Little Wolves Read online

  Numbly, he read for the first time how the boy had stopped at the parsonage and how the pastor’s wife had not come to the door. “I was scared,” she told Edna Drooge, the coeditor of the Lone Mountain Courier. “I couldn’t see who was there, but I just felt sure something bad was about to happen.”

  Grizz folded the paper and stuffed it again into the garbage. He felt a cramping along his left side and massaged the muscle. He had torn something for sure trying to take off Steve’s head with that shovel. But was it possible that what Steve said was true and that he was a friend, not an enemy? Steve served on the church council and the board of directors at the local co-op. He was the sort of man Grizz needed to keep close if he was going to understand his son’s death.

  Seth’s suicide had been Grizz’s worst fear; he was such a melancholy boy, a daydreamer who sulked instead of doing his chores, but as he got older that sulking turned to anger, the anger to desperation. Grizz could almost wrap his mind around the suicide but not the sawed-off shotgun, the pockets filled with lead slugs.

  He had kept Seth’s bedroom door shut since that night. A shut door meant anything could still be inside there. Seth hadn’t left any note or any clues so far as he knew, but maybe the men hadn’t known where to look.

  Grizz climbed the stairs and opened the door to a chaotic scene. The sheriff’s men had torn open the drawers of Seth’s desk and dresser and left them askew. On the floor his T-shirts and jeans pooled in piles, and his bed sheets were still dimpled with the outline of his body, a faint dark impression. It felt like trespassing.

  Deer antlers, polished by years of sun, were embedded along the inlaid shelves of one south-facing wall. Seth had gathered the antlers as a boy, when he was a wanderer, when Grizz had hounded him about landmarks, keeping the house in sight, and avoiding the deep limestone crevices up in the hills where a body might fall inside and never be found again.

  That boy kept him up at nights. And sometimes when Grizz did sleep, his jaw ached in the morning from grinding teeth, worrying on him. Once Seth had left a collection of women’s bras and panties dangling from the antlers as a taunt, some with rust-colored stains lining the silk. All the sizes had been different, though Grizz had tried not to look too closely. Women’s things, delicate and lace fringed, maybe some from girls at the high school. Only way the boy could have had them was if he had stolen them from houses in town. A creep.

  “Where’d you get these?” Grizz asked that evening. He sat in his recliner, the offending articles piled on the floor below him.

  Seth just looked away. He was not a handsome boy, tall and slump shouldered, as though apologizing to the world for being made so big. This had been a few weeks after Grizz had found the pot in his sock drawer and called Will Gunderson to arrest his own child. He didn’t know what to do with him anymore, couldn’t control Seth.

  “I need to know I can trust you. Tell me the truth, now. Whose are these?”

  “I see you’ve been in my room.”

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Found ’em,” Seth said, shrugging. He met Grizz’s gaze. “You going to turn them over to the sheriff, too?”

  “Should I?”

  Seth swallowed his grin. “No.” A shadow passing over his features.

  “Why would you keep such things?”

  His eyes had gone back to mapping the floorboards. “It was a dare.”

  “A dare? To do what? Who dared you? Did Kelan put you up to this?”

  Seth raised his head, his eyes blazing. “Fuck you,” he said. When Grizz stood he was still bigger than his son, but if they fought the outcome was no longer sure. Seth lowered his head and came toward him but turned at the last second, only brushing past him as he went up the stairs. A moment later his door slammed, and then his stereo came on: electric guitars, a blast of drums, a voice wailing from the speakers.

  A dare? His best friend had been Kelan Gunderson, the sheriff’s older boy. Kelan was a lanky, handsome child, black haired with long-lashed gray eyes the girls all swooned over. Unlike Seth, Kelan was well liked, a congenial kid who put on a smiling face for all the adults, but Grizz always had the feeling he had egged Seth on. Kelan had a tagalong little brother, too, a boy with what the unkind called mongoloid features. The brother was always practicing spastic karate moves while trying to defend himself from the bigger boys and so they took to calling him Odd Lee instead of his given name of Bruce and the name stuck. Now he thought of Kelan and his little brother out there grieving their father, likely as mystified as Grizz, and he regretted thinking meanly of them. His son had murdered his best friend’s father. His only friend.

