Wolf Hollow

by Lauren Wolk

  Except Aunt Lily, who sat watching, drinking coffee in her pink flannel robe, and said, “I still don’t understand how a man like that could be anything but terrifying to a girl like you.”

  I didn’t answer her, but Henry did.

  “She was his friend,” he said, but Aunt Lily just snorted.

  “And why are you wearing that coat?” she said. “It looks just like the one Jordan was wearing when he came to help find Betty.”

  My mother seemed about to say something, but she looked at my father, he shook his head, and they both nodded to me as if to say, Go ahead. It’s all right.

  My grandfather leaned closer and then back with a nod. “That’s my old coat,” he said. “And it looks very fine on you, Annabelle. Maybe a bit too long in the sleeve.”

  I pulled the gloves from the right-hand pocket of the coat and put them on the table.

  “And my favorite gloves,” my grandfather said. “I’ve been looking for those.”

  “Jordan had gloves just like those, too,” Aunt Lily said slowly. “I thought it was odd that he wore them to the dinner table that night.”

  Henry came over to examine them. “Not ones like them. He had these very ones,” he said. “I saw that berry stain on the thumb when he was hammering up new planks in the barn. I remember it looked like Africa.”

  James was the only one at the table who found his breakfast more interesting than the gloves that lay quietly alongside my plate, waiting patiently to be worn again.

  “But why do you have Jordan’s gloves?” Aunt Lily said. “Did he forget them?”

  “Lily, those are my gloves,” my grandfather said. “And that’s my coat. And what Jordan was doing with them I neither know nor care. Now pass me the sugar, Lily, and the cream, Annabelle, or I’ll have to drink this coffee black.”

  Henry was staring at me. My parents watched in silence. My grandmother spread jam on a piece of toast. James stole a slice of bacon off Henry’s plate, unnoticed.

  “But why—” Aunt Lily began.

  “That wasn’t Jordan,” Henry said, his eyes wide as an owl’s. “That was Toby.”

  My grandfather put down his fork. “Who was Toby?”

  “Jordan,” Henry said. “He took off only one of his gloves. At the dinner table. So we wouldn’t see his scars.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Aunt Lily said, scowling into her coffee cup. “Jordan is a very nice man.”

  “Who came out of nowhere,” my grandmother said thoughtfully. “Wearing that coat, and those gloves.” She looked at me curiously. “Annabelle, why are you wearing that coat?”

  I looked at my parents again and took the last step. “Because I was cold last night, up in my room, where I hid the coat so the bloodhounds wouldn’t find it in the mudroom.”

  By now even James was paying attention. “Why would bloodhounds be in the mudroom, Annabelle? That’s dumb.”

  “Because they were following Toby’s scent,” Henry said.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” Aunt Lily said. “Toby has never been in this house. Not once. Or in your grandfather’s coat, for that matter.”

  “Jordan was Toby,” Henry said. “Wasn’t he, Annabelle?”

  I nodded. “Yes, he was, Henry. And you’re right, Aunt Lily, he was a very nice man.”

  In the confusion that followed, I let my father answer the questions while Aunt Lily’s face changed from white, to red, to white again.

  I slipped my hands in the big pockets of my grandfather’s coat and, as I watched her grapple with her revelations, made a fresh discovery of my own.

  Toby, who knew such a great deal about shame, had left us something that had the power to shame even Aunt Lily.

  I found it, cold and hard, in the bottom of the left-hand pocket. I tried to pull it out, but it was pinned to the lining.

  “There’s something in this pocket,” I said, standing up.

  Everybody stopped talking.

  I unbuttoned the coat so I could work with both hands.

  And unpinned what turned out to be a gold star with a face engraved on the middle, set inside a wreath. At the top was an eagle perched on a bar that had the word VALOR on it.

  I turned it over.

  “What did you call Toby?” I asked Aunt Lily slowly. “A monster? A madman?”

  I handed the star to my father, who looked at it closely and read aloud what was engraved on the back. “‘The Congress to Tobias Jordan.’” He looked up at me, as pale as Aunt Lily. “Annabelle, this is a Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “Let me see that,” Aunt Lily snapped. She scrutinized the medal, looking for a way out, but there was none. “Well, how were we supposed to know the man was a war hero?” she said, handing the medal on to my grandfather, who held it as if it were made of glass.

