Little Wolves (14 page)

The church and parsonage were on the town’s outskirts, as if built as a protection against the woods spreading beyond. Woods that were still considered a savage place even now. When she was done writing, Clara lay in bed, sleepless, the windows open, her belly immense. The passage she’d set down seemed less one of her father’s stories and more a dream of her mother abandoning her. She thought about the child in the woods and then about the legends she’d been teaching her students before the shooting. Beowulf ripped off the monster’s arm, and there was rejoicing in Heorot. Somewhere in the swamps his mother wept and bided her time. Something was coming, the coyotes had meant to tell her.
You are not safe, not here
.

Clara shut her eyes, imagining running free with them across the countryside, across miles and miles. Shedding her human skin. The fur and wildness underneath. She was as sleek as silence, a she-wolf whose hearing took in what was happening from far away. She heard the skeletons of abandoned barns caving in the wind, the brittle creak of empty grain bins, the lisping of the corn leaves in a dry time before the harvest. She heard the voices Logan carried home with him, the talk inside the houses after sundown. The folk were afraid. They were afraid and didn’t know how to live in a world that was changing all around them. There were coyotes out in the dark running free, come from the woods, from a mountain where the giant lived unseen.

A teenager had murdered the town’s hero, then shot
himself. There was no mystery to solve, nothing more to fear. Why should it bother her? Something flickered at the edge of her vision, like heat lightning. She had told Sheriff Steve what she had seen, and that was enough, but what had she seen? She had seen his shoes, dirty Converse, the fraying hem of his coat. She heard the gun, saw him cross the graveyard, heading for the waiting corn where his body was later found. Her mind ran over and over the same ground, the images in branded lightning flashes when she shut her eyes.
I’m not ready to bury you like the rest of them. I’m not ready to begin the long forgetting
.

And why had the sheriff come back here? Despite what she told Nora, Clara knew he had come here for her and not her husband. She shouldn’t have any reason to be frightened of him, even if he really was the kind of man you didn’t want to cross, as Nora had said. Clara had kept the notes, but was that so wrong? Why that presence down in the basement, that overriding sense of fear?

Some of the riddles she had told her students from
The Book of Exeter
had no answer or the answer had been lost to time.

I give myself far-wandering longing towards my Wolf
.

When it is wet weather and I sat weeping
,

Then the brisk warrior embraced me with his arms;

That was bliss to me, but it was also pain
.

Wolf, my wolf, my longings toward thee

Have brought me sickness, thy seldom coming

The mourning mood, not want of meat

Hearest thou? Eadwaccer, the whelp of us both
,

Carries a wolf to the wood
.

The author had been someone named Cynewulf, a monk scholars speculated lived in Northumbria in the ninth century. Did he invent some of the riddles or, like the Brothers Grimm, gather them from the Kinder-folk? In another riddle he mused:

I saw a strange sight: a wolf held tight by a lamb—

The lamb lay down and seized the belly of the wolf
.

While I stood and stared, I saw a great glory:

Two wolves standing and troubling a third;

They had four feet; they saw with seven eyes!

The two riddles wove together, not answering but asking more questions. A love child that was a wolf carried into the woods? A lamb that destroys a monster?

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, C
LARA
picked up the phone. She needed a couple of weeks, time enough to collect her thoughts, to get the house ready for the baby. Time
enough that she could still back out if necessary. If the man she was about to call wasn’t in his office anymore, then it wasn’t meant to be.
Please be there
, she thought. She dialed the number he had left her. “Hello, yes. Could I please speak with Mr. Sheuffler? Tell him Clara Warren is calling about his offer.”

LITTLE WOLVES

S
eth cried out, “Dad, look! A coyote!”

His son had rapped on the passenger side window and pointed. It was a late afternoon in March when the sun’s rays warmed the frozen earth just enough that a silvery mist spiraled from the marshes. Grizz had followed his hand and there it was. At first he thought it was a small dog, but then he noticed the lean snout and long, foxlike ears.

Grizz slammed on the brakes, jerking Seth forward in his seat so hard he nearly hit the windshield before his belt snapped him back. The truck slid along the gravel road before grinding to a halt. A second later he was out the door, plucking up a .22 rifle he kept behind the seat. Dust from the road rained down around him. The coyote heard all this and yawned, displaying rows of little razor teeth. It looked indolent and dreamy with the mist rising all around it.

He took his time, balancing the rifle on the truck bed. If the coyote had not cast one backward glance as it trotted away, it might have escaped into the tallgrass. But the rifle made a small barking cough, and the animal went down. He reloaded while the boy stepped out of the passenger side and followed him into the meadow.

The coyote was a handsome creature with shimmering bronzed fur and round dark eyes and breathed as though in its mind it was still running. It lay on its side in the tallgrass, and the air around them smelled of musk and blood and its terror. The coyote’s breathing shallowed. “Aren’t you going to finish it off?” Seth asked. He held himself and shivered even though it was a strangely warm spring day.

“It’ll be dead soon enough.”

“Why’d you have to shoot it? I was only showing you where it was.”

