“It’s Clara, actually,” she said once she got her breath. “I’m the pastor’s wife.”
“I know who you are.” The woman’s mouth was a dark pink cave; her caretaker must have neglected to put in her dentures. “It’s cold in here,” she continued, shivering. “That’s what hell is like, winter without end. Fire eats you up quick, but the cold is a slow kind of burning.”
They had just gotten done talking about eternal life as this woman must have known. Clara heard the others in the kitchen chatting in low voices as they washed and dried Rosa’s good silverware and china. “Why did you call me Duchess?”
“It’s who you are.”
“Oh,” Clara said. “How nice to be a duchess.”
“Don’t put on airs. We took you in as one of our own. Our little displaced person. But you were bad, you and the other one.”
The hair stood up on Clara’s arms. The woman’s whitish-blue eyes had fixed her with a hostile glare. “What did I do?”
“You know what you did.” She waved a speckled hand over her afghan. “Always serving tea and then turning the cup over to read the leaves. Telling us when to plant, if our husbands had been faithful. You walked with spirits; you lay down in sin.”
Clara froze. If hell was winter without end, it was all she saw in the woman’s eyes, emptiness and violence. But the woman’s voice ebbed with every word. Even her head sagged slightly, as if the story she told were draining her.
“Well, I won’t do it anymore.”
“That’s what you promised.” Her head was like a sunflower, too heavy for the stalk. It sagged toward the blanket. “You promised. But you were a liar. You had to be punished.”
“How?”
When a moment passed without the woman speaking, Clara leaned in close. The old woman smelled of talcum powder and decay, as if pieces of her were already rotting from the inside.
Nora appeared behind her. “I see you’ve met Bynthia.”
Clara stood and looked into Nora’s periwinkle eyes. “I need to get home,” she said, “will you walk with me?”
Once they were outdoors in the heat of Indian summer, the old woman’s words seemed insubstantial. Nora hobbled beside her on her bad hip, gossiping. “Sorry about Gretel. Some days, I feel like I have to wash my mouth out with cider vinegar just to hold my own in a conversation with that woman.”
The Catholic church’s bells rang the hour across the town.
“Bynthia called me Duchess.”
Nora halted.
“You know that name, don’t you?”
“Stop at my house and we’ll talk more there.”
They walked the remaining block in silence before going up the steps to Nora’s porch. Inside the house, Clara smelled soil and the perfume of flowers. Vines from a pothos plant twisted along the arched entryway and climbed over an inset bookcase. An umbrella tree blocked out the light coming in the living room window, and spider ferns dangled from the ceiling. Even the carpet and sofa were a matching pistachio color, the curtains darkly evergreen. Nora told her to make herself at home while she went to fix them each some ice water. A few minutes later she returned, the ice water sloshing because of her ungainly gait as she passed a cold glass to Clara.
Clara set her glass on a coaster. “You were going to tell me about the Duchess.”
Nora sat heavily, grunting as she did so. “First of all, Bynthia is ninety-five years old and she’s lived on the wrong side of the crazy river for the last decade or so. She’s Gretel’s mother. They’re relations of Sheriff Steve Krieger.”
“Then why does that name bother you so much? Why did I remind her of this woman?”
Nora glanced at Clara’s hand. “It’s your left hand, dear. How many women have such a … wound. Some of the old-timers look at you and remember. There’s been talk, but we couldn’t be sure. Who are you, Clara? Who are your people?”
“My people?” Clara settled into the couch’s soft cushions. “I don’t really know. I was raised alone by my father. He refused to talk about his family or my mother. He would only say that she died in a car accident in the wintertime. He would tell me stories, but they were fairy tales, really. There was always a mountain in them, sometimes wolves and winter storms. That’s all I know, not even my mother’s name. After he died, I couldn’t find my own birth certificate among his records. I don’t know how he registered me for school without it, how he got me my social security number. It’s as if I don’t exist, except through his stories.”
Nora was quiet for a long time. “Why did you come here?”
“My husband was called. The call committee hired him.”
“Yes, I heard. I also heard from Simon Wiley that he was sure your husband was going to turn us down. We were all surprised when he accepted. So I figure you talked him into it.”
“I did. I’ve been looking for records of my mother for a long time.”
“You might just have found her,” Nora said.
A hard knot in the center of her chest tightened her breathing. This was it, the news she had longed for. The air grew light up in her head, and she had to take a drink of water to compose herself. “All my life, I’ve lived with this gap inside me. This empty place. I need to know about her.”
Nora sipped from her glass, then set it down. “Sylvia came here a little after the war, married a schoolteacher in town. She was an immigrant, but we couldn’t be sure where she was from. She came here under the Displaced Persons Act. She was petite like you, but darker, raven haired. Shortly after the wedding, she leased out a building downtown. Lord knows where she got the money, considering her husband’s salary. Draped the windows with posters of Paris and London. The Duchess’s Beauty Emporium opened a few weeks later.”
“Did you ever go there?”
“Oh, all the young girls did. Sylvia was good with hair. You could bring a picture from a magazine, and she could weave up any bob or beehive you asked for. But that wasn’t the real draw.”