  “He wasn’t,” I said. “He would have told you that himself if the police hadn’t killed him last night.”

  I went to school that day, but I don’t remember a single thing about it.

  I’m sure much was made about Betty’s death, and I’m sure that Benjamin was back in the seat that Andy had claimed for much of the month. I didn’t expect to see him in school for some time. And I would never be afraid of him again.

  I do remember that Henry waited for me in the schoolyard at the end of the day instead of running ahead with James.

  “Do you want to walk with us?” he said.

  I shook my head. “It’s okay. I’m okay. You go on now. I’ll see you at home.”

  In truth, I wouldn’t have minded the company, especially that of a brother who seemed to regard me as an actual person now.

  But I had somewhere to be, and I wanted to go there by myself.

  There were only a couple of hours of light left on this short November day, and I had some distance to cover, but I paused along the path where Betty had first confronted me and had a word with her before I left. I told her that I was trying to forgive her and myself both, but I didn’t know if I could, and she didn’t answer in any event.

  I went, then, to the place where the wolf pits had once been, and I spent some time there, as well.

  But the wolves that had died there were silent, too. And it was only as I stood in that place, listening, that I realized I’d been hearing them for weeks now, translated.

  I hoped that maybe they’d help me understand Toby’s stories someday, if I was ever brave enough to unlid them again.

  Toby’s smokehouse was already beginning to miss him.

  A spider had left an egg sac in a web above where he’d slept, and I pictured the hatchlings cascading down into his nest of pine boughs when the thaw came next spring.

  There was raccoon sign in one corner, near the vent for Toby’s fire, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to come back here again.

  It took me a long time to free the remaining pictures from the walls.

  That he had used tree sap suggested two things: He’d had nothing else to use, or he’d meant to stay here forever.

  I cried over both answers.

  I had brought a paring knife to slice the photographs free, warming the sap first by pressing my hands over each picture, but I still ruined the most stubborn of them.

  The ones I took were wrinkled from the process, and most were thin where the backing paper had come away. If I held them up to the light, a part of each photograph seemed to glow. I liked that.

  I left a few, partly so I could get home before dark but mostly because they belonged where they were. The deer napping in mayapples. A red fox after mice in the strawberry patch, the tip of its tail a white arrowhead.

  The last one I took with me was of a hawk standing on the Turtle Stone. I nearly left it behind because it was so beautiful, but I took it because it was so beautiful.

  I expected a scolding when I got home that evening. Instead, my mother
said a simple hello and handed me an apron.

  And when Henry came into the kitchen, looking relieved to see me there, I handed him the stack of photographs.

  “Toby left these,” I said. “If you want, the camera’s in my bedroom. I loaded a fresh spool of film. We can take turns with it, spool by spool.”

  “What about me?” James said, prancing into the kitchen wearing a coonskin cap. Apparently, my grandmother had started to read him a new book, presumably about the Wild West.

  “You can take some pictures, too,” I said.

  “Did Daniel Boone take pictures?”

  “I doubt it,” Henry said.

  “Then I don’t take pictures either,” James said, galloping off into his own private wilderness.

  Henry turned to me. “So the camera will be for just us,” he said.

  And the way he said it made me think I might be happy again soon.

  Betty’s was an odd funeral. The church was full, every pew, mostly with people who had never met Betty but knew her grandparents or had known her father growing up or had heard of her terrible death and wanted to send her off properly.

  I recognized Betty’s “gone” father from the picture in her bedroom. He chose a seat apart from her mother, who sat in the front pew and wept into her hands.

  I was sitting where I could see that his face was dry. But when we stood to sing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” he folded over in his seat and endlessly rubbed his eyes, his shoulders trembling.

  Betty’s grandfather had made her casket himself. Painted it white. I thought it was a shame to put it into the muddy hole they had dug for her. And it seemed too cruel to leave her there alone with no company but the flowers we had laid on top of her casket, mostly the last of the wild asters and goldenrod we’d managed to gather from the dying fields.

  But leave her we did, every last one of us, though some more slowly than others. And when we passed by the graveyard the next day there was nothing but a raised bed of bare earth, strewn with tattered flowers and leaves, where Betty had last been.

  Now that she was gone, Betty reminded me of the April cold snaps that kept my father up all night, feeding bonfires in the peach orchard to save the tender blossoms from freezing.

