“You heard what happened over in Amroy?” Kelan went on when she hesitated. “Some Satanists killed a farmer’s pig for one of their rituals. Cut off its head; gutted the body.” This announcement sparked a host of side discussions throughout the class, rumors of rituals back in the woods or on isolated farms that involved molested children, animal dismemberment, secret graves.
“Did any of you see this with your own eyes?” Clara said, trying to get control of the conversation once more.
“My dad’s the sheriff,” Kelan continued. “He could tell you stories about what goes on in this town.” The other students in the room quieted. She felt a collective leaning toward Kelan. Seth they feared for his size and violence, but Kelan held sway with personality. Being the son of the sheriff made every story he told matter that much more. Worse, Clara felt somehow that they needed to believe that these things were happening nearby out in the woods. Such stories offered the delicious shiver that comes from walking in a nightmare and returning safe to your ordinary world.
“Look,” said Clara, “if you read the accounts of serial killers, it’s not the devil they report giving them marching orders. It’s not the devil’s voice they claim to hear up in their heads.”
It’s God who they say told them to kill, she was about to say. But Kelan cut her off. “Do you believe in him, Mrs. Warren? You didn’t answer my question.”
She wasn’t going to lie. These kids had grown up with lies. Adults telling lies to children to keep them afraid or to keep them safe. If Clara held sway here in this room, it was as a truth teller. She hadn’t lied, and she wasn’t going to start. “What do you think?” she said, turning the question back on him.
“The devil is a roaring lion in this world,” he said, his gray eyes shining, and his words flit about the hushed room like bats.
Clara had not meant to think of Kelan now. In truth there was something smug and condescending about the boy that got under her skin. She was trying to remember Seth, the last time she saw him. Clara had been concentrating so she could finish grading a batch of five-paragraph essays from the sophomores on the definition of a hero. She needed to finish them and then get home and start dinner for Logan. It was late in the day, and most of her fellow teachers had gone home, an unnatural quiet spreading in the halls. Clara had the window open to let in a breeze and cleanse the room from the day’s gathered odors—chalk and mildewing dictionaries and teenageboy odors.
Clara had looked up and he was there, dressed in dark jeans, a denim jacket with patches of his favorite metal bands sewn on. His long hair, washed and feathered, glistened. “Seth? I didn’t even hear you come in.”
“Can I ask you something?” His hands were in his jacket’s pockets as he came toward her. “Why’d you come here?”
“We needed a job.”
Seth frowned. He was studying her hand, the missing fingers. Most of the students couldn’t stop staring, but Seth only seemed curious. “You told us your mother died in a car accident.”
She nodded. She hadn’t told the full story, just enough to satisfy their curiosity. The unexpected blizzard. The woman with the baby in the backseat. The only bits of the story she knew, really.
“My mom died when I was a baby, too. She only held me once.”
“I’m sorry.” And this was something she had not expected, either: the way the students came to her after class to talk about such things.
“She had lupus. She had been really sick a long time.” He swallowed. “You remind me of her, pictures I’ve seen.”
“I do?” Clara wasn’t sure what to say. She thought of the notes and was relieved on one hand that he might think of her in such a way. Maybe that was the connection between them, both missing mothers, both longing to hear a mother’s voice. Feral, like her.
“I’ve got lupus, too,” he said. “I found out a few years ago.”
She didn’t know what it was, just that it could cause great pain. Hadn’t it killed Flannery O’Connor?
“That creative response you asked for … there’s something I don’t get about these people.”
“Go on,” she said, grateful for the change of subject.
“All the gods die in Ragnarok, right? It’s like the end of everything. So what’s the point?”
“The point? You mean of living?”
“Living even when you know it’s all going to go to shit, no matter what you do.”
She decided to ignore the profanity. Seth’s class was blunt spoken, and early on as a substitute she had developed tin ears. “I guess the point is to make sure your death matters. To die heroically so you can enter Valhalla. To do something of worth.”
Seth’s Adam’s apple danced in his throat. He stepped forward and took something from his jacket pocket, an object wrapped in tissue paper, and placed it on her desk.
“What’s this?”
He glanced toward the hallway and then at her. “Mrs. Warren, you need to be careful.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just watch yourself,” he said.
Clara stood.
Seth was walking away, his gaze to the floor. Clara unwrapped the tissue paper to reveal two hand-painted miniatures, the kind used for Dungeons & Dragons. The first miniature had the legs of a human, but the shoulders turned muscular and hairy and were topped with a leering wolf’s head. A werewolf. The second figure had auburn hair, like Clara, and wore a long sweeping gown, her mouth open as though speaking a song or spell. A priestess. Each figure was exquisitely detailed and painted in bold colors. The priestess clutched a staff in her left hand. Clara felt sure if she studied it under a magnifying glass she would see two fingers missing, cleaved by an X-acto knife. She wrapped the miniatures in the tissue paper and put them away in her drawer. It was only later that she remembered Yggdrasil and the story of the two children, Lif and Lift-hrasir, who survive the end of the world by hiding in a tree. Of Balder coming back from the dead, and the sons of gods who witness the green world made again.
