Little Wolves Read online

  Silence. She felt her senses shutting down, narrowing, the way they had with Logan in the kitchen. This was the moment her body had been preparing her for. Down in the basement she had no weapon, no place to hide. Adrenaline pumped uselessly under her skin.

  There was something down here with her. She sensed it standing right behind her. It had come inside. A tremor traveled from her bare feet to the top of her skull, and then she was shivering all over. Don’t turn around. Don’t move. This is how you survive.

  Help me, Clara. Please.

  The hair prickled on her neck.

  That was it, a voice, her name, a cry, before the doorbell stopped and the sense went away.

  She waited a minute, catching her breath. The kittens started mewling again, unsatisfied with the little milk she had carried down for them. Then the lightbulb fizzed to life. She turned around, half blinded, but all she made out was a shadow retreating into the watery darkness where she intended to set up a darkroom for her photography. The sound of her name echoed in her ears. She had known that voice, a boy’s voice, scared. Seth.

  The doorbell rang again, breaking her chain of thought. She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing there. Then from above came the sound of the doorknob turning, the squeak of hinges. My God. Someone had come right inside the house; she heard footsteps in the kitchen.

  “Clara?” A voice rattling in the empty room above. An old woman’s voice.

  She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until she let it out in a rush. Instead of fear the feeling that coursed through her this time was bright, hot anger. It was just an ordinary parishioner upstairs. If they couldn’t find Logan at the church, the first thing parishioners did was call or look in here. Because the parsonage belonged to the church, some walked right inside.

  “Hello?” the voice called out once more. “Anyone home?” More footsteps, and then she must have spotted the dishes on the floor. “Goodness …”

  When her breath came back, she shouted up the stairs. “You can’t just come in here. I don’t know who you think you are, but you can’t just barge into a person’s home.”

  “Sorry,” said the voice. “I’ll just be leaving then.”

  “You wait right there,” Clara called out. She needed to put an end to this nonsense, make sure these people understood how she needed space and privacy. There were boundaries that must be respected. That was the word Logan always used. Clara walked upstairs to find her neighbor, Nora Winters, in her kitchen, standing by the stove. Nora was a gnome-sized woman with a round face that scrunched up into a mass of wrinkles when she laughed; she had blue hair, a dye job gone wrong. She was breathing heavily just from carrying a heavy silver container across the lawn that separated the two houses.

  “Hello, Clara,” she said. “I brought you something.”

  Clara drew in her breath. She was mortified to be found in her kitchen in the late afternoon still wearing her robe, not to mention the broken china in the sink. If Nora breathed a word of this to anyone it would spread all over town. “You can’t just come in here,” Clara repeated, but the heat had gone out of her voice.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “I was just going to leave it on the counter with a note. It’s hotdish. Tater Tot hotdish. My specialty. I keep one stored in the freezers for funerals and such.”

  Clara felt tired, so very tired. “No thanks.” The thought of soggy Tots soaking in gravy and beef left her queasy.

  “But you have to eat for two,” Nora rushed on, her lips pursing. “You’re far too skinny. Roundness is the natural shape the Lord intended for things. The earth is round and the harvest moon over the corn.”

  Clara had heard this lecture from her before. “I’m hardly skinny,” she said. “I’m fit to burst.” Fit to burst? Why was she talking this way? Why hadn’t she given the old bag the boot? Nora was one of those women who once lived on a family farm. A cheery, rotund woman who caused everything to bloom around her. It was as though, being round herself, she caused everything to plump and share that shape. And though her husband, she assured Clara on one occasion, had died of a massive heart attack due to clogged arteries, he went to his grave fat and satisfied.

  “Why, let that prairie wind take hold of you and you’ll be tossed about like a weed,” she said.

  Clara surprised herself by laughing and then caught sight of the mess in the sink again. Nora’s gaze followed hers. “It’s my fault. I have a terrible temper and was tired of looking at all those dishes.”

  “Well, let me help you clean it up,” Nora said. “When I was pregnant sometimes the most rotten moods came over me.”

