Little Wolves (13 page)

The boy found one of the smaller ledges and launched into the air, screeching like an eagle when he became airborne. He kicked out of his tuck, shirt billowing, his arms flapping uselessly. Then gravity yanked him to the tall cedar tree below him, and he smashed through bough and branch, yelling all the way down until he struck the mossy earth.

One of the coyotes barked while standing on a rock above the fallen figure, shaking Grizz from his daze. Blackbirds wheeled and settled in a far cottonwood, and forest and meadow eased into silence. The coyotes melted back into the woods, as if afraid of what they had done. Then, because the boy might be hurt bad, Grizz climbed down from the tractor and walked over to where he fell.

He was surprised to find him partly conscious, blinking up into the light. His face and head appeared unmarked, but his shirt and sweatpants had been gashed open. The boy’s legs were bent beneath him, and a wheezed gasping bubbled from his lips. Blood speckled the grass around him. “Don’t move,” he told him, “you might be hurt bad.”

The boy’s eyes appeared glazed. Grizz was afraid he was going into shock. He knelt in the grass beside him, not minding the blood. He could see now the boy was Lee, the younger child of Sheriff Gunderson. He knew from rumors in town they said the boy was “touched,” and the less charitable called him “retard.” Lee had long black hair and small eyes set in a pudgy face. Grizz fought a brief anger rising in him. If he had been shooting at him, he had lost the gun during his flight. The whole thing was senseless. Had Lee thought to spill Grizz’s blood to even the score? He bit his tongue and concentrated on the child before him. This could have been Seth, hurt after some foolish lark. This should have been Seth, not some child come to work a reckoning.

Lee loosed a hoarse, birdlike cry as Grizz yanked his legs beneath him and probed for broken bones. He didn’t intend to be gentle. The boy’s eyes were glossy as wet stones. Not knowing what else to do, Grizz spoke at random, fearing the boy’s shock would become fatal. He couldn’t handle any more blood on his hands. “The damnedest thing I ever saw,” he began, “and I’ve seen many a thing in my lifetime. The way you came down that ridge was a thing of beauty.”

Lee groaned again as Grizz poked at his ribs. Along the boy’s arm he felt something quick and wet and warm. He took out his pocketknife and cut open the shirtsleeve. His arm was sliced open. He saw tendons, red and glistening. Words left him for a time.

He cut off the rest of his shirt and then ripped it into
ribbons. Still Lee had not spoken, but his breathing seemed to steady. Grizz noted a twitch in the right leg and figured the boy had been lucky not to crack his spine or spill the contents of his skull like an egg against a skillet. He wrapped the wound tightly and then pressed down to staunch the flow of blood.

He found his breath again. “I won’t be able to describe it, I think, the way you fell. You likely won’t remember it. Only me and these coyotes and blackbirds saw you come down that ridge, and by Jesus and Joseph, you are one lucky bastard.” Lee groaned as if in agreement with Grizz’s rambling. It was all the encouragement he needed. “I recognize you from when you were little and you and Kelan used to come around here.” Grizz sucked on his teeth, surprised that the memory of Seth’s friends could renew such a sharp ache inside him. His eyes welled, and the boy’s features blurred below him. This could have been Seth, he thought. This should have been how it happened, a close scrape, a rescue. He shook the vision away; it did him little good now.

“What were you doing up there, besides trying to kill me?” Lee’s glazed eyes found his. Grizz was there to see his consciousness rising to the surface, like some fish swimming toward the light. He was there in the grass wet with dew and blood, and when Lee said, “Seth’s wolves. They were after me,” in a clipped, frightened tone, he felt a laugh escape his chest, a clean, beautiful feeling.

THE GROVE

C
lara answered the phone only to find Ernest Sheuffler, the superintendent, greeting her in his slow baritone. This was their second conversation since she had resigned. “Have you been thinking over my offer?” he asked.

