Little Wolves

by Thomas Maltman

  He absorbed this as if it was old news to him. “How’s Stanley doing?”

  “The same.” There was something airy and elemental about the pastor’s Nordic good looks, his gleaming white teeth.

  “Would you mind if I gave him communion?” He held up a slender black case.

  “I doubt he’s even awake. He’s just had his dialysis treatment.” For some reason she felt angry with this pastor and with her father for not telling her, as if he was leading a secret life. And it was a good secret, unlike the rest of what he kept from her, but it bothered her the same.

  “Okay if I look in on him? I’ve been coming every week.”

  Clara relented, and when they went into his bedroom, her father’s eyes were open, and he even smiled for the young pastor. Clara looked at her father with a sense of mingled wonder and betrayal. After all these fiercely agnostic years, the old man had been taking religion on the side. Was he taking out insurance with the reaper knocking? His eyes blinked in the lamplight, hooded by furry gray brows. He had a lifelong drinker’s face, his nose split with red veins. “I’m so glad you got to meet my Clara,” he said. “She’s living with me, just temporarily. She’s a student, you know, a linguist. She’s going to be a professor one day.”

  “Yes, I know.” The pastor turned toward her, smiling. “He talks about you all the time. It’s good that you’re here with him.” He set his black case down on the nightstand and cracked it open. Inside, plastic cups shaped like thimbles nestled in red velvet lining. He took out the cups along with a canister of wine and a thin tube packed with crackers. “Would you like to join us?” he asked Clara.

  “No,” she said, crossing her arms.

  The pastor filled the small cups with wine, his hands shaking so that some spilled on the nightstand. She saw that he was preparing her father to cross over, to go somewhere she couldn’t follow. It shouldn’t have mattered, the stale wafers, the bitter wine, but when the pastor said, “This is my body, broken for you,” snapping the wafer in half and placing it on her father’s tongue, the old man exhaled lightly, his eyelashes fluttering. And when he said, “This is my blood, spilled for you,” and tipped the cup past her father’s cracking lips, he shut his eyes and his breathing deepened, as though the wine were spreading inside him, cleansing impurities. Clara looked away, her eyes full.

  The young pastor visited twice a week, and Clara found herself timing her day so that she would be home when he arrived. Sometimes, when her father was sleeping, they went into the kitchen and talked.

  “The closest I’ve come to religion is reading Rilke,” she told him one afternoon. “ ‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror,’ ” she recited from memory.

  “ ‘Which we still are just able to endure,’ ” he continued, surprising her, “ ‘and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.’ ”

  Clara cupped her face in her hands, leaned toward him. “You know the Duino Elegies?”

  “I read them in the original German the year I studied abroad. I adore Rilke.” He was quiet for a moment, considering. “Rilke says that we live out our lives in the horizontal.” He drew his hand slowly along the surface of the table, “but every now and then, even in an ordinary life, we touch the vertical.” He lifted his hands from the table, spread them. “We get some glimpse of heaven. Faith is like that. Most of the time, I don’t sense God. I stumble through my days as blind as the next person, but every now and then I touch the vertical.”

  Somewhere during this recitation, Clara had touched his hand unconsciously after he lowered it to the table, and she held on. They had both blushed when they realized, and even then she hadn’t let go.

  AFTER THEY RETURNED FROM the hospital, Clara lay in bed waiting for the baby to rise as a fish does from the depths. Why was she so sure this child was a boy? The boys cause the most trouble, the widows told her. Logan sighed in his sleep beside her, tired out from the drive, but Clara was stirred up. Gusts of wind and rain shook and rattled the house. The north window flexed inward like a membrane, and outside the bare maples scraped one another.

  Mother. Clara’s first ghost, her childhood imaginary companion. In the wind she heard her mother trying to get home through the snow. The snow was coming, a winter out of time. Clara’s eyes grew heavy, lulled by the sound of falling water. She shut them for a moment, but somewhere distantly a door banging open and shut woke her. The wind moaned long and low, and it was so cold in the room she wanted only to nestle under the covers, spooned against her husband. Her left hand hurt, the missing fingers stretching out in the dark, regrowing from the nubs. The pure pain of it popped her eyes open.

