She shouted, not knowing what or why.
When no answer came, Clara limped toward the cabin, crossed the clearing. She climbed up on the stoop, recovering her breath, caught the swinging door, and stepped inside. The smell in the room so strong it burned in her nose, stung her eyes. Something chemical. She wiped her eyes and looked for a weapon.
She spotted the soiled mattress first, centered on the wood floor, a menagerie of impossible animals around it. What looked like red paint splashed underneath it, an uneven pentagram. A kerosene lantern, hissing quietly, cast flickering light over the scene. The sheriff himself slumped in the corner, his uniform soaked with dried black blood. An eyeless boar’s head topped where his skull should have been, the jaws wrenched open to show the terrible teeth. BEHOLD THE NEW CREATION scrawled in the same red paint on the wooden boards behind him.
Clara reeled away. The place had been made for her. This bed. This was where Kelan wanted to take her all along, the tableau he made for her. Please, God. But with the prayer, the thought that there was no God here. She was in a place where God would not come.
Her leg muscles had stiffened, but Clara managed to limp outside. Kelan stood waiting in the clearing, not more than fifteen feet away, his breath smoking. “Look at me. Look at what you did.” He grimaced, fingered the glistening open flap of skin on his cheek.
“I can fix it,” she promised. “Let me help you.”
“Go back inside,” he said. He stood in the center of the meadow, shuddering. He looked near collapse himself, but he had the strength to raise his gun, cut off her only path of escape.
“No,” she said. If she was going to die, it might as well be here, where she could feel the snow on her skin. Out in the open, among the trees where her spirit might run free. Not in there.
Kelan cursed. “I can tell you things,” he said. He wove back and forth as he came closer. His voice rising and then falling, pleading with her and then berating. “About the devil. I knew him. I lived with him.” He told her about the woman in the woods. An adulterer. A slut. Filthy like all women. His father and Sheriff Steve killed her and her lover and took the baby. Didn’t Clara know that? Didn’t she know who she was? The whole world was going to know. “Go inside. This is where you belong.”
When he lifted the shotgun, something roared off in the woods, a cry so utterly inhuman it raised the hackles on Clara’s neck.
Kelan pivoted and they were here, the coyotes surging from the woods all around him. Their ears peeled back, their yellow eyes huge and rolling. The gray pounced and snagged the edge of Kelan’s coat in his teeth. Off balance, Kelan spun and fired, and the unbraced shotgun leaped in the looseness of his hold and smashed into his face. He toppled backward into the snow. But instead of falling on him, the coyotes fled, scared off by the blast, the gunpowder smell, his high-pitched screams.
The two were alone again in the clearing. Clara limped off the stoop, hoping he wouldn’t notice her creeping up on him. Kelan, bleeding freely from his forehead, squatted as he levered open the shotgun, fumbling shells from his coat pockets. He blew on his fingers, numb from the cold, and looked up at Clara as if expected her to try rushing him. She approached, her palms upraised, when it came again, the primal bellow of something immense and wounded.
“No,” Kelan said, seeing it first. “It’s not possible.” The thing entered into the clearing, and Clara retreated, unsure which way to run, caught between the cabin and Kelan and what had come from the woods. It looked like Seth, risen from his shallow grave. Seth’s revenant here for vengeance. A thing massive and dark, as though it had formed from the fertile black soils of the farmlands stretching all around. A giant from under the earth, deep in the mountain. Her father’s giant, dripping something wet as though disintegrating with each step. HeWhoSleeps. A demon summoned.
Kelan crammed in two shells and clanked shut the chambers. The giant stepped into the clearing, black and seething. It grabbed Kelan from the ground before he could fire, lifted him in a huge hug that left Kelan’s feet windmilling above the ground. Kelan wheezed, dropping the gun, his fists flailing, knocking off wet dark earth. His screaming ended when the embrace tightened and all breath squeezed from his body. His rib cage collapsed, bones snapping brittle, an almost delicate sound, like icicles breaking on stones. Then the giant flung him away, the boy’s body folding as he fell.
