“You’re a hard man to reach,” Steve said when Grizz came back outside. He licked his lips. “Church council met last night. It was decided your son would be buried in the suicide corner of the cemetery.”
“No,” Grizz said. How could he have forgotten? This town and its sick traditions. “You wait just a goddamn minute. I want him buried next to his mother. I own the plot.”
“And you signed a contract that spells out what happens in the event of a suicide. The rules are very clear on this. He’ll have to be buried in the corner with the other suicides.”
Grizz felt the heat of the sun on the back of his neck, filling him up. His fists tightened around the shovel. “I intend to speak to the pastor about all of this.”
“Pastor Logan has already been informed of the council’s decision.”
Was it his imagination, or did Steve’s mouth curve in a small smile under the mustache? He turned his back on the sheriff and headed for the broken fence. Steve followed just as he knew he would. When Grizz heard his footsteps behind him, he turned and swung the shovel with all his might. He pivoted, planting his feet and throwing his entire body into the swing. The clamps and staves fell away in a clatter. In his mind’s eye, he saw the fanged edge of that old shovel cleave into Steve’s neck, saw the first bright geyser of red erupt, saw him fall, his mouth opening in surprise.
But Steve was a cunning man and knew what Grizz was about, so where he thought the man’s head or neck might be instead there was only air, and the violence of that swing twisted him badly on his hips, and he felt something tear inside when he fell.
Steve stood over him. “It’s not a good idea to try assaulting an officer of the law,” he said. “But I’m going to forget this happened. I don’t know what that girl told you. I can understand your anger, why you might try to hurt me in the heat of the moment.” He paused, made a sound in his throat, and spit to the side. “What I don’t understand is your boy. I mean his pockets were full of ammunition, Grizz. Took his time sawing down that shotgun. I can’t imagine such coldness.”
Even if Grizz wanted to rise, he couldn’t. It felt like there was a saw working in his gut, an old hernia tear he had torn again. He breathed in the dust where he had fallen and tried not to cry. How had he not seen this moment coming? Of course they would do this. They couldn’t just let Seth be dead. They had to find some further way to punish him, send him on to hell.
“This town’s had a terrible shock. They don’t feel safe. The world is changing, and they don’t know their place in it. Let go of your anger. If you want to be angry, be angry with your son.”
Grizz put one hand over his eyes. It was good advice. He should have been furious with Seth, but when he searched himself all he felt was the shock of his boy’s death. An emptiness, chaff in his palm.
Grizz didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his voice. Steve knelt in the grass beside him. “A group of us will come this fall and combine your crop. No charge.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“We both know you don’t have the money. Probably don’t have enough for Seth’s funeral services. You’re going to need help to get through this.” Steve extended his hand, but Grizz didn’t take it.
Grunting, Grizz climbed to his feet and picked up his shovel and the rest of his things. Steve shrugged and walked away. A moment later his car started. Only after the sheriff’s car disappeared up the driveway did Grizz allow himself to lean over and vomit up what he’d drank last night. He let the sick come up, all liquid and no solids, until he was scoured out.
Then he walked to the broken place in the fence line where one post had been shattered in half. The bull must have been shocked by the electricity, enraged. The fence repelled him once, but the next time he charged it he must have hit the old post at full speed, splintering it. Grizz admired how the bent wires twisted and curled into space.
Grizz drove the staves into the ground and wound wire around the makeshift post, clamping it in place. The bull lifted his head from the dusty grazing pasture and studied his work. It was a jerry-rigged operation, and they both knew it. Just this small effort sapped Grizz’s remaining energy, and he had to sit for a moment in the waving grasses to catch his breath. And even as the work drained him, it also renewed him, quenched his ache for a spell.
A boisterous cloud of blackbirds burst from the oaks as the sheriff drove away. The flock gathered into a swirling pinwheel that carried them high above the pasture, the line breaking and re-forming before arrowing toward the mountain, where they landed in the waving grasses and went silent as though they had never been. Grizz was left alone again in the hot sun with the cows chewing their cud.
