“No. Not if we take them home.”
Grizz lay his gun down in the grass. “These aren’t like puppies from a dog, Seth. They’re wild things, and they belong out here in the wild. We start violating the natural order, and bad things will happen.” He squared his shoulders and leveled his gaze. “Now get back down to the truck and let me do what I have to do.”
“No.” Seth’s jaw jutted out, and he drew himself up, and Grizz saw how big he was becoming. Still, he could shove him aside, and it would all be over in a few seconds. His iron-toed boots would crush a few baby coyote skulls, and then it would be done.
“What do you think people in town will say when they hear we’re raising coyotes?”
“I don’t care. I’ll only keep them until they get big enough to live on their own.”
“The one thing that keeps us safe from such creatures is that they fear us. You take away that fear, and you’re going to hurt both them and us.”
Behind them, the whimpering of the pups continued. The boy’s eyes watered, but he kept his footing, and when Grizz laid a hand on his shoulder, he flinched. That one action, a simple flinch, took away his breath. His son thought he was going to hit him. He never hit Seth, hadn’t whipped him in years.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
“We can take them home?”
“But they have to sleep in the old brood house. We can’t have them in the barn or anywhere near the cows. You’re going to have to make sure they’re cleaned every day.”
“We’ll get one of the heating lamps,” Seth said. “I’ll stretch a cord from the barn. And we can keep them in a box with some blankets. And we can feed them with the calving bottles.”
“Not a word at school, understand? I don’t want people in town hearing what we’ve done.”
Seth drew his hand across his mouth, zipping it shut.
One by one the three pups were lifted, blind and trembling, from the den and deposited in the warmth of Seth’s coat. They rode home together with that pungent scent filling up the cab and the sound of them crying so loud Grizz could hardly hear himself think. The boy talked to them in a cooing voice, wincing when a claw hooked his chest under the shirt. “Little wolves, is that what you called them, Dad?”
“It’s what some call coyotes, sure.”
“My little wolves,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you.”
All through the spring and summer, Seth fed them faithfully with a bottle they used for the calves and baby’s formula from Jurgen’s Corner, replacing the nipples that the coyotes gnawed to rubbery shreds. When they were big enough to eat from his hand, he let them go, true to his word. They’d come back every night since. The boy was not supposed to feed them anymore, but Grizz knew he took them scraps and dry dog food, and that was how they came to be so large, the size of wolves instead of bony coyotes.
After stopping the boy’s bleeding, Grizz carried the Gunderson child up from the meadow into the yard where his truck waited.
“I can walk,” Lee protested, but Grizz shushed him. The boy weighed about the same as a newborn calf, like those that slipped under the fence every now and then, got lost in the grove, and had to be carried back to the pasture. Grizz ignored the aching muscle in his own abdomen, worrying that if he set Lee down and made him walk the boy’s wounds would reopen.
Once he got him into the cab, Grizz drove him to the hospital, remembering the day he and Seth had found the coyotes. It was a good memory, one of a few he had, and thinking on it passed the silent miles that took them over the prairie.
When they pulled up at the Fell Creek Area Hospital, Grizz paused. The parking lot lay empty. “I don’t think I’ll stick around once you get inside. I don’t know what folks will say if they see us together.”
Lee was shaking, holding the wounded arm that Grizz had bound with knotted pieces of his shirt.
“When is your pop’s funeral?”
“In a couple days.”
He hated to ask it, but didn’t know when he would get another chance. “Did you know about Seth? Did he say anything to your brother?”
Lee hesitated, his nostrils flaring. Grizz thought he might start crying and worried he wouldn’t know what to do if the child did, but Lee only wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked out the window.
“You think you’re done trying to kill me?”
He turned sharply. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess so.”
Grizz knew he wasn’t afraid to die. He would have been glad to be shut of his problems. “It’s too bad your aim wasn’t better.”
“I could have hit you if I wanted.”