“Bynthia told me about the tea leaves.”
“Yes. She would tell fortunes after serving you tea. She had this thick, dreamy accent. It was all very European, mysterious. She predicted I would meet Charlie at the dance hall over in Henderson, predicted him right down to the color of his eyes.”
“Bynthia made it sound like the town punished her.”
“Punished?” Nora’s expression darkened, her lips thinning. “Nobody punished her.”
“I saw that woman’s eyes. Pure malevolence. Surely, she was guilty of something worse than reading some leaves.”
“Sylvia was a free thinker, if you know what I mean. One of the high school boys came to see her. She was helping him with a correspondence course, near as I remember. They worked together late at night, and I guess you could say they grew close.”
Clara twisted her hands nervously on her lap. She was trying to take all of this in, not sure what to believe. First, there was the toothless old woman, who had looked like she materialized straight from an episode of late-night cable television, Fright Show or something. Now this, her mother’s story. Duchess. A woman Clara’s father had hated so much he erased her from his life.
“We don’t talk about this. Nobody has talked about this in many years. Then you show up. What I’m saying about Sylvia and the boy is that they were caught together. Naked in the back storeroom of the shop. Remember we’re talking about the early 1960s. Hell, if that happened even today there would be trouble. Still, it might have all blown over, but Sylvia pressed for a divorce from the teacher. She said she was in love with the boy.”
“Wait. What happened to her?”
“You mean your mother?”
“If that’s who she was.”
“Your father’s name was Stanley?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke Latin?”
Clara nodded. “He ran a corner grocery store up in Savage for most of the years I was growing up, but we had whole shelves in our apartment stacked with books in Latin. I must have
been the only sixth grader in the county who’d read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the original language.”
Nora looked wistful, absently running her hands through her hair. “Sylvia had a nervous breakdown, from what we heard. She had to be institutionalized. Your father moved to the Cities to get away from all this. Start fresh. This Sylvia Meyers was your mother. I’m sure of it. She had the same eyes, dreamy and farseeing. Like she was looking on into a world of spirit none of us could see. Your father and mother were gone as far we knew. Shamed. We thought that was the last of it.”
“She came back, though.”
“For her lover, in December, a few days before Christmas. I think they were trying to run away. They left in a hurry, in the midst of a storm. But the car must have slid off the road into a slough. It turned over at the bottom of the canyon, crushing the roof. Sylvia made it out of the car. She tried to walk back to town, but she never made it here.”
“She had a baby with her.”
“It was Sheriff Steve who found the baby. He took the baby, but he had to leave Sylvia behind. He couldn’t carry both her and the baby through the deep snow.”
Clara’s head was spinning. She sank deeper into the couch, shut her eyes. It was the vision of the woman she had seen, lost in the woods, surrounded by wolves. But there were no wolves in this story. “Why did she take the baby? Why not just leave me if she wanted to run away with this guy?”
“Why do people do anything? Maybe she wanted to hurt your father.”
“I don’t understand why he wouldn’t say anything.”
“What father could bear to tell his daughter such a story? How could he forgive his wife?”
“I’m going to have to say something, aren’t I? Tell them who I am.”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. You are Clara Warren, the pastor’s wife. You are a schoolteacher. A damn fine one from what I hear. You are an expectant mother. That’s all anyone needs to know. Leave the ugliness in the past.”
Clara sighed. “There must be some kind of article from a newspaper, something to substantiate all this?”
“No. The first newspaper office burned down years ago. Why would seeing something in writing make it more or less true? The only article ever printed didn’t even mention a baby, just the accident and the death of the woman. Sheriff Steve made sure of it. No one knows, really, but a few people like me.”
“And Bynthia.”
“I knew Stanley. If he didn’t tell you, he had reasons for it. He told you enough to bring you here, didn’t he?”
“What did they do with her body?”
“She’s out there, has been this whole time. Sylvia Meyers was buried in the suicide section.”
“The suicide section?”
“Pastor Schoenwald didn’t want her with the saints. She’s right out there at the furthest edge near the woods. Kids still tell stories about her, about the woman in the woods. It’s said that some nights if you are back there in the trees you’ll hear her calling and calling for her baby.”
Nora put her hand over Clara’s and squeezed. “Now her baby has come home.”
TRAP
Grizz took the International out in the fields with a haybine and rack running behind it. He was late for this final cutting and in a foul mood, realizing he would likely have to buy hay from the next county over to feed his cattle through winter after the poor harvest. Haying this way took two men, normally, one to catch the bales spitting out the bine and stack them on the hayrack, the other to drive the tractor and scoop up the loose hay into the thresher, running along the even rows. Without Seth, Grizz had to stop every thirty yards or so and hand carry the tumbled bales to the rack and climb up to stack them himself—long, slow, hot work.
It took him two hours to get the first rack filled, so when he came up from the fields and saw a strange truck in his driveway, a rust-eaten Silverado, he cursed under his breath. What stepped out of the truck was not the young, boyish pastor Grizz had been expecting but an old spidery man with long arms. He was clad in a wool suit and carried a slender black briefcase.