  She was here in the room, having arrived with the storm. Clara heard her before she saw her, the sound of dripping, a board groaning. She had plugged a night-light into the wall so she wouldn’t have to stumble around if she needed to use the bathroom, but the bulb crackled and went out. In the new darkness, Clara sensed her near the bed, a deepening of shadow. Logan turned over in his sleep, muttering incoherently. The floorboards creaked again, a sound like a sigh. Clara pushed up against the headboard, shut her eyes to banish her. The nerves in her hurt hand bristled.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. You’ve been out there the whole time, and now you have a new companion in the suicide corner, don’t you? Did he wake you up from your sleep? I heard about you, Mother. I know your story now. Go away.”

  Clara opened her eyes again, and in the pitch of the room she saw her. The woman’s hair rose and fell as though the wind had come inside along with her. Her skin blue as moonlight on snow. Her hospital gown shimmering. She looked cold, covered by a sheen of thin ice melting and pooling in a puddle at her feet.

  “He left you, didn’t he? Left you out to die in the snow, so he could carry me back. And now you’re angry with me. That’s it, isn’t it? You would have been free and alive if it wasn’t for me?”

  The woman carried something in her arms, a bundle in the shape of a child. A present for her daughter. The bundle squirmed.

  Clara heard a thin screaming. A child lost somewhere and crying for help. Then the blanket her mother held out to her unwrapped. What spilled out at first looked like a baby but was white as a corpse. The child was no more than a round ball of maggots, seething and boiling. These maggots spread up the woman’s arms, burrowing into her blue skin or unfurling one by one before dropping to the floor. The crying turned to a shriek, full throated. Her mother was still coming toward her even as the maggots ate her alive, her icy skin peeling away in clumps until she was bone, a skeleton woman, a skull with livid dark hair. She reached for Clara, disintegrating as she came.

  Then the light switched on, and Logan, above her, pressed a finger to her lips.

  Her throat ached. She had been screaming. She had been the one making that awful sound.

  He stroked her forehead. “You’re burning up,” he said.

  He brought her Tylenol.

  Clara took the pills and watched as he toweled up a spill of water on the floor—she had knocked over her glass in her sleep.

  She and Logan were a young couple with too few belongings to fill a big parsonage echoing with a century’s worth of memories. When you walk in a place, she thought, spill blood, surely the echoes of your passing remain long after you were there.

  A GOOD DAY’S WORK

  His wife Jo’s last summer had been a scorching season like the one that just ended, nights so hot the two of them slept naked, an evening ritual. He would shut off the lamp, disrobe, and cross the room where she waited for him atop the marriage quilt her mother had sewn. As soon as he lay down she straddled him, her skin feverish. When she kissed him their mouths smacked together, and her breath was hot on his neck before she bit down. His shoulders were tattooed with these teeth marks, wounds that never quite healed. She had never been like this and would never be like it again. It didn’t matter how bone sore or sun sapped he might be from working in the fields because her
hunger for him had no end, and sometimes he thought she wanted to swallow him, sate herself with his mineral and salt, take him inside her and make something new.

  When he shuddered into her, he prayed that what was dark in him would not root in her womb and that what was light in her would instead bear fruit. He prayed that the sins of the father would not follow the son, and if some summer nights he hesitated at the foot of the bed, he could not be blamed any more than he could possibly resist her summons. Summer passed in this way, and her belly did not melon-swell, and some mornings he caught her kneading the flatness of her stomach, praying fervently over and over the way farmers pray for rain in the dry season. God heard her, eventually, and gave them Seth.

  When Seth was a boy he threw the most terrible tantrums, and all Grizz could do was hold him while he thrashed and frothed at the mouth. In the firm cage of his arms he could rage for hours, it seemed, until the demon went out of him, and he sagged and was his frail self again.