“Because,” he said. At first the words didn’t come right. Why? Because, that was the way of things. No farmer going back to the beginning of time could allow such animals to threaten his living. So he told Seth about summer nights when the ranch house windows were open to allow in a breeze. How his mother couldn’t sleep for the sound they made. It stirred her up, that eerie howling. He told him about the calves being born in spring and how the coyotes were always there in the morning licking the birthing fluids from the blood-streaked ground, ghost shapes that were gone again before he could raise a gun. While he told him, he could see it in his mind’s eye, a primal
scene: cattle tonguing the afterbirth from their calves while coyotes slunk nearby, waiting to drink the rich placental blood from the grass. “Parasites,” he said. “Little ravenous wolves. At least now there is one less of them.”

Seth’s face had gone pale. His features weren’t set yet, the bones shifting in his face as if what he would become was still being written. Seth knelt in the grass next to the coyote. It was a female, the heavy dugs showing on her stomach. “Why do you think she didn’t run?” he said, and when Grizz had no answer he asked her softly, “Why didn’t you run?”

He reached out one hand to stroke her fur.

“Don’t touch it,” Grizz warned, but she was too wounded to do more than growl with what menace remained in her, her black gums peeling back to reveal long incisors pink with froth. One filmy eye fixed him, and then she went still.

Grizz put his hand on Seth’s shoulder and started to say something when a noise caught his attention. A sound on the hill above where there should have been only silence. Seth jumped up and went ahead of him. She had died not far from a granite boulder ringed by a thicket of sumac. Seth pushed through the branches and reached in. From the dark hole where the coyote had made her den mewling cries echoed. Her kit, probably born just a few weeks before.

“Stop,” he commanded Seth. “Don’t you go any nearer.”

Seth’s back went rigid, but he didn’t turn around at the sound of his voice.

“You go on back down to the truck and wait for me there.”

He gave just the faintest shake of his head.

“You don’t want to see this kind of work, but it has to be done. It’s the only thing we can do.”

When Seth did turn around his eyes were hard and glittering. “No,” he said. “I won’t let you.” He clenched his fist, the wind rustling his baggy jacket. In the distance a red-winged blackbird sang out in warning, hearing them on the hill above. From this vantage point Grizz could see the farm and the stretch of black fields. They would need to take out the spreader now that the manure was no longer frozen, clean out a winter’s worth of mess from the barns and fertilize the fields. A long day’s work, but the boy would get to pilot the Bobcat in and out of the barn, and he loved driving it. Grizz was anxious to get down and get started.

“If I don’t do this, Seth, they’re going to starve, a long, slow death.” Such a stubborn child. When they had kept pigs, Seth hated when the runts were born. They had to kill them right off so they didn’t keep the sow’s milk from those capable of surviving. They stretched them on a board and cracked their little skulls with a ball-peen hammer. When Seth was little, it used to make him cry. He would steal those runts and take them up into the loft and hide them in a hole he’d hollowed in the hay. Then he would take out a turkey baster and fill it with milk from the kitchen and carry it to the barn. Grizz knew what he was doing the
whole time and didn’t stop him. The runts all died despite his best efforts. He left the boy alone to learn that some things aren’t meant for this world. By the time he was ten Seth was hardened, and when he started growing prize-winning sows for the FFA he learned to wield the ball-peen hammer himself. And Grizz thought the whole time he had been teaching him about mercy.

“No. Not if we take them home.”

Grizz lay his gun down in the grass. “These aren’t like puppies from a dog, Seth. They’re wild things, and they belong out here in the wild. We start violating the natural order, and bad things will happen.” He squared his shoulders and leveled his gaze. “Now get back down to the truck and let me do what I have to do.”

“No.” Seth’s jaw jutted out, and he drew himself up, and Grizz saw how big he was becoming. Still, he could shove him aside, and it would all be over in a few seconds. His iron-toed boots would crush a few baby coyote skulls, and then it would be done.

“What do you think people in town will say when they hear we’re raising coyotes?”

“I don’t care. I’ll only keep them until they get big enough to live on their own.”

“The one thing that keeps us safe from such creatures is that they fear us. You take away that fear, and you’re going to hurt both them and us.”

Behind them, the whimpering of the pups continued. The boy’s eyes watered, but he kept his footing, and when
Grizz laid a hand on his shoulder, he flinched. That one action, a simple flinch, took away his breath. His son thought he was going to hit him. He never hit Seth, hadn’t whipped him in years.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“We can take them home?”

“But they have to sleep in the old brood house. We can’t have them in the barn or anywhere near the cows. You’re going to have to make sure they’re cleaned every day.”

“We’ll get one of the heating lamps,” Seth said. “I’ll stretch a cord from the barn. And we can keep them in a box with some blankets. And we can feed them with the calving bottles.”

“Not a word at school, understand? I don’t want people in town hearing what we’ve done.”

Seth drew his hand across his mouth, zipping it shut.

One by one the three pups were lifted, blind and trembling, from the den and deposited in the warmth of Seth’s coat. They rode home together with that pungent scent filling up the cab and the sound of them crying so loud Grizz could hardly hear himself think. The boy talked to them in a cooing voice, wincing when a claw hooked his chest under the shirt. “Little wolves, is that what you called them, Dad?”

“It’s what some call coyotes, sure.”