In this year of drought the leaves fell early, small and brown and skeletal. The canary grasses were tawny in the light, bending under a hot wind, and the woods stretched toward town, dry as kindling.
LONE MOUNTAIN
Once there was a mountain, a bald grassy place that looked like the skull of a man, all brow and crown, because long ago a giant had trampled the valley before sinking up to his eyeballs and drowning. The little ponds around it were his footsteps, the mounds beside it his shoulders as he shrugged underground. Maybe he was not dead. Maybe he was only sleeping. The wind off the river was his breath. Night in the valley was sentient with his dreaming. Cows that escaped pasture fences went to the mountain and vanished. He slept his sleep of a thousand years and waited and no oaks or maples grew from the grasses over his head.
“Is the giant mean? I don’t want him to wake up.” She never tired of hearing such stories, imagining the hatchet-faced mountain rising above the fields.
“Don’t you worry. He’s old and sleepy, but he watches and waits. He only wakes in times of trouble. There are wolves that live in his caves, and he sends them forth to help those in need.”
“His emis—?”
“Emissaries. They do his bidding.”
“Like the ones who came for the woman. To keep her from hurting the baby. Like the coyote who found the baby after all those people died in the war?”
“Yes, the very ones.”
“Why did the woman want to hurt the baby?”
The giant in the mountain was as old as the moon or stars, as ancient as a stone left by the seashore. Things fastened to him like lichen or mollusks so the rocks found on the mountain were like nothing on the earth. The last tallgrass prairie became the giant’s beard and eyebrows. Nowhere else in the valley could you find the Great Plains prickly pear cactus, green and bristling, among the cedar trees and prairie bush clover thick with bees.
Granodiorite. Gabbro. The rocks were living things the Indians said flew about the stars at night. The boulders were witnesses to creation. A hundred years before, the mountain was holy to the Dakotas. The sick went there to drink from a limestone spring; infertile women ate the dirt. Where red rock showed through the grass, pink as skin, the young men painted their visions. Thunderbeings and black bears and buffalo. Sometimes just a hand etched into the stone to say I was here, if only for a single heartbeat of the one who lives within the mountain.
“Will you take me there, Daddy?”
“Maybe when spring comes again. When I’m feeling more peppy and can make the climb. Then we’ll pack a picnic and sit on the mountaintop and feel the wind in the grass.”
“When?”
“Someday.”
There was no mountain near the town of Lone Mountain so far as Clara could tell, the streets as quiet as a secret on Sunday morning. The competing spires of Trinity Lutheran and Our Lady of the Sorrows peeked above leafy treetops. Silt laden, the Minnesota River wound like a thick ribbon of caramel in the valley below.
It was a pretty enough town at first glance, the women sweeping their porches, the men cutting precise patterns on riding lawnmowers. Victorian houses with gables and wide porches surrounded Hiawatha Park, a green space where the town enacted the annual Longfellow Pageant. Black iron lampposts lined the main street where buildings of dun-colored brick
bore the mark of previous decades, advertisements for Lee’s overalls and mugs of Sanka. Farmers wearing seed caps parked their trucks along the curb. At the pool hall, they passed rainy mornings playing a card game called sheepshead to determine who would have to pay for coffee. Know the price of beans or the weather forecast, and you might find your way into a conversation. Logan had told her that people lived in this town for twenty-five years and were still counted as strangers.