  He stood looking at Seth’s closet door, hung with a poster of the Four Horseman charging out of red clouds, a city below them in flames, the words JUDAS PRIEST at the top and NOSTRADAMUS at the bottom. He tore the poster from its Scotch-tape moorings, picked up the scattered cassette tapes and survival magazines, because these things were not his son. As he gathered them in a garbage bag for the burn pile, his eyes were drawn to papers scattered on the desk. They were drawings mostly, wolves and strange giants in a far, frozen country. The boy had a fine hand for sketching. A creature with its arm torn off howled in the woods. In another, a child looked into a pond, but his watery reflection turned monstrous and fanged. A final one showed a hallway clotted with bloody bodies, a woman’s severed head lolling on the floor. The sheriff’s men hadn’t taken these papers; there was no need with Seth dead.

  When Grizz picked them up, he saw something that caught his breath. Seth had gouged a single word into the desk: WERGILD. The wounds in the wood were fresh, dark walnut surface peeled to show blond wood underneath. Seth had worked at this recently with a knife, prying up the slivers carefully. Grizz didn’t know what the word meant but knew someone who did. It was time he got ready to head into town.

  He ripped the bandages from his palms, scrubbed the wounds clean, then put on fresh blue jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, steel-toed boots he favored while driving loads for the co-op or taking trips to town, and then pulled his cap low to shade his eyes before setting out.

  He drove the winding stretch of road between his farm and town, his hands light on the wheel. He’d driven past the church for many years without stopping, but today he parked out front. Grizz checked the office down the hall for the pastor, his hollow greeting echoing. It figured. He went into the sanctuary, where it was so quiet he could hear a few pigeons cooing up in the bell tower.

  On a hunch he stepped through a side door, saw the path that went over to the parsonage, and almost ran right into a woman standing in the grass in her bare feet. She was staring off toward the cemetery, a single piece of paper in her hand. She had long auburn hair and was wearing a billowy blouse and skirt that could not disguise her pregnancy. She startled when she heard the door clamp shut and saw him come toward her.

  He took off his cap as he approached. The way she stood, on the balls of her feet, it was as if she was preparing to run. Like she thought he was going to hurt her.

  “You’re the pastor’s wife.”

  She nodded, her face ashen. The wind whipped her curly hair in front of her face.

  “He around?”

  She shook her head, no. The same relentless wind snatched the paper from her grasp and sent it tumbling across the lawn and into the cemetery where it was lost among the graves. “Fuck,” she said, the very first word he’d heard her speak, and then brought up her hands over her mouth as though to cover the profanity.

  At that moment he also noticed the missing fingers on her left hand. It had bothered Seth, he remembered. His boy had come home telling about the new teacher, a mystery. “When is he coming back?”

  Her eyes darted between Grizz and the place where the paper had vanished. What had she been holding? “He has a service at the nursing home. I think. Probably return in an hour, unless he has visits.”

  “You know who I am?”

  She met his gaze. “You’re Seth Fallon’s dad.
Logan’s been trying to reach you.”

  “I wasn’t ready to talk before now. Are you okay? You look about ready to puke.”

  “That paper I was holding? Someone left it at my door.” She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “It was a drawing your son made for my class. Did you see anyone else around here?”

  The look he gave her must have showed his confusion. She shut her eyes briefly and drew in a heavy breath. “I’m Clara Warren. Seth’s English teacher.” Tentatively, she held out her hand, and he took it. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Fallon.” Her hand felt smooth and hot within his own. She held on a moment too long, maybe feeling the wounds in his palm and reading some story from the touch. He jerked his hand away and then felt embarrassed of his foolishness. Her eyes were bright and amber colored. She had sharp features, her small nose twitching as if scenting something troubling in the air. A petite woman, despite her pregnancy. Grizz loomed over her.