“Sure.” He didn’t ask about why. He thought he knew. His own son had looked at a man down a barrel and pulled the trigger. This boy thought to do the same. He couldn’t account for the feeling floating in his chest, a floating bubble of thought. To die. It would be a good thing. Only by dying could he come closer to what he had lost. Yet he could feel the steering wheel under his hands, the breath in his lungs. A child beside him. He had made promises to Seth. If he died, who would tell Seth’s story? Who would see to it that his son was buried properly? His work wasn’t done yet. “What are you going to tell people about how you got hurt?”
Lee still trembled. He was expecting for Grizz to turn him in to the law, but he wasn’t afraid either. He was hurt bad, maybe not in his right mind. His right mind. Who was these days? The cab reeked with the iron smell of his blood.
“If you don’t mention the coyotes, I won’t tell about the gun.” Grizz held out his hand.
“Okay,” he said. His eyes rolled back in his head like he might faint.
“Just tell people that you were out running and some wild dogs were chasing you and you fell down the ridge. Tell them you stumbled out to the road and someone found you and drove you here.” It was a dumb story, but how closely would people question Lee? Especially considering what his family had been through. The words his own child had carved into the desk rose up unbidden in his mind. Wergild. A blood debt. Grizz heard the words leave his mouth before he even knew what he was saying. “You have a job?”
Lee shook his head.
“You want a job?”
Another nod. “You think you could work for me, help a little around the farm?”
The boy’s hand was on the door handle. Their families were two of the oldest in the valley, had been there since the beginning through Indian uprisings and droughts. There was ugliness in the shared story, both recent and long buried. Lee looked at him, and he saw something spark in his eyes. He didn’t appear to be as dumb as people made him out. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Just think it over.”
He grunted as he moved to climb out of the cab.
“You need help inside?”
“No. I’m fine.”
The door wheezed as it swung shut. “Lee?” he called, reaching across to catch it before it closed all the way.
“What?”
He considered a moment. “If you come see me again, next time you make sure you come by the driveway.”
Lee shuffled along the sidewalk until the sliding glass doors of the emergency room opened. He paused at the threshold, but before he stepped inside he raised his good arm and waved to Grizz.
DUCHESS
Clara had not been back to church since the shootings, but the next morning she meant to meet Nora for a Bible study with her Naomi Circle at a house across town. Going to something as simple as a Bible study was a good way to make the church a part of her life again with the sheriff’s funeral tomorrow. When she married Logan, she had made promises.
Clara put on a pair of maternity shorts with a big stretchable waistband, an outfit she completed with a spaghetti-strap blouse and sandals. With her protruding stomach and pale stork-thin legs, she knew she cut an ungainly figure, but the unnatural heat wouldn’t let up, even in these first days of October. By late morning the asphalt blistered. Under the sun’s glaring eye lawns
baked yellow, parched trees let down the last of their leaves, and a film of dust settled like ashes over the streets and houses. Wind-still, even the air had a seared odor, a faint sulfur reek from dying bullheads on the shores of the narrowing river, and as the townspeople went about their daily errands they sought shelter from the heat in what scant shade buildings and trees had to offer.
The walk gave her time to think about the readings, which included every passage about heaven or hell mentioned in Old Testament and New. It had surprised her how little the Bible had to say about what happens after we die. When she asked Logan, he had only shrugged. “The Bible is the record of a living God seeking out relationships with a living people.”
“I don’t know. I thought the whole point was getting to heaven. If that’s the end of the road, the Bible doesn’t describe it very well.”
Logan had scratched at his beard. “What if it did? What if heaven was described right down to the last cubit? A known place, mapped and explored to the furthest reaches.”
“You and your mysteries,” she said, wrinkling her nose, sensing where he was headed. “That’s your answer for everything.”
“God gave us an imagination. It may be one of the most beautiful functions of our brain. He left the space open for us to fill.”
Clara wasn’t sure what she would say about the afterlife. Her father would grow angry when she tried to talking about it with him. People die, he had told her, and that’s all there is. No world but this one we can see and touch. No hell but the one we make in our own brains.