Later she would wonder why she did this, how she had such presence of mind. Clara went over and crouched beside Kelan, crumpled in the snow. He blinked up at her, his pupils darkening, the color of falling ashes. He tried to speak through a mouth filling with blood. She lay her hand on his icy cheek, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” until he shuddered and was still.
The giant swayed above them, black circles ringing his eyes, and when he opened his mouth what came out was an animal’s cry of pain.
She was burning up under her skin. Somewhere off in the woods one of the coyotes howled, a question in the night, the others joining in. Clara’s own pain washed over her, splitting her strange calm. It came in waves, in beats. “Grizz,” she said to the giant. “Seth Fallon.” She called by his full name, his baptized name. She needed him to come back to his human self. “I think my water just broke.”
ADVENT
Under the door she saw the shadow of his passage in a bar of moonlight. The night stretched long and silent before she heard the scream, a wet gurgle of something being eaten alive, and then nothingness. She waited for it to return to the cabin, press again at the door. What had been killed out there? The girl lay awake with the rifle her father had left her and didn’t sleep until sometime before dawn.
The next morning she carried the half-stock rifle with her when she went to gather eggs. One of the hens was gone, the only thing left of her a few feathers drifting down in the dusty light. That was what she heard screaming. But it was not an ordinary fox that had done this. The thing outside her cabin had been heavy, big as a man. She didn’t bother to fix the latch. If it came back, what use was a thin strip of leather? How could it possibly bar a monster? She looked at the blue gleaming metal of the gun her father had given her for protection. And what use was this gun? Her father had gone out on the prairies to save her, and he had not returned.
Draw blood from the loup garou, he had told her, and he will change to his human form. He will tell you the secret he has brought for you.
Drowsy from a lack of sleep, she went about her errands, out in the sugar maples, moving from spigot to spigot to collect the syrup the cold nights had forced from the trees. Syrup clear as blood, the trees bleeding in a time of change between the winter and spring. The girl herself bled, not understanding why. There were no other women she could turn to and ask about it. The smell of her blood, she knew somehow, had drawn this thing.
There under the trees, goose bumps rippled up and down her arms, and when she turned, she saw the loup garou watching her from the shadows. It growled, displaying a mouth of long teeth, and loped toward her. Her feet felt riven to the earth, as if stakes had been driven through them. The growling was a softer sound than she expected, almost a purr. When the loup garou raised up on two legs, the matted hair fell away from its face. Its nostrils were flaring, and the large amber eyes held her again. She saw the lean ropy arms, the thick muscles of its thighs, the privates coiled in their dark nest. She shut her eyes, ashamed for looking. It smelled of leaves and sweat and grass. The claws were as sharp as she remembered, but here in the daylight, in the shadows of the woods, it was less a fearful thing. A boy only, she realized. A wild child. It circled her warily, still growling.
Afraid, not knowing what else to do, she opened her mouth, and what poured out was a song, a hymn her mother used to sing to her before bed.
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
The darkness deepens—Lord with me abide.
Her voice caught and warbled, but the sound stopped the thing in its path. A boy, then. Her father, she knew in that moment, had killed its wolf mo
ther, the only mother it had known. The boy had struck back in confusion. A boy from the War with Indians. A boy her own age.
She had been alone for a long time. Wherever her father had been, he was not coming back. The wolf child came closer, entranced by the song, the shape of her mouth. She sang on, luring it in, not knowing if it came to save or devour.
The Holden Evening Prayer service Logan introduced at the beginning of Advent season would not have gone well a few months before. This song of light and darkness in the world, which required the congregation to sit up close and sing in rounds, would have been resisted. His German American congregation was not a singing people, unless it was the old, old hymns from the brown book of worship. They had specific places where each must sit when they came inside. The men sat mostly on the north side, the women on the south. Once Logan had roped off the back pews and balcony, and mild old ladies had responded with defiance and torn down the barriers. Once he had tried to coax them to change, and they met him with stony resistance.
All that had passed now. For a short time, they would not complain. They came to be near one another, for the shelter the church offered from the ravenous winter world outside. They needed the promises more than ever. And they came to see the baby, Dena. Clara had made sure the child had a strong birth name. Dena, from the Old English. Dena, which meant “from the valley.” The news stations and journalists from around the country had come and gone. It was morning, the nightmare over, and they had to learn to live with one another once more.