  Some of them would survive to become fruit as good as anything on earth. Others would wither on the branch, killed by frost, wasted.

  It seemed to me that Betty had been both the flower and the frost.

  Toby’s funeral was quite different.

  We didn’t have much money, but we had enough to bring Toby’s body home and bury him, not in the churchyard but on top of the hill above Wolf Hollow, beneath a plain marker engraved with his name and the years of his life.

  It had been easy to find out when Toby had been born—the army told us that, along with the fact that he had no living relatives—but we were the ones who told them when he had died.

  They sent us a packet of information about what he’d done to earn the medal, but I had already heard his side of the story, and none of it mattered much now. Not to me.

  We all gathered on the top of that hill after we’d laid Toby to rest. Mostly, we just stood silent, which seemed a fitting good-bye.

  But Aunt Lily surprised me. “I regret passing judgment on that man,” she said, looking not at his grave but away into the distance, as if he were somewhere else . . . which I suppose he was, though it didn’t feel that way to me.

  After a time, my grandparents made their way slowly back toward the house, Aunt Lily trailing along behind them.

  My parents kissed me and went away, too.

  “Come on, Annabelle,” Henry said as the light began to fail. “Let’s go.”

  But I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet, so Henry stayed on, and James, who had scampered off a ways, came curiously back, the dogs with him, to lie in the grass by Toby’s grave and comment at length on the clouds overhead.

  And then we all went home.

  From time to time, over the years after that, I sat on top of the hill alongside Toby’s grave, looking out over Wolf Hollow, and told him about my life.

  The hollow seemed to listen, too, and I often wondered about everything else it had heard over the centuries. The sound of men digging pits. The hopeless confusion of the wolves they had trapped. Perhaps one who had not been fooled by the scent of the bait, still on safe ground, pacing along the rim above, looking down into the pit at his doomed mates. Then retreating into the woods as the men came back in the morning with their guns.

  I imagined him so torn between the need to fight and the urge to live that he felt as if he, too, were bleeding. And I could not help but think of the hollow as a dark place, no matter how bright its canopy, no matter how pretty the flowers that grew in its capricious light.

  But Wolf Hollow was also where I learned to tell the truth in that year before I turned twelve: about things from which refuge was impossible. Wrong, even. No matter how tempting.

  I told Toby as much, though I also said that I didn’t blame him for fleeing the greater evils he’d known. And I thanked him for letting me try to right any number of wrongs, regardless of his own surrenders.

  But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.

  And that was all right with me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to many people for their help with Wolf Hollow. First among them is my mother, Mimi McConnell, whose wonderful stories of life on a farm in western Pennsylvania inspired this book. Her entire family, and the farm itself, figured greatly in my own life for decades and helped me create an authentic setting. My father, Ronald Wolk, and my sister Suzanne Wolk have been among my first and most perceptive readers. Their insight and encouragement have been invaluable. My sister Cally has always been in my corner, too, along with my husband, Richard, and our sons, Ryland and Cameron, who have made me a better writer, not only through their insights but also their support when the demands on my time and energy were great.

  The members of my incredible writers’ group—the Bass River Revisionists—have been with me through thick and thin, and I will always be grateful to them for their keen brains and warm hearts, especially Julie Lariviere and Maureen Leveroni who first invited me to join their ranks, and Deirdre Callanan for devoting so much time and care to her own craft and to mine. I am blessed with a great colleague, Robert Nash, who has always understood that although I love the work we do together, my writing deserves time and attention, too. He has been a true friend.

  I owe a debt, as well, to my former agent Dan Green, whose shift to nonfiction convinced him I’d be better off with different representation. He is a class act, as are Jodi Reamer, my superb agent at Writers House, and Julie Strauss-Gabel, my excellent editor. In fact, the entire Penguin Young Readers family has demonstrated an extraordinary commitment—both passionate and professional—to this book. I could not have asked for a better team. Finally, I am grateful to Annabelle for taking me into Wolf Hollow and showing me the way back out again. I’d like to be as brave as she is.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LAUREN WOLK is an award-winning poet and author of the adult novel Those Who Favor Fire. She was born in Baltimore and has since lived in California, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Canada, and Ohio. She now lives with her family on Cape Cod.

  Looking for more?

  Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.

  Discover your next great read!

 

 

 
-ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share