It didn’t matter anymore; he was dead, and Clara had failed him or worse maybe even given him some kind of false valor to do something horrendous. His blood was on her hands. And now there was someone out there who agreed, who had put the drawing under her doorjamb like an accusation. Hadn’t she been teaching children about doom?
The boy’s father had been here and gone. Seth cut the word “wergild” in his desk, and as he had done so, had he known his father would come to her with it? A blood debt. Had he meant that this wouldn’t end with his death, that it might trigger something worse? She remembered him, what was good in him, and she was more confused than ever.
Clara looked in the direction the wind had snatched the drawing, off into the cemetery and the field beyond. The sun was setting, but there might still be a chance to find it. In her thin maternity blouse and skirt, she stepped out onto the grass and started climbing the hill. She didn’t know where she was going, except that she had the feeling that whoever had left this for her had come this way, a faint scent of cordite on the breeze. In this stage of her pregnancy, Clara had never smelled so keenly what the world had to offer.
Below her the town lay still. She realized she was repeating Seth’s journey from a few days ago, heading for the country, for shelter, a hiding place. She was sweating in the muggy air from the walk, her feet aching from the hard ground. She’d walked far enough to reach a deep slough filled with tall, waving grasses. On the other side of the slough stood the waiting corn, the field where Seth killed himself. It had to be it. The cornfield ringed round by woods.
Before she knew what she was doing, she’d taken a few steps into the slough. The thick grasses were high as her waist and alive in the wind, stalks bending with each gust. The seed heads of the grass ticked and frayed in the wind. The corn beckoned to her, but she didn’t have the courage to enter. As her eyes scanned it, she saw something that took her breath away.
A figure in a long coat stepped out of the field at that very moment. The boy
. Dark hair. The same haggard coat hanging down near his shoes. The vision she had seen that afternoon he came to her door and rang the bell. Seth Fallon.
Her heart pushed up in her throat, and her breathing shallowed. He just walked out of the corn, from the place where he had ended himself, his eyes finding her right away. She stepped back, away from the slough of waving grasses, her blood gone cold.
Impossible. You are dead. You put a shotgun into your mouth and pulled the trigger. They found your body. Maybe a hundred yards separated her, but the figure clearly wore Seth’s coat, his face a dark smear. He wasn’t watching Clara, however. He stood surveying the town, the same spread of valley she had taken in moments before.
Impossible. The morning of the shooting she climbed the stairs after hearing the gun. I saw you cross the graveyard and vanish. I heard screaming down the street. And all I did was press my back to the wall and sink to the floor, knowing without seeing what had happened. How could I have known? Why won’t you leave me alone even now?
Inside her the child twisted and tumbled. A throbbing at the end of her fingers. She was soaked with icy sweat.
Then the figure turned around and vanished into the corn. Clara hurried home, past the cemetery, shivering all over. She was not supposed to have seen what she just saw. You’ve come back for me, my student. You’ve come back and you’re not going to let me sleep, are you? You are restless because you should be in your grave. There was too much she didn’t know. Why? What could the dead ask of her?
SWADDLING
Nolan’s Funeral Home was on the other side of town, not far from the nursing home and the big concrete walls that protected the downtown from the river during spring floods. Grizz passed through town itself, his vision focused on the road ahead, ignoring those few who came out of the post office or corner store to witness his rust-pitted Ford rumbling past and wonder over his errand.
The funeral home itself was an ornate, plum-colored plantation-style house with white pillars on the veranda. He shut off his truck, walked right up onto the porch, and stepped into the foyer without bothering to ring the bell. A young man in a three-piece suit and vest was seated behind a polished desk going over some papers alone. He had orange short-cropped hair, a spray of freckles across his face. “Can I help you?” he asked.
He was not someone Grizz knew, likely an apprentice Nolan was training, someone from another town. “Where is he?” he asked.
“Who?”
“I’m looking for my son’s body.”
A door opened behind the young man, and Nolan himself stepped out. He wore the same dark suit as his assistant, a kerchief tucked in his pocket. Nolan was a short man, his white hair pomaded with Brylcreem, his eyes huge and owlish behind thick black glasses. He nodded at Grizz as though he’d been expecting him and waved his hand at the young man to return to the papers at his desk. “Come this way, Grizz,” he said, holding open the door.
When the door shut they were in a narrow hallway together. Paintings of English gardens, the kind with topiary and fountains, hung on the walls, none of them looking like any place around here. A hallway of mirrors and illusions complete with velvety carpet that swallowed the sound of footsteps. Nolan turned as soon as they were in the cavernous hall. “Let’s go to my office. We can talk there.”
“I want to see Seth.”
Nolan paused, his eyes blinking behind his glasses. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Where is he?”
Nolan remained impassive. “Come to my office. We’ll talk about things, make arrangements.”
“I was already told what kind of service they have planned for him and where they’re going to bury him afterward.”
“I heard,” Nolan admitted. “But I don’t sit on the church council, so that sort of thing is not up to me. My job is to prepare people to say good-bye.” He drew in a quick breath and rushed on before Grizz could respond. “There are several affordable packages that might interest you. I am mindful of your circumstances.”