They all came for Dena, even Grizz, who sat at the back of the church, not far from the Gunderson family, the boy Lee and his mother, Laura. They were all here. Grizz had scars on his hands, a stigmata. Down in that pit, in the moment of his surrender, he had spotted sharp metal spurs jutting from the aluminum sides. He had impaled his palms into these, lifted himself from the mire. A nylon rope lowered down, looping toward him. He heard a boy’s voice, Lee shouting from above that he should tie it around his waist. With the boy pulling from above and Grizz grabbing at the sharp spurs, he had climbed out of that killing pit.
Lee had come for him in his last moment. Lee had pulled him up and stood there shivering, waiting for a punishment that never arrived.
“Where is your brother?” Grizz gasped for breath.
“He’s going to take her into the woods. Where they always take them.”
Logan, dressed in layers of liturgical clothing, the alb, the stole, the big square cross around his throat, sang the Holden Evening Prayer:
Now as evening falls around us,
We shall raise our songs to you.
God of daybreak, God of shadows.
Come to light our hearts anew.
BY ADVENT THE SNOWS were already knee deep. It would be April before they saw the bare ground again. A season of long-lasting darkness this far north with the roads leading out of town glazed with impassible ice. The widows heard voices out in the snow. They heard the voices of those who had gone on before, husbands and children. The widows with their sparrow bones and porous skin listened in the snow and heard someone calling. “Come, the way is soft. Those you love are waiting.” They listened; they followed. At the beginning of December, the congregation buried two of them and Clara struggled to remember their faces after they were gone, the shape of their small hands within her own.
After Grizz had killed Kelan, he leaned against a tree and sank in the snow. He went into shock or something like it. Clara had no choice but to go back inside the cabin and search the sheriff’s corpse for the keys to his cruiser. It had to be done. She was not going to have the baby out here. Clara had driven both of them home, passing the overturned truck in the ditch, and she made it as far as Nora’s house, before the pain of the contractions halted her and she could go no further.
Dena was born in Nora’s living room, among the spider ferns and umbrella trees.
Now, Nora was trying to join those other widows. She had a seizure shortly before Christmas. When Clara heard about it she took Baby Dena and went to see her. She carried in Dena, still buckled in her car seat and fast asleep, to Nora’s room, which was awash in white, wintry light. Nora’s pale hair was mummified in a bandage, and she snored quietly. She’d struck her head on the kitchen floor during the seizure and she had lain there for a day and half before her daughter-in-law, visiting from the farm, had found her. Her hazy blue eyes opened, focused on Clara. “Hello, dear,” she said, smiling. “You look well.”
Clara herself had been in the hospital for two weeks after her near-death experience, and it was not a place she was eager to return to. Hypothermic, having lost two pints of blood from the accident, Clara’s recovery went on even after she was allowed to go home with the baby. Her hair newly shorn in a boyish bob, she did not feel well. “Thank you.”
Clara brought over the baby so Nora could cluck and coo over her. “It’s too bad they rescued me. I think I was dreaming of Charlie when I had the seizure.” She paused, and Clara thought for a moment she might start crying.
“I’m going to need you,” Clara said. “This baby is going to need you.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be fine.”
“But I won’t.” Her throat thickened. “You would think I would have nightmares, but I don’t. I don’t even know what I dream when I do. I’m not afraid, not for myself, but I’m exhausted all the time. I have to keep checking on the baby every hour. Make sure she’s breathing.”
“I was the same with my first. It gets better.”
“I would die for her. I almost did.” Clara went on to talk about how Logan had changed, how well he took care of her, nursing her, but also how he still seemed ambivalent toward the baby. She described her uncertainty about what would happen to her fragile family, her fears about her marriage.
Nora sighed when she was done, “In my day we didn’t have any choice, but I’m glad Charlie stuck with me through the bad times. Every couple reaches some kind of turning point. They either break or find a way to go on.”
“Do you think we’re going to make it?”
“Who the hell knows?” Nora said. She laughed, but it was short-lived when Clara didn’t join her. Nora waved her left hand in the air around her. “Reach in that drawer there and fetch me out what you find.”