  He knew what they were saying about son in town, but they didn’t know him. Had Jo not died of systemic lupus shortly after the boy’s birth, how might Seth have turned out? Had he been born in another age, he might have done something great, and his name and Grizz’s name would have been remembered for different reasons now. Something of Jo had lived in the boy, even in the final terrifying moment of his life.

  GRIZZ HAD LIED TO get the pastor out here, and the man seemed to know right off. Still, it hadn’t stopped him from following Grizz up the ridge to the burial mounds at the base of the mountain where Grizz buried the boy the night before, a rose-colored stone marking the spot.

  Under the round, rolling hummocks of grass all around them rested many bodies. Dakota. Fox and Sauk Indians. Before them, the Cheyenne. Before them, a thousand nameless generations. This was an ancient, spooky place, and Grizz didn’t usually come here. A man from the university had walked this property and wanted to come back with a group of students and do a dig, but Grizz refused. Such an act seemed a violation.

  And now Seth had a place among them. In the dark, he’d unzipped the bag he’d dragged up through the woods and let the body spill into the deep grave he’d dug. Skin touching earth. Not looking, grateful for the cover of darkness, covering his child with warm black dirt. Seth hadn’t belonged in this century, and Grizz hoped he might find rest here in the wildest place left in the valley. And if the sheriff did ever try to follow through with his threats and send out the cadaver dogs, they might never find this body among so many others.

  A tumbling of leaves rushed up from the woods and spilled past them, and the twilight quickened with swift clouds. “If Seth had lived this is where he would have come. There’s a cave behind the spot where’s he buried. He would have hid here. There’s a limestone spring close by. He would have had food and water. Maybe that’s what all the shells were for. The ones in his pockets.”

  These last few nights Grizz had dreamed of fire. Fire licking up from dead leaves and the underbrush on the forest floor, cracking and spitting as it ate twigs and leaves and branches, growing into the very trees. The oaks and maples blazing from within, as though they had been given inner beings of light. They were transfigured. The fire grew and grew until it made its own wind, a living thing, hungry for flesh, and it moved on toward his farm and the sleeping town, drifting under a pall of ashes. In the dream he saw his son running just ahead of it, his long coat fanning out, saw him stop in the grove, out of breath among the statues, and turn toward the flames.

  The pastor took off his glasses. He seemed angry to have been brought out here under false pretenses. “Let’s get this over with, then.” He chewed on his lower lip. “And I want to make this clear. I believe your boy intended evil. All that ammunition wasn’t just to kill one man. It wasn’t for hunting out here. Seth went into town knowing he was going to die, by his hand or others.”

  Fire in a dry season, in desperate days. Fire consuming them all so that the world could start fresh again. He woke with the taste of ashes on his tongue. He woke thinking of his son.

  “I know you loved Seth,” Pastor Logan said when Grizz didn’t respond.

  “I would give my life to have him back.”

  “You blame yourself for his death?”

  He nodded, his eyes stinging. He had not meant to cry. It unsettled him to cry in front of another man, but once the tears started he was powerless to stop them.

  “Do you believe that you can be forgiven?”

  Grizz settled himself by looking out over the woods, the parched trees stretching all the way to his farm and town beyond it, dusky in the fading light. “Let’s not talk about me anymore. I want you to do the funeral rites. That’s why we’re here.”

  The pastor took out his Bible, and Grizz came toward him with the lantern. Here were two men on a high hill that passed for a mountain in these parts, one carrying a light, the other a holy book. The risen moon hiding behind shreds of cloud and then reappearing once more and touching everything with silver. Something silvery moving in the woods below, among the stone statues that lined the driveway. Something unquiet where there should have been only peace. Something near calling out when the moon appeared. One man crying, one afraid. A secret ceremony, as grass closes over a body like a green wound.

  BY EARLY AUTUMN THE sugar maples stood bare out in the yard. The trees had retreated inside themselves in a bad time, letting down dusty leaves and dreaming of the promised season, abundant rain and a fat summer sun. The absence of leaves told him a story about more than drought. The sight made Grizz anxious.