  “What was on the drawing?” He thought of the ones on the boy’s desk. The monster in the woods. The woman’s severed head.

  “A wolf,” she said. “He’d written something in runes on the bottom about no one being spared.” She rushed on, nervous. “We were studying Beowulf in class, just finishing up a unit. It might not have meant anything.”

  Grizz fanned the air with his cap. “He liked your class.” It was the only class Seth had spoken about once school started.

  She smiled faintly, and her eyes filled. “I know.”

  They were alone, the cemetery behind them, hidden from any traffic on the street by the big two-story parsonage. “Why didn’t you go to the door, then?”

  “I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t know who was there.”

  “Had he threatened you before this?”

  “It was only a feeling,” she said.

  “The same feeling you have now?” He was tired of it, the way people looked at him, shrank from his size. Tired of being feared. A weariness Seth must have felt as well.

  She raised her chin and studied Grizz. “No. I know you’re not going to hurt me, Mr. Fallon.” Then she wiped her hands along her skirt and peered into his eyes.

  Grizz stepped back. It was the expression on her face, open, expectant. He was afraid she was going to hug him, and he didn’t want her to do any such thing. He needed to hold on to his anger, see this to the end. “There’s something else,” he said. “He carved a word in his desk. It doesn’t look like English. ‘Wergild,’ or something. You know what it means?”

  After a moment, she nodded. “It’s Old English. A blood debt, that’s what it means. It’s a price a family paid to keep others from taking revenge. Gold for blood spilled.”

  “Why would he write that, then do what he did?”

  She was quiet while she thought about it. He saw this and knew he would trust her. Her hands were around her stomach, as though to soothe the baby inside her. “Maybe he wanted someone to stop him.”

  He set his cap on his head, not wanting her to see his eyes. It was clear to him what she had to offer. This woman had liked his son. She had not hated him the way the rest of the town had. Even now she was not judging him. “Do you think he really meant to kill a whole bunch of people like they’re saying?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Only Seth knows.”

  He turned and walked to his truck.

  “Mr. Fallon,” she called after him.

  “It’s Grizz,” he said, facing her once more. “What everyone calls me.”

  “Grizz, would you like to come inside the parsonage and wait for my husband there? I’ll make tea. Maple tea. It’s a secret recipe my father taught me.”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll come another time.”

  THE CORNFIELD

  After his truck passed on the road, Clara was alone in the fading day. She thought of Seth with his desk all the way in the back of the room, a circle of space around him. A kid with a face so gaunt he almost looked cadaverous. Steorfan. The word flashed inside her the first time she looked into his eyes, an Old English word for “starving,” a word that once simply meant “death.” She didn’t know why it popped into her brain. Seth’s eyes were slanted and golden brown, and the way his dark clothing draped on him made him appear tall and lean and dangerous.

  He had been tracked along with the kids not in precalculus and college chemistry, the ones who didn’t expect anything more out of life than to head up to Bowden Technical College for a year to study plumbing or electrical maintenance before returning to Lone Mountain. His class was hell on teachers, and they came to Clara during her fifth period, right after lunch, a riot of noise and distraction. Her first day they continued talking after the bell while she paced in front of the room, deeply regretting wearing heels because she wasn’t used to being on her feet all day long.

  The boys sprawled in their desks while the girls gaggled. Clara went over to the doorway and switched the lights off and on to get their attention, but this just made them ooh and aah. They were going to make an example of her to set the tone. Clara’s blood pressure spiked when she realized she had lost control of them before she even got started. A young teacher who didn’t know what she was doing. A mistake to take this job. Logan had argued against the long-term-substitute position when it was offered, reminding her that she was supposed to be finishing her dissertation, an investigation of the remaining Old English texts that described the massacre of St. Brice’s Day under the reign of King Aethelred the Unready. Clara raised her voice again to tell them about Beowulf, which they had just started reading before their last teacher, Mr. Gleason, had a stroke.