Clara opened the nightstand drawer. Nothing was in there but a Bible and a Baggie that looked like it was filled with dark loam, moist chunks like bits of chewed brownie. Clara held it up to light. “This?”
“You know what it is?”
“A bit of land from your family farm?”
“No, it’s from Chimayo. My son brought it from home, but I don’t have any use for the stuff.”
“Chimayo?”
“It’s like the Lourdes of the West or something. People go there seeking healing. Charlie made sure we stopped there on our big trip. His prostate cancer had been spreading. He’d read about the place in Reader’s Digest and was determined to try anything. Dug that soil from the church basement where pictures were pasted on a wall, stories and letters of the miraculous, candles glowing all around. They say the dirt was holy to the Indians long before the Catholics built a mission.”
“I thought Charlie died of a heart attack.”
“Yes, but not cancer. His cancer was cured by the dirt. If there is anything a farmer knows, it’s the power dirt has to heal.”
“Why are you showing it to me?”
“I’m giving it to you, dear.”
“I don’t know. It sounds a little pagan.”
Nora smiled. “There are some like me who think that it’s God’s will when a new pastor comes. He is the one God chose for us. But I also believe God sent you here.”
Clara shook her head. “What I am supposed to do with this?”
FOR THEIR FIRST CHRISTMAS together, Logan brought home a living tree from a farm ten miles out in the country. He put away his boxed, artificial tree, said he wouldn’t mind needles on the floor for once. The smell of the balsam fir filled the room with
piney sweetness. It stood eight feet tall and seemed nearly as wide. “What do you think?” Logan asked.
“Much better than that aluminum-foil tree you had at seminary.”
“That’s antique, you know, made by Mirro. One of a kind.” Every Christmas Logan had decorated that tree with his mother, hung bulbs from the pink frosted metal branches, but this year he said was a time for making new traditions.
While the baby napped in her swing, Clara sipped from her mug and helped Logan string up the lights. They both were drinking cocoa that Clara laced with a pinch of dirt. Miracle dirt, if you believed in such things. Pica, that was the name the ancients had for how a woman craved earth when pregnant or nursing. Just a pinch, so Logan wouldn’t know. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Logan had on a Santa hat as he hummed along with Elvis’s “Blue Christmas.” Together, they put on the ornaments, Clara pretending not to notice when he rehung the ones she had put in place. After the ornaments, Logan hung the tinsel one strand at a time, but Clara tossed hers up in clumps.
Outside the wind sculpted a bare moonscape from the snow, and low clouds sifted down their artic spindrift. Logan finished and dimmed the lights so he could turn on the tree. He liked the big colored lights, the ones that painted a flickering pattern on the walls and ceiling. From out by the graveyard, a familiar sound arose, a few trailing barks rising in pitch, then one, long low howl. Clara went to window to watch them bound in the snow, playfully chasing one another. Logan came behind her and wrapped his arms around her. “They’re beautiful,” he said. He ran one hand through her hair. “What are you thinking about?”
He kissed the back of her neck, the sweet place where her shoulder met her throat. She thought of a boy being tormented by his own father. Kelan had not been buried in the suicide section. He was buried with the saints. Saints and sinners, all of us, Logan said, convincing the council that in death we were one. There might be suicides in the future, but no longer would they be outcasts in death. Such a nice boy, the old ones said. So handsome. Wasn’t Lucifer the most beautiful of the angels? The story of what had happened went on reverberating in the words and gestures of everything people in town said, migrating in the whispering of teenagers in the hallways of the high school, the low gossip of old people at the pool hall and grocery store, the hushed way parents tried to explain it to their children before bedtime, all of them knowing there was no language large enough to take the awfulness away. They blamed it on the devil. They blamed his father and the man who trained his father, Steve Krieger. And the more they talked and talked, the more they made him into some Other so they could go on. Clara knew. She had set her hand on his skin and knew the monster was as fully human as any of them, even if she did not understand and knew she never would. “I was thinking about heaven,” she said. “What if it’s not a place? Not somewhere we go, but somewhere inside us.”
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