“We can’t leave them in the lurch. Not after this.” Logan continued when she didn’t say anything, “Besides, coming here was your idea, remember?”
“People make mistakes all the time. There’s no shame in admitting it.”
Logan rose from his chair, closing off the conversation. He was moving away from her once more, going off to shower and then to the church next door. “I’ve found a home for those kittens,” he said, surprising her. “Last Sunday, after the service.”
“What?”
“I think that’s part of what’s bothering me, my allergies, just having them in the basement. The Nelson family said they would take them. All their cats died from the distemper. Now they have rats in the barn again.”
Clara couldn’t bear to look at him. “I want to come with when you take them.”
“No. The Nelsons are very private people.” Logan averted his gaze. Had she caught him in a lie? Was he planning on dumping those kittens by the side of the road or worse? It occurred to her that she didn’t know what he was capable of doing. If Clara saw the Nelsons in church she would ask them about the kittens, but she had no idea whom he was talking about. Most of Logan’s congregation were still strangers to her.
“They’ll all die. They’re too small. They were born too late in the fall.”
“Welcome to the country,” Logan said.
“I didn’t know when I married you that you had a mean streak.”
Logan touched her hair, patting it. This should have bothered her even more, but his touch took away the other words she was going to say, and she let his fingers linger there. It surprised her how much she wanted him to touch her, when she had just been ready to spit in his eye. She shut her eyes while he massaged her scalp. “You feel things too keenly,” he said.
His voice was lower, calming. His fingers found the ridges in her skull, pressed gently at the tension. “I’m not trying to be mean,” he said. “You knew from the night you found them you couldn’t keep them.”
“Just let me keep them one more day.”
Logan kissed the top of her head. “A few more days. I’ll take them on Friday. The Nelsons are good people, Clara.”
By “good people” it was clear what he meant. His kind of people. Church people. She let the comment pass because she could feel the baby stirring inside her. She let it pass because her husband who had been avoiding her was touching her, his hands moving from her hair to her shoulders. “The baby,” she told him. “It’s kicking. Do you want to feel it?”
Logan’s hands went still.
She opened her robe. Her breasts were heavy and full. Beneath them the globe of her belly stretched, blue veins wending over the surface. Something, a hand or a foot, thrust outward from the skin.
“Clara,” he said. “The curtains are open.”
The world outside gauzy with rain. “I don’t care.” She guided Logan’s hand to her stomach, closing her own over the top. They didn’t have to wait more than a minute. Feeling Logan’s cold hand, the baby thumped once more and then sank back into the depths within her.
“Weird, huh?” she said to fill the silence. Clara knew he was studying the curve of her breasts. She had seen the longing and loneliness in him from the very first time she met him. Now, she wanted him to stay. She wanted him to keep touching her. And shouldn’t he want her even more, since she almost died? Shouldn’t he affirm this life, hers, his, the mystery inside her? They hadn’t made love since finding out about the baby.
Clara’s conversion to Lutheranism was inextricably bound up in the physicality of her husband. Logan had been her father’s pastor. A few weeks after her father died, Clara attended services at Logan’s church one gray Sunday and was surprised when Logan asked her to brunch at the café down the street. They would meet again for coffee in a few days, then dinner out, followed by dinner at his place. He needed her, she saw, just as much as she needed him. In his quietness she read depth; in his shy touch, innocence. The first time she undressed for him, undid the buttons on her blouse, she had watched the pupils in his light blue eyes darken with desire. “I knew I would love you before I ever met you,” he told her later in her bedroom that night. “It was the sound of your name in the stories your father told about you. Clara, clear as running water. Clara, like clarity. Clean like the sky. I knew you before I ever saw you.”
Behind them the phone jostled on the receiver.
Logan’s hand was still on her stomach, tracing slow circles. Her hand on his.
Don’t. Stay.
Logan went to get the phone.