She pictured him on the other end of the line, a fat man who dressed in caramel-colored suits, the seams straining around his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sheuffler. My answer’s the same as when you called a few days ago.”

“How have you been doing?”

“Oh, fine,” she said. “Fine, fine, fine.”

He was silent, leaving the tinny echo of her voice ringing in her ears. “I believe you have a talent for teaching, Mrs. Warren,” he said after a moment. “The students miss you. One came to see me, and we talked about you.”

Clara waited. Mr. Sheuffler was proving to be a frustrating
person. Moving way out into the country was supposed to provide Clara the time and focus she needed to finish her dissertation. Teaching had been a mistake.

“You remember Leah Meyers?” he asked.

“Sure.” Seth’s girlfriend.

“A smart girl. I trust her judgment. She told me you’re one of the best teachers she’s ever had.” Why would Leah go and see the superintendent? She wouldn’t, not unless summoned. “It’s not a good idea,” Clara told him. “I’m due in December. Those kids … what they need is some continuity. Hell, what they need is someone who knows what they’re doing.”

His chair squeaked as he sat back. “Could I come see you in person?”

“Look, I can’t think about this right now. I’ve got too much going on. Busy, busy.”

“Okay. A few more days then.”

“What? You’re not listening.”

“I’ll call back Wednesday. Good day, Mrs. Warren.” He hung up before she could say more.

L
OGAN AND
C
LARA ATE
off paper plates that night, and after dinner he left for another visit, one he’d set up a few weeks ago, before things went wrong. “You work too hard,” she warned him on his way out the door. “I worry about you.” Really, what she wanted was for him to stay here. They deserved a night together. No responsibilities. Just the two of them up late talking like when they were engaged.

“This is only temporary,” he said on his way out, “things’ll get better.”

She looked away. He was pouring himself into this place. The weight he’d lost made his blue eyes even more piercing and prominent above the hollows of his cheeks. He was pouring himself out as she tried to hold what fell in her hands.

“When the funeral is over and done with, we’ll go to Fell Creek, to the supper club there. They make the most delicious popovers.”

He kissed her, not on the mouth. The center of her forehead. His lips dry, cracking. She didn’t know how to hold him here. What a young wife should say or do.

A moment later, his Nova rumbled in the driveway, and then he was gone.

In the first year of his ministry Logan was on a mission to visit each and every one of his parishioners. Many of the elderly citizens in the congregation had finished their schooling in the eighth grade during the Depression and World War II. The homes and hobbies of these people revealed an unexpected diversity: a bachelor farmer who was a championship chess player; a one-hundred-three-year-old lady who spent her days, summer or winter, tatting snowflakes she gave away each Sunday at church; a veteran who had been there for the liberation of Auschwitz.

He visited homes where newspapers were stacked to the ceiling, occasional homes of filth that clouded his hair and clothing with an ashtray smell of desperation. To all of
them he carried simple questions:
What is it you like about your church? What makes you proud to be a part of your congregation?

In a month’s time Logan had visited more than thirty households, and as one they were confounded by his questions.
Pastor
, one of the bachelor farmers had explained,
it’s just that we’re used to talking about what’s wrong
.

Clara stood in the kitchen, looking out into the night that had swallowed up her husband, the gas stove heating a grumbling kettle behind her. She was about to check on it when she noticed something running at the edge of the yard, forms close to the ground. She shut off the lights and let her eyes adjust to the night outside. The coyotes were back again. The largest of them was a gray with a frosty-silver back. A yard lamp behind the church caught the tawny glistening of his fur. The coyotes moved in formation, following behind the gray.

They surrounded an old dog’s pen in a neighbor’s backyard across the way from Nora. There they yipped and chattered at the dog, who lay inside his kennel with his muzzle on his forepaws, an old man being tormented by teenagers. Then the dog rose slowly to his haunches and loosed a deep booming bark followed by ferocious growling, his fur bristling. The coyotes continued to circle his pen, yipping and dancing. The old dog woofed again, and the coyotes, tiring of their game, trotted off into the night, chuckling like punks.