Grizz let out an exasperated breath. It would serve this asshole right if he wrung his neck right here in the hallway. He hated his suit, the fake flowery prints on the walls, the richness of the carpet beneath his feet. It was all a lie for the grieving, and now Nolan wanted him to sit in his office while he spun out a dizzying row of numbers, bid him sign some dotted line? But Nolan could still help him. He was not the enemy. “What if I was to bury him on my own land?”
“You need a permit from the county. You’d have to get a portion of your land declared a private cemetery. It’s frowned upon by the current commissioner.”
“Frowned upon?”
“Now, if you just follow me, we can talk. It’s not so bad. Do you really think God cares what section of the cemetery we bury bodies in?”
Grizz narrowed his eyes. “Show me the door that leads to your basement.”
Nolan took off his glasses and wiped them with his kerchief. “End of the hallway. Last door on your right.”
Grizz went down the hall. When he opened the door, he smelled the dampness and an odor like leaking gas. His iron-toed boots clacked on the concrete steps leading down. He didn’t even notice Nolan following until the man flicked on a fluorescent set of overhead lights, the tubing buzzing. The door clanged shut behind the men as they went down. Seth’s body waited at the bottom of the stairs in a chilly room. He’d been zipped in a black bag that sat on top of a gleaming metal table, a gurney with wheels underneath, everything polished and clean. Gutters cut into the concrete floor below the gurney led to a large drain.
When Grizz stopped, Nolan set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t do this.”
Grizz clenched his fists and stood with planted feet, bracing himself. “I need to be sure.”
“It’s him. Believe me. But there isn’t much left of his head. I’m telling you that now. It’ll have to be a closed-coffin service.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I’m trying to be honest, here. Look, if it makes you feel any better to know this, when they did the autopsy on Will Gunderson they found his body riddled with cancer. It was all over his chest and stomach. If anything your son saved him long months of agony. They both died quick.”
“Leave us be.”
Nolan did as he asked but stopped on the way out. “This shouldn’t be your last memory of your son. There are better ways to say good-bye. Remember him instead when he was a child.” He went up the stairs without looking back.
Grizz shut his eyes and put his hand on the bag. The last time he had been in a room like this was in the hospital after Jo died. The only thing that saved him in the following days was being able to bring home Seth and care for him as a baby.
Seth had never been happy unless Grizz held him or rocked him, and nights passed with him up late walking the creaky floorboards of the old farmhouse. Seth cried in colicky hiccups and spat up most of the formula he managed to get down the baby’s gullet. When he heard the baby crying he would head into the nursery room and find the child waiting for him. The two had a truce. By rolling a bottle nipple in sugar he could get Seth to take his formula. Eventually, Grizz ended up bundling the sleepless baby into the car seat and taking him for a ride in the truck.
Already the roads of the town had been so imprinted on his brain he could drive them in his sleep, and sometimes on the long road back, stretches passed with his mind so vacant he believed he had been sleeping. Seth quieted as soon as he was in the cab. Father and son owned the empty streets, the sleeping town, all of it belonging to them at that late hour. To stay awake, Grizz kept up a narration of things he saw on the road: raccoons pillaging a trash can, a hunter’s moon, Orion descending. The rumbling truck took them down roads glazed with black ice, Grizz white-knuckling the steering wheel, terrified of the deep ditches opening on either side of the road, down past farmhouses, into the ancient river valley where at last the baby descended into his uneasy rest.
At home he carefully lifted Seth out of the car seat and carried him u
pstairs to his crib. Before wrapping the baby in his swaddling, he held him, swaying like a branch in a light wind, and prayed, “Lord, this child is little more than a sparrow’s weight in my hands. Watch over him. Do not take him from me. What strength I have I will into this child. Down to marrow, let this boy be whole and safe and strong.”
Grizz let himself weep for what he had lost until his breath was ragged in his lungs. He couldn’t bear to open the bag. Nolan was right. He couldn’t do it, and he hated himself for his cowardice. It wasn’t Seth here, just the shell of his wrecked body. If there such a thing as a soul, a spirit, the boy’s was not here. There was only this to believe in now. Grizz, who only believed in what he could touch with his hands, needed to believe in something else. He had failed his son in life, but he would not in death.
“I’ll come back for you,” Grizz said. “I won’t let them hurt you anymore.”
WOLFGIRL
Deeper, further back into her past, there was a wind in the trees outdoors, a wastrel wind. She was six years old, an only child, living with her father in an apartment above the Four Corners, a small grocery store he owned and operated in the suburban town of Savage, Minnesota. That winter, December 1968, it was so cold at night she could hear the elm trees out in the windbreak splitting open, a shriek as their broken branches fell. They dropped with a tremendous thump that shook both the windows and the snow from the roof. Huge icicles draped from eaves, like the claws of some dragon resting on the roof, blown in by the storm. She imagined him up there, scales of his pale lizard belly scraping the tiles. Snow fell and stuck to barren trees and brought more branches to the ground. The night was full of falling snow and falling stars and the wind rising and falling from beyond.
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