  Clara looked at Nora, her blue hair, her face ruddy from the short walk, that cheerful voice.

  “It’s true,” Nora said, reading the doubt in Clara’s eyes. “I once took a bat to my husband’s pickup after he went to the bar and left me alone with the kids on a Saturday night. Got both headlights before he stopped me.” Against her wishes, Clara felt herself smiling again as she imagined this turnip of a woman attacking her husband’s truck. “So you just let me clean this up. It’s one thing these old bones is good for.”

  “No. I have to …”

  Before she knew it, Nora had crossed the distance and put her hand on Clara’s. Her voice lowered. “Why don’t you go upstairs and run yourself a nice, hot bath? You leave this to me.” She squeezed Clara’s hand, gently insistent. “And don’t you worry about talk spreading uptown. I can keep a secret.”

  Clara’s throat thickened, and she didn’t want to cry in front of her so she nodded and did as Nora asked. She was almost out of sight before Nora spoke again, an afterthought. “Why did Steve Krieger come by to visit?”

  “Who?”

  “Steve, the sheriff.”

  The doorbell she had heard earlier when she was in the basement with the kittens.

  “Don’t know,” she said quickly. “I didn’t get to the door in time. Maybe he was looking for Logan. Will Gunderson’s funeral is a couple of days from now.”

  “Oh. He’s a vigilant one, our law enforcement officer. Neither he nor Will Gunderson are the type of people you would ever want to cross.” She shook her head. “Not that you need to worry about that.”

  THE BATH PROVED EVERY bit as restorative as Nora had promised. Clara put on her terry-cloth robe, a towel wrapping her hair, and went to the window. Nora was already heading home. She thought of how kind the woman had been to her on first coming here, how eager she was for the baby, telling Clara how she’d raised eight children into the fullness of adulthood and could salve, rub Vicks Vapo, or chicken soup her way through the most dire illness. But oh! There was one lost one, a boy she could not save from childhood leukemia. She thought about him every living day.

  Nora went directly to her garden and knelt on rickety knees in the grass. In the center of the vegetables, now husked brown and raked over, there stood a short statue of the Virgin Mary left there by her husband, Charlie. Nora and Charlie shared one of those marriages, Catholic and Lutheran, which caused so much woe on either side of their families. Nora had told Clara all about it, her voice so loud during the church social hour that people at other tables turned to listen. “ ‘It’s all the same to me,’ Charlie used to say. ‘To get to New Ulm you can take Highway Twenty-Nine or you can take the Fourteen. They both end up in the same damn place.’ ”

  It had been Nora’s husband, Charlie, who insisted the statue be placed in the middle of the green growing things. Nora told her she had resisted at first, but the statue grew on her. In the statue’s arms she took some comfort. Here was a woman given a sacred task, bearing God’s child into a world that would mock him and impale him on a tree. She did not break when that man was spat upon and crucified. Her love had been absolute. The resurrected Christ came back to women first.

  BOY FROM THE STARS

  In the days that passed, Grizz held firm on not allowing a funeral. He filed the paperwork asking for the right to bury his son on his own land, th
en waited on word from the county and tried to keep his mind off it with chores. There was always more work on a farm than any one body could do alone, especially in the fall. Two hundred acres of corn and soybeans to be harvested, fifty-three head of cattle to feed and water, new siding for the barn, twenty acres of bottomland meadow hay and alfalfa to bale and stack in the mow, and machinery to be oiled and groomed for the coming harvest and winter.

  He could fill himself up with such numbers and work. It was how he had lived with the boy after Jo died, so much work it stripped away the words he might have spoken across the dinner table, words that might have called Seth out of the darkness he carried inside him.

  Any thought of that commissioner set his teeth on edge, even as he sought to lose himself in his labor. The hay in the lower meadow needed cutting, so the day following Grizz’s visit to the funeral home he hitched the mower to the International and set out to do the work. Even with the tractor in full thrum and the blades of the cutter scything out long rows of grass, he felt unsettled. Occasionally on the mountain he caught a winking of light, of sun on glass or gleaming metal. As though he was being signaled by a mirror. The hair raised on his nape. There was someone out there watching him; he felt sure of it.