  Then Seth rose from his place at the back of the room, holding one of the heavy English literature textbooks. In a single, smooth gesture he let it drop from chin height to the floor. The book whipcracked the linoleum. The entire room hushed and turned in his direction, the quiet kids up front tensing and hunkering down in their seats. “Shut the hell up,” Seth told them, “and let the lady talk.”

  Clara didn’t say anything right away. Her mouth felt coated with paste, and her eyes watered because her feet were killing her. In the new silence, she took off her heels and tossed them into a corner and let her swollen feet kiss the cold floor. She sipped from her water, drew in her breath, and shut her eyes. Then she began to sing them the story in Anglo-Saxon as it was meant to be told, her voice starting low and then rising in pitch, a lilting soprano that drew in all the cadences of Old English alliteration and bound it together in a weave of sound. Clara, a music minor at the U, had sung in the choir but never soloed before this. She felt all their eyes on her. She hadn’t done this for the earlier class, the smart kids who bent to their reading and the questions at the end of the section without giving her trouble.

  “Do you know what language that was?” she asked the silent room. “What story I was telling?” A few mouths gaped; she had their attention. She walked the room and began to speak of it, a kingdom under siege, the nightly terror in the mead-hall. The class went on and they opened their books and dived into the text itself, but it was the stories and songs and legends they wanted. The words and mysteries and how inside the words they spoke every day they carried the memory of this lost world. How it was said that Hitler’s troops fought so hard at the end of World War II because deep in their icy German hearts they remembered Ragnarok, and the end of the world. The gods at war with frost giants, men at war with the gods, even the women as Valkyries riding in on shrieking clouds to pick out the heroic dead. And after class that first day, Seth paused at the door and showed his teeth when he smiled. “Neat trick,” he said before ducking under the door into the churn of bodies in the hallway.

  He was the key to the class, the one they feared. Hold his attention and the rest would follow. Clara had the feeling she had been tested in some crucial way, and she had passed. The moment gave her a strange confidence, and the students responded to this confidence, even if it was all bluff and bravado.

  Fifth period became her fav
orite time of the day. She made the room dark for them by drawing the heavy felt curtains along one wall of windows and then lighting a couple of candles along the lip of the chalkboard. They loved riddles and mysteries, so she put up a riddle each day on the chalkboard from the Anglo-Saxon Book of Exeter for them to puzzle over. They drew maps of England, studied the Danish sagas that had inspired Beowulf, histories featuring men with names like Ivar the Boneless and Ragnar Shaggy-pants, who was executed by being lowered into a pit of vipers. It was all a little corny maybe, but she had found a way to make this ancient story come alive. They needed her, a PhD washout who hadn’t been able to finish her dissertation, a pregnant woman with all sorts of fears and hang-ups of her own, but someone who knew the world and could talk to them about it on their own level. She learned how desperate many of them were to get out of this town, how eager for news of life in the outside world, for what awaited them—a few of them—at college.

  Even so, she made plenty of mistakes, pried when she shouldn’t have. During a classroom discussion about Grendel descending from Cain, about original sin and monsters, Kelan Gunderson had raised his hand. His black hair was trimmed in a neat crew cut around his square face, and he wore a letterman’s jacket in the school colors, scarlet and gold. Kelan, Seth, and Leah had been an inseparable trio in the hallways.

  “Mrs. Warren,” Kelan asked, “do you believe in the devil?”

  Caught off guard, Clara laughed nervously at first, thinking of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady impressions on Saturday Night Live. But Kelan wasn’t smiling, and the rest of the class seemed to await an honest answer. Did she? Was it necessary to believe in the devil if you believed in God? Clara had always considered the devil just an ancient bogeyman, as mythic as Grendel, an excuse for the darker aspects of humanity, but she couldn’t say that here, not as the pastor’s wife. She was not used to being in a position of authority.