name the contents with her eyes closed. Toomuch for three people, and certainly too much for June to load into the car withno help, but tradition called.

She ran her hands over her hips, ruing how square they were growing. Nothinghelped. Every year there was just the littlest bit more of her. June's motherhad been a wide-set woman, too, and it was one of the things June had sworn shewouldn't repeat in her life, even if it required ever-increasing severity. Shebaked cakes and cookies. She grilled steaks, and she creamed potatoes, and shebuttered bowls of peas, but she rarely ate any of it. Maybe that was why, moreand 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 themill and help her carry the Thanksgiving items out to the car, fitting boxes inthe trunk like he was doing a puzzle, laughing and trying to grab June's hipswhen she swished past him for another load. But that was before—back whenNate was still in elementary school, when the mill could barely keep up withorders, and most definitely before Cal returned from a business weekend inBoston with another woman's bra rolled inside one of his dirty shirts.