WAS IT ONLY A few months earlier she had spread out the map on the kitchen table, her index finger tracing the black road that raveled along the river? She remembered tasting the name silently with her tongue against her teeth: Lone Mountain. The pull of something dark and sweet wafted inside her, a scent like burning sugar. Childhood whispers.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Logan said.
She touched the tiny dot, measuring. It looked to be about two hundred miles west of the Twin Cities. She imagined endless cornfields, a flat prairie expanse, and then that cleft in the land where the road vanished into the valley. The big woods, sudden escape, shade. Her voice sounded tinny when she responded. “I think we should go.”
Logan sipped from his tea. His cheeks were ruddy from a fever, the steam of his drink. “After two months of dead-end interviews in this synod, it comes down to this.”
Clara sat down so they were at eye level. The sky outside held pewter-colored clouds, and a few fat raindrops rinsed down the window. “Ever since you told me the name of that town, I’ve known we should go there.”
Logan shifted in his seat. “It’s a dying church, Clara. Every year three times more funerals than baptisms. The whole region is dying, that way of life. They can barely afford to pay me synod guidelines.”
“We have each other,” Clara assured him. Baptisms and deaths and the numbers of baptized members versus the average worship attendance on Sunday. Numbers and facts and figures as he debated each open position in the synod. For a spiritual man, Logan obsessed over such things. And she knew why else he was afraid. In his last year at seminary, Logan had suffered a severe series of anxiety attacks during finals week. Clara had been the one to find him, rigid on his bed, paralyzed with some nameless terror. She had been the one to talk him out of the spell. He had gone to see a private therapist, afraid that if the news reached the board, they would make him undergo a new battery of psychological tests, and he would not be able to graduate.
She folded her arms across her chest. She wanted to tell him that she felt like she had to do this, now that she was going to be a mother herself. She wanted to tell him how badly she had wanted a mother growing up, someone to explain the mysteries of womanhood, how she had run away in search of her mother, how she needed her mother more than ever with a baby growing inside her. Instead she said, “How many interviews have you gone to?”
Logan frowned. “They’re used to getting experienced pastors at these places, even if they no longer have the budget for it. And the answer is five.”
“Only one of the five has called you.”
Logan had been raised in the swank Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago, the only child of two agnostic psychotherapists who later divorced. When his parents bickered, he would sneak out of the house, walk to the Lutheran church down the street, and climb into the balcony where he napped on the padded pew, light from a stained-glass window pouring over him.
Against his parents’ wishes he started attending services every Sunday, befriended the pastor, and would go on to study religion at Concordia in Moorhead, Minnesota, before finishing his master of divinity at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. It was a rebellion in reverse, their only child choosing what his father termed “the ultimate delusion.” Relations between Logan and his parents remained chilly to this day. They had not seen them since the wedding.
Logan held her ghost hand, the nubs where the finge
rs were missing. He was drawn by a wound that repulsed others. “Those stories your father told you. You think this might be the place?”
“I don’t know,” Clara admitted. “I don’t know if it’s the place she was going or where she died or maybe none of these things. But he used to speak of a mountain in his stories. How many places are there in that part of the world with the word ‘mountain’ in the name?”
“Where was she going with a baby in the backseat in the middle of a blizzard?”
“My dad only said she was crazy.”
Logan tensed. “Like postpartum?”
“They didn’t have a name for it then. And he didn’t keep any pictures of her, wouldn’t even tell me her name. You saw when we went through his things. He didn’t even have my birth certificate in his record files.” Her fingers traced circles on the kitchen table before she looked into his eyes again. “We need to go there. You’ve been called. They’ll have archives in the courthouse or even at the local newspaper. Someone will remember the story. I just have a gut feeling about this, okay?”
Logan blew his nose in a napkin. “Help me understand, Clara, because it sounds crazy. Why would you want to live in the place where your mother died?”