Even after Grizz shut off the tractor it continued to hum and tick. The worst of his work awaited him. He’d have to unload the rack and shoot the bales up the conveyor belt into the hayloft, where the temperature likely broiled near one hundred degrees. It was too hot for this late in fall, the heat and drought relentless. He rinsed his face at the pump, in icy water drawn deep from the well.
“Looks like hard work,” the man said as he came toward Grizz.
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” he said, water dripping from his beard.
The visitor introduced himself as a preacher from over in Amroy named Cyrus Easton, and when he opened his Bible and began to read to Grizz about the end of times, Grizz stopped him by setting his hand on his shoulder and squeezing hard. “You don’t even know where you are or who I am, do you? I’m Seth Fallon, and this is just outside Lone Mountain. Almost a week ago my son killed a man and then went into the corn and ate his gun. So, I’m not meaning to be rude, but you’re the last person on earth I want to talk to right now.”
The end of the world. The apocalypse. Grizz smiled, completely unhinged. What a sick sense of humor God must have to send a man like this to him on such a day.
Cyrus pulled away from him and reached into his briefcase, extracting a brochure he left in the grass rather than hand him directly. “I heard about it on the radio,” he said, softer. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll come back another time.” He snapped his briefcase shut and peered up at the other man expectantly. “Might be I could tell you about heaven and how it’s possible for you and your son to be among the chosen.”
“You come back here and I’ll snap your neck with my bare hands.”
“Well, okay, then,” Cyrus said, gesturing at the brochure and walking to his truck. “You can look that over.” Then he seemed to think of something important because he paused midway. “ ‘Here I tell you a mystery,” he said, lifting his voice as though he were addressing not only Grizz but the cows in the pasture and the rest of creation. “ ‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.’ ”
HERE I TELL YOU a mystery. Grizz had been waiting for news from the county, biding his time. He was not a man to bide time. After the little preacher man left, Grizz abandoned the rack of hay bales. Let the rain ruin them, let them rot. There were questions about Seth he had been pushing aside.
An hour later he parked his truck under the trees at the old landing. In a normal year the shade near the river hummed with bloodsuckers, but the summer of drought had palsied the oaks and stripped the cottonwoods bare. He left his truck and made for where he thought the place might be, freshly fallen leaves crackling under his boots and releasing a dusty smell, like burned cinnamon, into the grove. The river beyond was little more than a stream, so shallow he could walk across it and hardly wet his ankles.
A little ways out, a channel catfish with a body as long as his arm rotted on the bare sand. All that remained were the barbed whiskers, hinged sucker jaws, a cage of bones. A prehistoric creature of mud and deep currents, it had probably been marooned here as the river dwindled to a shallow pond and then to nothing. The sun had bleached the scales gray, and a few crows worked at the head, picking at the flesh, before they saw Grizz and flapped their wings lazily in the heat, moving to the other side of the river.
Sweat crept down his spine. In the middle of the river a long golden sandbar gleamed under the sun. He thought of his son out here with that girl just a few months before. There would have been enough water then that Seth and Leah would have had to swim to reach the sandbar.
He let himself imagine it as it must have happened. A fire crackling from the shore in a sandy pit, a beer can sweating in his boy’s hand, the river a band of caramel under the moon, Leah dipping a red-painted nail into the water and asking, You want to go swimming?
Can’t. Didn’t bring any suit.
It was innocent, the girl had told Grizz. Bu
t had it been? He imagined her undoing the buttons of her cutoffs and letting them slide to the sand, showing long legs like a gazelle’s. And then quickly, while Seth gaped openmouthed, the shirt peeled off and fluttered behind her, before she dived in her bra and panties, popping to the surface a ways from shore, her blonde hair dark and wet against her pale shoulders. You coming in or not? And when he had followed, stripping shyly with his back turned to her, and dived in after and found in her in the river, had she tasted of the beer and the river itself, the salty mineral heat of her true self, sweet breath and the carbon of stars?
A kiss, a long kiss, Seth fighting for footing as the lazy current pulled at them, Seth trying not to think of the channel cats the size of barracuda swimming near him, all the things sliding past him in that secret river. A long kiss before the girl pulled away and went for the sandbar, laughing.
They had not been alone, Leah had implied. Someone had stood on this shore as he did now, back in the trees, watching the two teenagers in the shining river. And if it had been Will, why hadn’t he arrested them for trespassing, two half-naked minors under the influence? Will Gunderson had not been the kind to look away while others broke the law. Unless Will himself had secrets out here. Unless this was not the first group of teenagers he had spied on.
Grizz breathed through his mouth, steadying himself. He had a hard time letting go of that vision of his son in the river with the girl. For a short time in the early part of summer he had stopped fearing for his son’s future, and let his guard down.
A beaten path led to a small cabin in the clearing. This was the place Grizz had been heading for all along. The cabin leaned on its river-rock foundation, something mudded together in a bygone century. This was the place Leah had told him about, where Will brought vagrants and strangers to scare them. A sign warning that this was county property was nailed near the door, but some kid had spray-painted FUCK YOU, PIG in red letters over it.
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