  He turned when he heard footsteps crunching in the frosty leaves. A boy in a bright red Windbreaker approached, his head hung low, but Grizz recognized the younger Gunderson. The boy didn’t even know he was being watched until he left the woods and entered the yard. Grizz raised a hand as Lee approached, a dough-faced kid in work boots and jeans. “Morning,” Lee Gunderson said, his breath ghosting in the cold.

  Grizz nodded. It seemed a long time had passed since he had driven him to the hospital. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m here about the job.”

  Grizz rubbed his eyes. He’d forgotten his spur-of-the-moment offer, hadn’t seriously thought a Gunderson would take him up on it. “What time is it?”

  Lee glanced up at the sky, then back at Grizz. “It’s around nine, judging by the sun.” Grizz noted the watchband on the boy’s wrist, one of those lumpy deals that also played video games or some nonsense. One of Lee’s eyes tracked lazy, following its own orbit. Odd Lee. The sheriff’s boy. Right here on his property. “Your mother know you’re here?”

  Lee toed the dust with his boots.

  “Okay, then. But I need some coffee before we get started. You eat any breakfast?”

  He mumbled something Grizz didn’t catch, his chin tucked into his chest.

  “Look at me when you’re talking.”

  “Chocolate cake. Two slices.”

  “Your mother feed you that?”

  “She doesn’t get out of bed much these days. The cake is from the church ladies.” Looking at this boy who had come through the woods without telling his own family, Grizz remembered his body and felt hungrier than he had in a while. “That isn’t a proper breakfast. Come inside and I’ll fry you some eggs.”

  A few nights ago Steve and a few other local farmers had come with their combines to harvest his corn. There must have been at least a dozen men from surrounding farms. Grizz had recognized Steve’s cousin Harvey and the two Folshem brothers and Jim Brogan from down the road, among others. They brought trucks and gravity bins for transferring the corn to the silo, and all those machines had lit up the night. Grizz had watched them from the house and had not come out on the porch to thank them when they were done because he wouldn’t see a dime from the corn they were taking from his fields. There was a part of him that said they were doing this for themselves, so they could go back to their houses and talk later about how Christian and forgiving they had been, and their
plump wives would nod and say That poor man, and the men would say Well, and perhaps speak of how he had not come out into the yard to thank them, not even once. He knew it was unkind to think this way, because he had not deserved their mercy, and their mercy had only made him feel more desperate and alone.

  Now one boy had come onto his land, a boy from an enemy family. While the coffee percolated on the stove, Grizz fired up another burner and cut nubs of butter to coat an iron skillet. He whipped the melting butter into a froth and then cracked eight eggs, folding them together with a spatula. “I would make toast, but the loaf’s gone moldy.” The rich smell of the eggs mixed with the aroma of the coffee. It had been a long time since Grizz cooked breakfast for anyone but himself, but he enjoyed it. Seth had slept in late most days, a constant battle to get him to wake up and go to school on time.

  The Mirro percolator thumped this whole time as water rose and washed over the grounds. When the eggs were done, Grizz shut off the gas stove and carried over a plate for each of them. For a boy who claimed not to be hungry, Lee shoveled in his food.

  “How’s your brother?”

  Lee shrugged. “The same. That girl Leah comes over all the time.”

  “You mean the girl who just moved here from the Cities.” Seth’s girl.

  “I’m not supposed to follow. They keep to themselves. Mostly, I take care of the pigs. My mom calls me her little man, says it all depends on me on account of me being the responsible one. It’s not easy. That’s what she’s always saying. This isn’t easy for me, you know?”

  Grizz made a humming sound in his throat. “How often does the girl come over?”

  Lee shrugged once more, and Grizz decided not to press him. What had it been like growing up in the household of Will Gunderson? Lee raised his gaze. “I charge three dollars an hour, and I can only come on Saturdays, when my mother is working at the nursing home.”

  “Those are fair terms.”

  “What kind of work do you have for me today?”