AFTER HE LEFT THAT morning, Clara sat at the dining room table drinking coffee and lingering over her old textbooks. She would have to give them back now that she wasn’t going to be teaching there anymore. In the background the local radio station, KLKR, quoted from Reagan’s secretary of agriculture, who had said earlier that day in his press conference that farmers should “Get big or get out.” Stormy Gayle, the announcer, hissed into the microphone in response, “This is what we’ve come to in this country. What will happen to the land when it is no longer worked by families who know the soil? What will happen to families when there is no longer land to anchor them?” Clara shut the radio off, saw from the clock that it was 9:45, second period for her on a normal day, sophomore English.
She needed to go the grocery store because the refrigerator was bare, but she didn’t want to face people in town yet. She needed time. While paging through one of the English literature textbooks she would no longer be teaching from, Clara heard a wet whump sound, the sound of a body or some heavy object leaning against the back door.
She set her book down and went through the kitchen. She opened the back door and found a piece of paper had been slid under the jamb. She unfolded it. In her hands she held a pencil drawing of a wolf, jaws stretching wide to swallow the whole world. A single tree letting down its leaves upheld the earth, but even this was being squeezed by a serpent. She knew exactly what it was, a drawing of Ragnarok. She had been teaching Seth’s class of juniors about Norse mythology so they could understand the pagan darkness in Beowulf better, where lives were ruled by wyrd. The wolf was Fenrir, who devours middle earth at the end of time. Under the drawing someone had written a note in runic letters: There is no one who will be spared.
And on the back of the page someone had neatly printed out a riddle:
A man tries to speak
with his throat torn
One woman shrieks
blood in the corn
Man in a pit
her without sleep
one drowns in shit
the other weeps
Wolves under moon
child in her skin
the end comes soon
she will suffer for her sin.
Someone knew. Someone knew about the notes she had been keeping.
The first note she discovered near the overhead projector, pleated in a neat square with her full name printed on the outside. It was Clara’s third day as a long-term substitute, and she needed to get the journals written out on the transparencies for first period. She unfolded the note, wondering who had left it there:
You have such a nice laugh, it makes me warm inside. But even when you are laughing your eyes look sad. You look like the loneliest person in the world.
Clara didn’t know what to do with it. She searched her mind for the faces of those who sat near the overhead, who might have slipped this note here. Part of her wanted to throw it away. Keeping it invited an intimacy. Keeping it meant the words printed there were true in ways she wasn’t ready to think about. She put it in her desk drawer, telling herself she would throw it away after school. But she never did, and every other day when she came in the notes were waiting for her in the same place, tucked carefully under the big bulky overhead.
He’s always gone at night. Where does your husband go? Where could he go with such a pretty wife at home? If you were mine, I wouldn’t leave you alone like that.
He was watching her. She was being watched even after school. But she always had that feeling, living in a small town for the first time in her life, like everything she did or said was being measured and judged. The handwriting of the notes was blocky, printed in all caps, and in places the ink smudged. Someone worked on these in the late hours.
She thought she knew the writer, even though there was never a name. She thought she caught it in the glint of his eye when he watched her up in front of the room. And as deeply as they disturbed her, a small part of her was flattered. She was pregnant, after all, a married woman. Any day, any time, she only had to turn the letters in to the principal. To tell him her hunch, but then so what? It’s not like she could prove anything.
The thing that troubled her most was why she held on to the letters afterward, why she had them still downstairs in a kitchen drawer under the hand towels, the pages folded and refolded so many times that some of the words blurred. She had wanted to turn them in when the sheriff came to interview her. She needed to show her husband. But by now it would have made her look guilty as well, and she hadn’t done anything, had she? She hadn’t encouraged him in any way. Or was it enough, sometimes to simply return his look in class, to stand talking as though there weren’t anyone in the room but the two of them?