There was the grocery store, Jurgen’s Corner, and a bait shop, the Bookworm, which sold yellowing paperbacks and comic books along with supplies for fishermen wishing to ply the brown river. The town movie theater had shut down, but the marquee still advertised Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. Downtown also held a hardware store, two bars, and a Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon. Two bars and two churches made for an even balance of liquid spirits and holy spirits in Clara’s estimation. The high school and nursing home were across town from where Clara lived. On either end of the valley, where County Road 29 dropped from the prairie tableland as it sliced through town, big billboards had been erected, each featuring smiling babies meant to represent fetuses. I HAD A HEARTBEAT AT TWO MONTHS, read one, while the other, in stark black and white, admonished THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
The entire town clung to the south face of a steeply sloping hill overlooking the river lowlands, prone to flooding, where the Harvestland silos loomed over taverns and railroad tracks and mobile homes occupied by migrant workers during the pea and corn harvest at the Del Monte plant in nearby Amroy.
The town had all of these things by her accounting, but no sign of the mountain for which it was named, and this troubled her. During Clara’s first few weeks here she made a habit of bumping over county roads in Logan’s ’69 Nova in search of one. She spotted a few low green hills knobbed by granite outcroppings and spindly cedars, but nothing like the vision of the mountain she held in her imagination. The locals she interrogated proved evasive.
“Oh, the mountain,” said one codger when she asked about it during social hour in the church basement. “It’s just east of town a little ways.”
Clara nodded as if this made sense, wondering if the mountain could be little more than a glorified hill named by the homesick Germans who settled this valley.
“No, no,” the man’s brother interrupted, his mouth full of half-chewed chocolate-chip cookie. “You want to get there, you hook a left at the granite pit, head southeast down the gravel road ’bout a quarter mile. You can’t miss it.”
Clara knew who these men were because Logan had given her a church directory from a few years back with pictures from the congregation. The Hendriks brothers, Abel and Abram, were Dutch bachelor farmers who lived a few miles outside town.
Both men had bald, sunburned heads and bulbous frog eyes and puffy mouths. They wore western-style long-sleeved shirts and suede dress coats with patches on the elbows. Both sat up in the balcony along with a group of senior citizens Logan had already identified as malcontents after he roped off the balcony one Sunday, hoping they would sit closer to the front. Without a word they tore down his barrier, their sisters and wives leading the way, and climbed the steep winding stairs to sit where they had sat for generations. Gloating, triumphant. “Stiff necked as the Israelites in Canaan,” Logan groused after the service. These German Americans had endured Indian uprisings, locust plagues, two worlds wars, the Depression, a hail storm that destroyed most of the windows of the church, and an ongoing farming crisis killing their way of life. They would survive one upstart pastor fresh out of seminary trying to get them to change their ways.
So Clara wasn’t surprised these men were directing her according to landmarks they took for granted, guided by a compass she was not born with. Neither of the Hendriks brothers offered to shake her hand or introduced himself, partly because she was a young female and partly because some residents here expected her to know who they were without being told.
The Hendriks brother with his mouth full of food was also staring at Clara’s breasts, swollen because of the pregnancy, while he licked a crumb from his lip. Clara held up her left hand to her chin, as though contemplating something, to show her missing fingers. The old man swallowed hard and coughed. He gulped boiling coffee from a Styrofoam cup and, wincing, looked away. Most men didn’t ask about the hand; they shuddered to imagine it touching them. She was damaged goods, and that’s all they needed to know. Clara leaned forward, pressing her advantage. “Which granite pit do you mean?”
So many of her father’s stories featured this missing mountain, a sacred, healing place. If she could find it, she would find the place where she was from. Knowing this would root her. A part of Clara felt as if she had opened the door that day and received the obliterating blast from Seth’s shotgun, scattering bits and pieces of her true self all about where they could never possibly be gathered together again. She needed to get right before this baby came.
WELCOME TO THE COUNTRY
Logan had already been up for an hour by the time Clara came downstairs. He sat alone at the dining room table, leaning on his elbows, his blond hair dark with sweat. He was wearing a T-shirt, skimpy Lycra shorts, and tube socks pulled up nearly to his knees. Logan didn’t turn his head to wish her good morning when she entered the room, but he kept his attention fixed on the rain outside, muttering something—a prayer?—under his breath.