  Something else troubled him as well. These last few years Seth’s coyotes always came to greet him shortly after he started haying, loping down from their mountain warren to frolic in the fields. He feared the moment as much he longed to see them, for they were only alive because of what Seth had done years earlier, and he had lain awake these last few nights with the windows open to listen for their singing, but the night remained silent.

  The coyotes came for the mice the tractor scared up from the grass. When the mice fled, the coyotes leaped after them, pouncing with curved spines to pin the rodents under their paws, then gobbling them up in a single gulp. When Seth was alive, Grizz had recoiled at the sight of them, the way anyone raised on a farm reacts to a predator invading his space, fox or egg-thieving skunk. Seth’s little wolves were big, rangy creatures, but their lean snouts and long, comical ears belied something more dangerous. These were efficient killers, and they left little to waste. In the spring when the cows calved in the pasture, the coyotes were always there, gorging on the placenta and afterbirth, their muzzles bloody in the early light. He had told Seth that if they harmed even one of those calves he would shoot them all, but they hadn’t, not yet. Seth had held them at bay.

  These last few years, the sight of them coming down from the mountain had cheered the boy during the hot work of haying. Grizz would hear his boy’s laughter, a rare sound, when Seth sat behind him on the rack. Sometimes he would call, and the coyotes would answer, especially with evening coming on. The coyotes’ absence became one more troubling reminder of the boy’s absence.

  Sometimes a hiccup of dust sprung from the grass in front of the tractor or just behind it as he swiveled the little front wheel and turned into another row of grass. A yellow cloud of chaff smoked behind the cutter and dirtied the clear blue sky. When Grizz changed direction, he turned into the dust cloud, and his eyes and nostrils stung. He kicked into second gear, risking a jam, and pulled the brim of his cap lower. Again the grass erupted to his left, throwing up dirt. Over the grinding of the gears, he heard a distant crack.

  Grizz knew then what he was seeing and hearing. Gunshots. He pulled the kill switch to cut the power, and when the tractor sputtered to a halt and the resulting dust cloud whipped past him, he climbed into the saddle seat and stood there with his hat in his hands, swaying unsteadily on the spring seat. Here, he meant for whoever was out there. Go ahead and put me out of my misery. His breath came short. With his sinuses furred by itchy hay, he wasn’t seeing right. Maybe there was nothing out there at all. Shielding his eyes, he scanned the mountain above for a spot where he’d seen that winking light.

  He didn’t have to wait long. A moment after standing he saw a movement in the grass, higher up than where he first looked, as three forms rushed down, bounding as they came through the brush. Seth’s coyotes on the hunt, circling whatever was hidden there. This is what had kept them from coming down. A stranger on the property. A second later, maybe hearing what was coming his way, a figure stood up on the ridge, then bolted. Idiot, Grizz thought. What sort of fool runs from dogs, much less wild animals? Doing so just excited their predatory instincts.

  It’s no easy feat to run down a steeply pitched hill. The figure fell with the suddenness of a meteor, a thunderous crackling of leaves and branches, gathering momentum as he tumbled. Blackbirds erupted from the bur oaks in a noisy cloud, and his heart turned a somersault inside his chest just to see it. The boy—that much he could make out—spilled down the ridge with a clumsy grace. He had formed himself into a ball, knees tucked into his chest, his arms protecting his fragile skull.

  At two hundred yards or more this was not exactly a mountain, but no small hill either. It rose up at a steep sixty-degree angle cut by straight drops and speckled with boulders and orange-tinted cedar trees and massive bur oaks. Somehow the boy missed the steeper drops and the boulders and the iron-hard oak trees. He fell like a child from Dakota legend, a boy out of the sky. Grizz was mindful of the September sun touching his hair, the circling of the coyotes on the hill above, the blackbirds wheeling in protest overhead. I can die now, he thought. I have seen everything, a boy chased by little wolves, falling from the sky.

  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 l
ucky 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

  Clara 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.”