Clara had never seen anything so strange and beautiful
and ritualistic. The kettle spat and jumped on the stove behind her. Just when she was about to turn around, another flicker of movement caught her eye. Sorena, the mother cat. Sorena must have smelled the coyotes out there because she was running full speed, streaking across the yard. Or maybe the coyotes had flushed her from her hiding place, because the gray came on behind her, a flash of silver under the yard lamp. The kettle whistled and then screamed.

The cat shot up a crab-apple tree while the gray and the other coyotes circled the base. Even behind the window Clara could hear Sorena hissing at them below. The gray alpha leaned his weight against the trunk. He was big, the size of a German shepherd, and the crab-apple tree shook and tossed small fruit onto the grass. Sorena lurched, just barely keeping her balance. It wasn’t going to take much to bring her down.

Clara was out the door before she even knew what she was doing. She hadn’t bothered to gather a weapon, so she raised her arms up to make herself look taller than she really was. “Scat!” she hollered at them. “Get out of here.”

The sound of her voice stopped them. The gray left off shaking the tree and peered at Clara with his golden eyes. The other two ambled behind him, their tongues lolling. They did not run. Clara windmilled her arms and shouted at them again. “Ha! Get! Flee!”

The alpha growled in a low voice. His tail bristled as he approached her.

Clara didn’t know what to do now.
Run!
A hundred synapses in her brain clicking at once.
Get back inside the house!
Clara stayed where she was. The three approached, sniffing and circling, just as they had with the old dog at the neighbor’s house.

She let her arms drop to the side. The gray had piercing yellow eyes that froze her in place. She had been hearing them every night, come from the woods into town. They were all around her, a musky pungency. She should have been afraid, she should have run, but she remembered her father’s stories. Clara remembered who she was under her human skin.

She reached out her left hand as the gray came forward. When his nose pressed against her palm, the skin felt coarse and wet. Clara’s heart thumped wildly behind its cage of ribs, and she felt the baby stirring inside her. The coyotes looked skinny and ragged, especially the two smaller russet-colored ones. Females?
Steorfan
, she thought, the same word she had for Seth. The coyote’s gold-brown eyes watching her. They were starving, she thought. Urchins, like her. “What is it you are looking for?”

The gray’s ears peeled back, and he whined softly.

“For Seth, isn’t it? You belonged to him?” She was sure of it now. The coyotes had only come from the woods after Seth’s death. Somehow the two were connected.

Then a car honked down the block, a blaring sustained honk, and the large gray leaped back. All three tucked tail and fled for the woods, the cat forgotten up in her tree, but
not before the gray turned once more and barked, as if asking Clara to follow.

There was a woman lost in a grove, leaves and twigs crackling under bare feet. She wore nothing but a pearly gray gown, and she walked under a sky like slate, even the woods leached of color. She moved toward a sound, what was it? Something was crying. Her baby. Her baby was hurt and calling for her. She hurried through the grove, parting low-hanging branches and stepping over fallen logs. Her pace increased as the child’s cries became more urgent, and then she was running. Thorny bushes tore her gown and skin. When she looked behind her she saw that she’d left a track of bloody footprints through the fallen leaves. And still the child kept crying from an unseen place deep in the woods, a call she couldn’t resist. The trees closed in, branches writhing
.

At last, after it seemed she’d been trudging through the woods for a very long time, she broke through a dense thicket of bramble and found the baby lying on a matting of leaves in the meadow. The shape before her was born out of her but did not belong to her. The baby’s cries turned to a wolfish lament. She saw now that it had pale, glistening fur and the face of a child, a pink nose and two glowing eyes that regarded her with bottomless hunger. It loosed another howl and then from the woods around her more shapes trotted into the meadow, wolves come from the place of thorn to lick the blood from her palms
.