She had come downstairs wearing only a blue terry-cloth robe. She wanted to get a cup of coffee and then head upstairs to soak in a bath and write some more, but spotting Logan changed her plans. “I’m going to fry some eggs,” she told him. “Want any?”
Logan startled at the sound of her voice. Then he shook his head without turning her way. “I can’t eat so early in the morning, especially not after a run.”
Clara crossed the room and touched his damp face with the back of her hand, feeling the Braille of his boyish beard. “You need to eat something,” she said. Above his hollow cheeks, his eyes sank into their sockets. Day by day, Clara was growing rounder while her husband shrank, as if she were one of those spiders who feeds on her mate, drinking in his juices until he’s only a sack to lay the eggs in. What a terrible thought. She was having such thoughts these days. Clara knew Logan was fasting in the mornings again, heading straight over to church and starting his day by kneeling before the altar, his hunger a punishment for not having the answers his congregation required. Perhaps it was wrong of her to tempt him with fried eggs, but looking at him now—her pale, handsome husband with his knobby knees and receding hairline—a motherly tenderness welled in her. “What were you thinking about here, sitting in the dark?”
“Satan,” he said, glancing her way and smiling ruefully.
“Oh, is that all?” She pulled over a chair so she could sit beside him.
“Feels strange to say aloud. Sort of foolish.”
Was it? She knew Logan loved the story of Martin Luther battling the devil in his last days, flinging a book across the room and reminding Lucifer of his baptism. What was God without the devil, heaven without hell? Though he considered himself a modern seminarian, quick to point out that accounts of demon possession in the Gospels were likely manifestations of mental illness, Clara knew that he also believed in the devil. That the devil was active in this world made Logan’s work urgent.
Clara put her hand over his. “Tell me what you saw.”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said, squirming in his chair, edging deeper into the cushioned seat, “except that I was up in the pulpit looking out over my parishioners when I spotted him. He was ordinary looking, just a guy in a dark suit, but with eyes he took away my voice. I tried to speak, but it was like there were hands”—Logan paused and massaged his throat with his free hand—“choking the words. The congregation knew something was wrong, but I was alone up there. No one even noticed him there except for me. The devil there, smiling.”
“How awful.” His hand beneath hers was cold, as if the rain had soaked straight
through him on his morning jog. She wondered if Logan’s telling of the dream was also meant to rebuke her for not being in church last Sunday. She knew exactly the rational reason behind what he’d seen, and that it was called the Hag’s Dream, or sleep paralysis. While you sleep your body locks down your muscles to keep you from acting out your dreams. But sometimes you wake up partially; you rise to a conscious state and realize your body is paralyzed and in that moment you panic and see the thing you most fear. In the Middle Ages it was a mare, a black horse, which is how the word “nightmare,” comes down to us through the ages.
Clara knew what Logan’s dream was because she knew her etymology, like any good linguist. But she said nothing to her husband, because it wouldn’t help him feel any better. She also had trouble sleeping, her dreams restless and furtive, as if she had tuned in to the voices scattered about town, where the story of what happened went on and on, a psychic echo. Writing in her notebook, telling her father’s stories, soothed the voices and let her rest. Writing was her prayer.
The only language she spoke for a time was her hand on his. Nightmares aside, it felt good to be with him in the gloomy morning, touching. The next words slipped out of her without thinking. “Was it a mistake to come here?” When Logan flinched she wished she could take it back.
Logan withdrew his hand. “Doesn’t do any good to think about that. We’re here.”
The room next to them was still cluttered with unpacked boxes a couple of months after their arrival. “We could go,” Clara said, her voice barely a whisper. “You could tell the synod bishop it wasn’t a good fit, ask for reassignment.”
A faint flush crept into Logan’s cheeks as he studied her. “Three years, Clara. If you spend less than that in your first call, it looks bad on your record. We waited two months for this assignment. How would I get another call?”
There was nothing kind in his blue eyes so she looked away from him.
Little Wolves Page 4