I don’t know what to do anymore. Sometimes I watch you. Late at night. You keep a light on even after your husband has come home again. Do you feel me out there in the dark? I love you, dumb as that sounds. It’s what I wanted to tell you. One day I will find the guts to tell you with more than these words. I will tell them all in a way no one can forget.
HER HANDS TREMBLED AS she smoothed the edges of the paper she held now. Seth. She had seen him working on this very same drawing the week before the shooting, and now someone had brought it here to her door. Seth Allis Fallon. There had been nothing between them. The only thing between them was that she had wanted to mother him, a student all the other teachers loathed and feared. Had he misread how she wanted to keep him safe, even from himself? How stupid, how arrogant of her to think that she had tamed him.
The drawing was a cover for the story he never bothered to turn in, the riddle some dark and bloody parody of the ones she had taught his class, but seemed to refer to both Seth’s and the sheriff’s death. It spooked her, especially the parts about the woman with “a child in her skin.” This could only be Clara, could only mean that she was being hunted, but there was no reason for her to feel any danger, not anymore, and what was her sin?
We are all born into Adam’s sin, her husband Logan had said to her once, each of us tasting exile in our mutual fall. Out of this grows our longing for the lost garden, for the paradise we might know again. It’s what he told her the first time they talked about faith, holding her damaged hand in his, speaking of a place where they might be whole inside and out. And if she doubted anything, she did not doubt this man’s goodness, even if she feared him doubting hers.
She scanned the yard, but there was no one there, just the winding gravel path that led to Logan’s church and, beyond the empty graveyard, the blond field of corn and the encroaching woods.
WERGILD
As the day went on, the sun cooked up a heat so cloying even the wind lay still before it. His empty house droned like a dead phone line. Like Grizz was some kind of dog whose ears peeled back w
hen he heard a faint calling from someone loved and gone.
There’s things you don’t know, the girl had said. Will Gunderson had kept a shack in the woods and he taken his son there if she spoke true. He believed her, but he was going to have to see with his own eyes. Grizz only believed in what he could lay his hands on. That’s why he needed to go to town, talk to the pastor. He was going to have to see the body.
After the cattle were gathered in and the fence fixed, Grizz went into the house to get cleaned up. He washed his face in the sink, rinsed out his mouth, and then eased his bladder. He paused when he went into the kitchen because Seth’s mother was ever present in this room. The kitchen table and walls and cabinets were still the same matching lime-green color that she’d painted them before Seth’s birth. Framed watercolor vistas of sugary sand beaches and glowing seas hung on the wall. Jo had hated the cold, and in the wintertime she’d sit in this room with the gas stove open, drinking chamomile tea while she worked on transcribing notes for Dr. Salverson’s office.
Someone had been here and gone; he saw right away from the cleanliness of the floor. The visitor had come while he was sleeping and whoever she was had also taken the time to sweep up dirt the sheriff’s men had tracked in from the fields and broken glass from the floor. A note on the kitchen table waited for him. He picked it up:
Do not dispair give up,
Your not alone.
Hotdish in the fridge,
Cook thirty minutes at 350.
The handwriting was unsteady, arthritic. One of the women from the Naomi Circle at church, the meddlesome old biddies. The world wasn’t ready to leave him alone; he couldn’t hide from it anymore. He crumpled the note in his fist. Grizz needed something in him to soak up the acids in his stomach, and hotdish, the food of solace in these parts, wasn’t it. He got out some saltine crackers from the cabinets and forced these down with tap water.
When he was done he threw away the note, finding that whoever had come here had also discarded the weekly paper in the trash so Grizz wouldn’t have to look at it. The lead article carried the story about his son and featured a yearbook photo from Seth’s freshman year when he still wore his hair short, the bangs chopped unevenly, his eyes slitted like he was looking into the sun. It was the year they discovered Seth had the same systemic lupus that had killed his mother at age forty, the year little wolves had come to the Fallons. Grizz couldn’t bear to look at the photo long.
Little Wolves Page 5