But what about Mama; isn’t she in heaven?
No. She’s just gone. All you got is me. All we got is each other.
But I want her to be in heaven. I want to see her one day.
And he would get angry, the vein pulsing in his brow. No such thing. No world but this one here. Tapping his chest, hard, like a hollow drum, then taking up her damaged hand. This is what she did to you, your mother. That’s all you need to know.
But—
Enough!
Rosa’s home proved to be a low-slung ranch house, the walkway lined with weedy, wavering daisies. Clara was twenty minutes late, drenched with sweat, and praying that Rosa, the host of the Bible study, had air-conditioning inside her house.
Rosa didn’t. The woman was a widow in a ruffled navy dress that looked hand sewn, pads puffing up the shoulders, and she ushered her into the foyer. She was staring at Clara’s bare legs, the sandals on her feet.
All the women were staring at her legs once she went into the dining room where Nora waited along with few others, sitting around a lace-covered table and sipping iced tea from tall glasses. As a group they blended into one at first when Rosa introduced them. Hilda. Doreen. Helen. Gretel. They all wore polyester pantsuits in soft autumn shades, except for Rosa. Clara was the youngest one there by at least three decades.
Clara wiped the sweat of her palms on her shorts and shook hands with each of them. Was she supposed to shake hands or was that considered unladylike? The women had light bird bones under their porous skin, a brittle fragility, and she shook hands gingerly until she got to Gretel. Gretel’s iron-gray hair was done up in a tight bun, and she had a grip like a meatpacker. She looked in Clara’s eyes and said what some of the others must have been thinking, “You wore shorts out in public.”
“Of course she did,” cut in Nora. “It’s ninety degrees outside.” She tried to laugh lightly, and Doreen joined her with a nervous bray. “I’d wear shorts if I had legs like hers.”
Gretel’s frown deepened her wrinkles. “She’s the pastor’s wife.”
“Gretel was a schoolteacher,” said Hilda, “for some thirty-seven years.”
“That’s … impressive,” Clara said. Thirty-seven years, she thought. Those poor fucking kids.
“Would you like fresh crushed mint in your tea?” asked Rosa.
“Yes, please.”
“Sit down,” bid Helen. “We were just talking about our own visions of heaven.”
Hilda pulled out a chair next to her and patted the place. “And you should know we’re having cake afterward,” she said. “German chocolate.”
“I hope they have cake in heaven,” Clara said after sitting along with the rest. She glanced at the sluggish ceiling fan spinning above the table, which only seemed to stir the hot air in the room. “And air-conditioning.” She paused, still nervous with so many eyes on her. She was always afraid they would sniff her out, a doubter among them, the one not raised Lutheran. “Did you know that Hilda or Brunhilda means ‘ready for battle’ in Low German?” she said to fill the silence. “Brunhilda rode with the Valkyries.”
Doreen laughed her horsey laugh, spraying a mint sprig onto the tablecloth. The rest looked puzzled.
“I did not know that,” said Alfrieda.
“It’s a good, pagan name,” continued Clara. “All around us these pagan reminders live on in words and names and customs.”
Now that all the women were sitting down, Helen leaned forward. “We’ve heard that you’re a scholar.”
A scholar. Clara smiled at the sound of it. “I’m a doctoral student; I just need to finish.”
Six gray heads all nodded, satisfied. Nobody asked what her studies were about, but Clara decided to fill them in anyway. Didn’t it connect to the afterlife? “For my dissertation I am examining the edicts surrounding the massacre on St. Brice’s Day in 1002. King Aethelred the Unready.…” Here she paused, clearing her throat. “How’s that for a name? Anyhow, this king declared that all the Danes living in England were to be slaughtered. A group of Danes tried to shelter within a church. But the English locked them inside and burned the church to the ground.”
“They all died?” Helen’s hand covered her mouth, as though the event Clara described had happened in the next town over only a few years ago.
