Little Wolves (5 page)

He did as she asked, embarrassed by his own desperation. She turned toward him, her head lowered, and spoke in a low breath. “That day Seth got in trouble for busting the aquarium, Mr. Berman had been egging him on. He didn’t like it when he caught Seth flirting with me out in
the hallways. He called him ‘Seth Felon,’ said some other things. Said the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I’ve never seen Seth so angry. That’s when he turned over the aquarium.”

He shook his head. That was it? The sheriff’s car pulled into the last stretch.

Leah dropped her cigarette in the gravel and held herself, one hand kneading the place he had hurt. “I hadn’t stopped seeing your son, even though my daddy made me promise. I think I caused Seth to get punished that way. You know that Will Gunderson kept a hunting shack back in those woods near the landing?”

The sheriff’s car rolled to a rest.

Leah rushed on before he could climb out, her voice barely above a whisper. “Kids at schools say he took people there to punish them. Burnouts and stoners. He cuffs you to chair and does things to put a scare into you. After school, that’s where I think he took Seth.”

Steve was walking toward them, his hands on his hips. “Everything all right here? Horace Greeley called to say your cattle were loose near the county road.”

Leah didn’t look back as she went to her car. “I was only here to pay my respects,” she said to Steve in a shaky voice. She opened the door and ducked inside. Safe behind tinted windows, she didn’t look at either man as she drove away.

When she was gone, he told Steve everything was about as fine as expected. “Unless the sheriff has gotten into the fence-repair business.”

Behind him, Grizz heard the cattle calling to one another as the bull led his harem and calves back inside the fence he’d wrecked. He turned in wonder. It didn’t make sense, and Grizz had never seen such a thing in all his life, but with the sun burning off the clouds, it was hot and already dry by early afternoon, the land drinking in what modest rain had fallen in the night. The pond in the lower pasture had dried up during the summer drought, but with fresh rain there’d be mud where the cows could cool themselves awhile. His cattle, which could have run free all day, were leading themselves back into captivity.

“I’ll help,” Steve said, surprising him. The two men fanned out on either side and raised their arms and shouted at the stragglers in the yard, “Get along, girl,” and “move along, Bessie,” until the rest were inside the damaged fence.

Grizz went to get his tools, the girl’s words churning in his head. Seth had been hurt. He had been scared, but he hadn’t come to his father for help.

Steve touched his mustache, ran his hands over his chin. Beads of sweat stood out on the fat man’s forehead from the little effort it had taken to corral the cattle. “Look, Grizz,” he began, “the other night I said some terrible things.”

Grizz picked up his shovel and the staves and wire clamps he’d left lying in the grass. “There’s things I have to do,” he told him as he went to the barn to shut off the fence’s electricity so he could make repairs. This new Steve, his voice slick with concern, scared him. He preferred the
one who came to his house two nights before and spit in his drink. If he said anything else, if he said what he was truly feeling in that moment, it would reveal all Leah had confided. Because if Will Gunderson kept a shack in those woods, then Steve, his predecessor, surely knew about it. Seemed like everyone knew but Grizz.

“You’re a hard man to reach,” Steve said when Grizz came back outside. He licked his lips. “Church council met last night. It was decided your son would be buried in the suicide corner of the cemetery.”

“No,” Grizz said. How could he have forgotten? This town and its sick traditions. “You wait just a goddamn minute. I want him buried next to his mother. I own the plot.”

“And you signed a contract that spells out what happens in the event of a suicide. The rules are very clear on this. He’ll have to be buried in the corner with the other suicides.”

Grizz felt the heat of the sun on the back of his neck, filling him up. His fists tightened around the shovel. “I intend to speak to the pastor about all of this.”

“Pastor Logan has already been informed of the council’s decision.”

Was it his imagination, or did Steve’s mouth curve in a small smile under the mustache? He turned his back on the sheriff and headed for the broken fence. Steve followed just as he knew he would. When Grizz heard his footsteps behind him, he turned and swung the shovel with all his might. He pivoted, planting his feet and
throwing his entire body into the swing. The clamps and staves fell away in a clatter. In his mind’s eye, he saw the fanged edge of that old shovel cleave into Steve’s neck, saw the first bright geyser of red erupt, saw him fall, his mouth opening in surprise.

But Steve was a cunning man and knew what Grizz was about, so where he thought the man’s head or neck might be instead there was only air, and the violence of that swing twisted him badly on his hips, and he felt something tear inside when he fell.

Steve stood over him. “It’s not a good idea to try assaulting an officer of the law,” he said. “But I’m going to forget this happened. I don’t know what that girl told you. I can understand your anger, why you might try to hurt me in the heat of the moment.” He paused, made a sound in his throat, and spit to the side. “What I don’t understand is your boy. I mean his pockets were full of ammunition, Grizz. Took his time sawing down that shotgun. I can’t imagine such coldness.”

Even if Grizz wanted to rise, he couldn’t. It felt like there was a saw working in his gut, an old hernia tear he had torn again. He breathed in the dust where he had fallen and tried not to cry. How had he not seen this moment coming? Of course they would do this. They couldn’t just let Seth be dead. They had to find some further way to punish him, send him on to hell.

“This town’s had a terrible shock. They don’t feel safe. The world is changing, and they don’t know their place in
it. Let go of your anger. If you want to be angry, be angry with your son.”

Grizz put one hand over his eyes. It was good advice. He should have been furious with Seth, but when he searched himself all he felt was the shock of his boy’s death. An emptiness, chaff in his palm.

Grizz didn’t answer. He didn’t trust his voice. Steve knelt in the grass beside him. “A group of us will come this fall and combine your crop. No charge.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“We both know you don’t have the money. Probably don’t have enough for Seth’s funeral services. You’re going to need help to get through this.” Steve extended his hand, but Grizz didn’t take it.

