Little Wolves Page 10

  “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.

  LOGAN AND CLARA 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 chi
ld 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.

  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?

  THE NEXT MORNING, CLARA 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

  Seth 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 o
n 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.