“Cooked to a crisp.” Clara felt giddy from the heat. Across the table, Doreen’s eyes were glazed, her jaw slack.
“Why on earth would you want to study something like that?” This was from Gretel.
“There’s this verse in the Bible about judgment at the end of days, about using fire to separate the cockle from the wheat. Aethelred used it to justify his actions. I’ve been translating his writings, looking closely at the words, and also studying the Danish impact on customs and language.”
Silence. Mercifully, Rosa returned with her iced tea. Clara gulped some down and added, “I hope they have iced tea in heaven.”
“Foolishness,” grumbled Gretel. “Why must heaven be a place of creature comforts? Streets of gold and all that.” She shook her head. “Those are human visions, and I don’t know why we settle for clichés.”
“You’re sounding like Reverend Schoenwald,” said Rosa.
Clara knew that the Reverend Gunther Schoenwald had been pastor here for thirty years. For three decades the same portly red-bearded man presided over every Lutheran baptism, every wedding, and every death. This was another reason that Logan hadn’t wanted to come here. They have an unhealthy way of dealing with death, he said. After so many years under the same leadership, the church could develop rigor mortis, hardening in its traditions. Pastor Schoenwald had been the one who insisted on burying the suicides in a separate section. Saints and suicides and newborns all had their own territory, the tombstones for the unbaptized babies like tiny broken teeth scattered in the grass.
“Why not?” said Helen. “Surely he’s up there with the saints.”
“Is Seth up there?” Clara said, surprising herself. She hadn’t meant to speak her question aloud. She had just come to listen, but she hadn’t been able to shut up since coming inside. “Wasn’t he baptized in our church?”
“What do you think?” said Gretel. “A murderer and a suicide? What sort of God would let such evil into his holy presence?”
“The same one who lets evil into our world.”
Gretel’s jaw snapped shut with an audible clacking, like a metal hinge. “You don’t know that family, d
o you? You don’t know the slightest thing.”
Clara’s voice was small. “I knew him,” she said.
“Did you? After living here for one month? I don’t believe any of us knows what others think. Only God can look inside a person’s heart. Do you know what I am thinking right now, dear?”
“Stop this,” Nora tried to interrupt. “I don’t like where this conversation is going.”
“Something wicked,” said Clara, raising her chin and meeting the woman’s gaze.
Gretel’s smile twitched the corners of her mouth; she was enjoying this exchange, Clara realized, probably not used to people talking back to her. “There’s a difference between thinking and doing,” she said.
“Not much,” said Clara.
“Yes,” insisted Gretel. “Sometimes the difference between thinking and doing is a matter of life or death.”
AFTER THIS EXCHANGE THE rest of the conversation blurred for Clara, and she was quiet, her thoughts elsewhere. The German chocolate cake proved to be dry, spackled with a hard coconut frosting. The women gathered up the plates and headed into the kitchen. Doreen and Helen had left already, but Clara lingered, still hoping to redeem herself from her earlier foolishness. She wanted to walk home with Nora. She stayed because she needed a friend, but when she had offered to help with the dishes, Rosa had gently said, “Not in your condition.”
“Condition,” muttered Clara. She hated that word, as though the baby was some type of fungus growing under her armpits. Precious Moments figurines sat on the surfaces of sideboards and buffets lining the walls, each occupying its own lace-fringed doily. The figurines had fat angelic faces and teardrop eyes. Clara found them faintly creepy.
Gretel pushed in a woman in a wheelchair from one of the back rooms and left her there, rejoining the other women in the kitchen without any explanation. The woman was so ancient most of her white hair had fallen out, except in clumps on either side of her head. She slumped in the wheelchair, lightly snoring, a yarn afghan thrown over knees despite the heat. When Clara stepped back, she jostled the Precious Moments figurines on one of the buffet tables, startling the woman awake. She raised her head, sniffing like a hound, her eyes milky blue. “Hello, Duchess,” she said, when her eyes found Clara.
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