Grunting, Grizz climbed to his feet and picked up his shovel and the rest of his things. Steve shrugged and walked away. A moment later his car started. Only after the sheriff’s car disappeared up the driveway did Grizz allow himself to lean over and vomit up what he’d drank last night. He let the sick come up, all liquid and no solids, until he was scoured out.

Then he walked to the broken place in the fence line where one post had been shattered in half. The bull must have been shocked by the electricity, enraged. The fence repelled him once, but the next time he charged it he must have hit the old post at full speed, splintering it. Grizz admired how the bent wires twisted and curled into space.

Grizz drove the staves into the ground and wound wire around the makeshift post, clamping it in place. The bull lifted his head from the dusty grazing pasture and studied his work. It was a jerry-rigged operation, and they both knew it. Just this small effort sapped Grizz’s remaining energy, and he had to sit for a moment in the waving grasses to catch his breath. And even as the work drained him, it also renewed him, quenched his ache for a spell.

A boisterous cloud of blackbirds burst from the oaks as the sheriff drove away. The flock gathered into a swirling pinwheel that carried them high above the pasture, the line breaking and re-forming before arrowing toward the mountain, where they landed in the waving grasses and went silent as though they had never been. Grizz was left alone again in the hot sun with the cows chewing their cud.

In this year of drought the leaves fell early, small and brown and skeletal. The canary grasses were tawny in the light, bending under a hot wind, and the woods stretched toward town, dry as kindling.

LONE MOUNTAIN

O
nce there was a mountain, a bald grassy place that looked like the skull of a man, all brow and crown, because long ago a giant had trampled the valley before sinking up to his eyeballs and drowning. The little ponds around it were his footsteps, the mounds beside it his shoulders as he shrugged underground. Maybe he was not dead. Maybe he was only sleeping. The wind off the river was his breath. Night in the valley was sentient with his dreaming. Cows that escaped pasture fences went to the mountain and vanished. He slept his sleep of a thousand years and waited and no oaks or maples grew from the grasses over his head
.

“Is the giant mean? I don’t want him to wake up.” She never tired of hearing such stories, imagining the hatchet-faced mountain rising above the fields.

“Don’t you worry. He’s old and sleepy, but he watches and waits. He only wakes in times of trouble. There are
wolves that live in his caves, and he sends them forth to help those in need.”

“His emis—?”

“Emissaries. They do his bidding.”

“Like the ones who came for the woman. To keep her from hurting the baby. Like the coyote who found the baby after all those people died in the war?”

“Yes, the very ones.”

“Why did the woman want to hurt the baby?”

The giant in the mountain was as old as the moon or stars, as ancient as a stone left by the seashore. Things fastened to him like lichen or mollusks so the rocks found on the mountain were like nothing on the earth. The last tallgrass prairie became the giant’s beard and eyebrows. Nowhere else in the valley could you find the Great Plains prickly pear cactus, green and bristling, among the cedar trees and prairie bush clover thick with bees
.

Granodiorite. Gabbro. The rocks were living things the Indians said flew about the stars at night. The boulders were witnesses to creation. A hundred years before, the mountain was holy to the Dakotas. The sick went there to drink from a limestone spring; infertile women ate the dirt. Where red rock showed through the grass, pink as skin, the young men painted their visions. Thunderbeings and black bears and buffalo. Sometimes just a hand etched into the stone to say
I was here,
if only for a single heartbeat of the one who lives within the mountain
.

“Will you take me there, Daddy?”

“Maybe when spring comes again. When I’m feeling more peppy and can make the climb. Then we’ll pack a
picnic and sit on the mountaintop and feel the wind in the grass.”

“When?”

“Someday.”

There was no mountain near the town of Lone Mountain so far as Clara could tell, the streets as quiet as a secret on Sunday morning. The competing spires of Trinity Lutheran and Our Lady of the Sorrows peeked above leafy treetops. Silt laden, the Minnesota River wound like a thick ribbon of caramel in the valley below.

It was a pretty enough town at first glance, the women sweeping their porches, the men cutting precise patterns on riding lawnmowers. Victorian houses with gables and wide porches surrounded Hiawatha Park, a green space where the town enacted the annual Longfellow Pageant. Black iron lampposts lined the main street where buildings of dun-colored brick bore the mark of previous decades, advertisements for Lee’s overalls and mugs of Sanka. Farmers wearing seed caps parked their trucks along the curb. At the pool hall, they passed rainy mornings playing a card game called sheepshead to determine who would have to pay for coffee. Know the price of beans or the weather forecast, and you might find your way into a conversation. Logan had told her that people lived in this town for twenty-five years and were still counted as strangers.

There was the grocery store, Jurgen’s Corner, and a bait
shop, the Bookworm, which sold yellowing paperbacks and comic books along with supplies for fishermen wishing to ply the brown river. The town movie theater had shut down, but the marquee still advertised
Red Dawn
with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. Downtown also held a hardware store, two bars, and a Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon. Two bars and two churches made for an even balance of liquid spirits and holy spirits in Clara’s estimation. The high school and nursing home were across town from where Clara lived. On either end of the valley, where County Road 29 dropped from the prairie tableland as it sliced through town, big billboards had been erected, each featuring smiling babies meant to represent fetuses.
I HAD A HEARTBEAT AT TWO MONTHS
, read one, while the other, in stark black and white, admonished
THOU SHALT NOT KILL
.

The entire town clung to the south face of a steeply sloping hill overlooking the river lowlands, prone to flooding, where the Harvestland silos loomed over taverns and railroad tracks and mobile homes occupied by migrant workers during the pea and corn harvest at the Del Monte plant in nearby Amroy.