Little Wolves

DUCHESS





Clara had not been back to church since the shootings, but the next morning she meant to meet Nora for a Bible study with her Naomi Circle at a house across town. Going to something as simple as a Bible study was a good way to make the church a part of her life again with the sheriff’s funeral tomorrow. When she married Logan, she had made promises.

Clara put on a pair of maternity shorts with a big stretchable waistband, an outfit she completed with a spaghetti-strap blouse and sandals. With her protruding stomach and pale stork-thin legs, she knew she cut an ungainly figure, but the unnatural heat wouldn’t let up, even in these first days of October. By late morning the asphalt blistered. Under the sun’s glaring eye lawns baked yellow, parched trees let down the last of their leaves, and a film of dust settled like ashes over the streets and houses. Wind-still, even the air had a seared odor, a faint sulfur reek from dying bullheads on the shores of the narrowing river, and as the townspeople went about their daily errands they sought shelter from the heat in what scant shade buildings and trees had to offer.

The walk gave her time to think about the readings, which included every passage about heaven or hell mentioned in Old Testament and New. It had surprised her how little the Bible had to say about what happens after we die. When she asked Logan, he had only shrugged. “The Bible is the record of a living God seeking out relationships with a living people.”

“I don’t know. I thought the whole point was getting to heaven. If that’s the end of the road, the Bible doesn’t describe it very well.”

Logan had scratched at his beard. “What if it did? What if heaven was described right down to the last cubit? A known place, mapped and explored to the furthest reaches.”

“You and your mysteries,” she said, wrinkling her nose, sensing where he was headed. “That’s your answer for everything.”

“God gave us an imagination. It may be one of the most beautiful functions of our brain. He left the space open for us to fill.”

Clara wasn’t sure what she would say about the afterlife. Her father would grow angry when she tried to talking about it with him. People die, he had told her, and that’s all there is. No world but this one we can see and touch. No hell but the one we make in our own brains.

But what about Mama; isn’t she in heaven?

No. She’s just gone. All you got is me. All we got is each other.

But I want her to be in heaven. I want to see her one day.

And he would get angry, the vein pulsing in his brow. No such thing. No world but this one here. Tapping his chest, hard, like a hollow drum, then taking up her damaged hand. This is what she did to you, your mother. That’s all you need to know.

But—

Enough!

Rosa’s home proved to be a low-slung ranch house, the walkway lined with weedy, wavering daisies. Clara was twenty minutes late, drenched with sweat, and praying that Rosa, the host of the Bible study, had air-conditioning inside her house.

Rosa didn’t. The woman was a widow in a ruffled navy dress that looked hand sewn, pads puffing up the shoulders, and she ushered her into the foyer. She was staring at Clara’s bare legs, the sandals on her feet.

All the women were staring at her legs once she went into the dining room where Nora waited along with few others, sitting around a lace-covered table and sipping iced tea from tall glasses. As a group they blended into one at first when Rosa introduced them. Hilda. Doreen. Helen. Gretel. They all wore polyester pantsuits in soft autumn shades, except for Rosa. Clara was the youngest one there by at least three decades.

Clara wiped the sweat of her palms on her shorts and shook hands with each of them. Was she supposed to shake hands or was that considered unladylike? The women had light bird bones under their porous skin, a brittle fragility, and she shook hands gingerly until she got to Gretel. Gretel’s iron-gray hair was done up in a tight bun, and she had a grip like a meatpacker. She looked in Clara’s eyes and said what some of the others must have been thinking, “You wore shorts out in public.”

“Of course she did,” cut in Nora. “It’s ninety degrees outside.” She tried to laugh lightly, and Doreen joined her with a nervous bray. “I’d wear shorts if I had legs like hers.”

Gretel’s frown deepened her wrinkles. “She’s the pastor’s wife.”

“Gretel was a schoolteacher,” said Hilda, “for some thirty-seven years.”

“That’s … impressive,” Clara said. Thirty-seven years, she thought. Those poor f*cking kids.

“Would you like fresh crushed mint in your tea?” asked Rosa.

“Yes, please.”

“Sit down,” bid Helen. “We were just talking about our own visions of heaven.”

Hilda pulled out a chair next to her and patted the place. “And you should know we’re having cake afterward,” she said. “German chocolate.”

“I hope they have cake in heaven,” Clara said after sitting along with the rest. She glanced at the sluggish ceiling fan spinning above the table, which only seemed to stir the hot air in the room. “And air-conditioning.” She paused, still nervous with so many eyes on her. She was always afraid they would sniff her out, a doubter among them, the one not raised Lutheran. “Did you know that Hilda or Brunhilda means ‘ready for battle’ in Low German?” she said to fill the silence. “Brunhilda rode with the Valkyries.”

Doreen laughed her horsey laugh, spraying a mint sprig onto the tablecloth. The rest looked puzzled.

“I did not know that,” said Alfrieda.

“It’s a good, pagan name,” continued Clara. “All around us these pagan reminders live on in words and names and customs.”

Now that all the women were sitting down, Helen leaned forward. “We’ve heard that you’re a scholar.”

A scholar. Clara smiled at the sound of it. “I’m a doctoral student; I just need to finish.”

Six gray heads all nodded, satisfied. Nobody asked what her studies were about, but Clara decided to fill them in anyway. Didn’t it connect to the afterlife? “For my dissertation I am examining the edicts surrounding the massacre on St. Brice’s Day in 1002. King Aethelred the Unready.…” Here she paused, clearing her throat. “How’s that for a name? Anyhow, this king declared that all the Danes living in England were to be slaughtered. A group of Danes tried to shelter within a church. But the English locked them inside and burned the church to the ground.”

“They all died?” Helen’s hand covered her mouth, as though the event Clara described had happened in the next town over only a few years ago.

“Cooked to a crisp.” Clara felt giddy from the heat. Across the table, Doreen’s eyes were glazed, her jaw slack.

“Why on earth would you want to study something like that?” This was from Gretel.

“There’s this verse in the Bible about judgment at the end of days, about using fire to separate the cockle from the wheat. Aethelred used it to justify his actions. I’ve been translating his writings, looking closely at the words, and also studying the Danish impact on customs and language.”

Silence. Mercifully, Rosa returned with her iced tea. Clara gulped some down and added, “I hope they have iced tea in heaven.”

“Foolishness,” grumbled Gretel. “Why must heaven be a place of creature comforts? Streets of gold and all that.” She shook her head. “Those are human visions, and I don’t know why we settle for clichés.”

“You’re sounding like Reverend Schoenwald,” said Rosa.

Clara knew that the Reverend Gunther Schoenwald had been pastor here for thirty years. For three decades the same portly red-bearded man presided over every Lutheran baptism, every wedding, and every death. This was another reason that Logan hadn’t wanted to come here. They have an unhealthy way of dealing with death, he said. After so many years under the same leadership, the church could develop rigor mortis, hardening in its traditions. Pastor Schoenwald had been the one who insisted on burying the suicides in a separate section. Saints and suicides and newborns all had their own territory, the tombstones for the unbaptized babies like tiny broken teeth scattered in the grass.

“Why not?” said Helen. “Surely he’s up there with the saints.”

“Is Seth up there?” Clara said, surprising herself. She hadn’t meant to speak her question aloud. She had just come to listen, but she hadn’t been able to shut up since coming inside. “Wasn’t he baptized in our church?”

“What do you think?” said Gretel. “A murderer and a suicide? What sort of God would let such evil into his holy presence?”

“The same one who lets evil into our world.”

Gretel’s jaw snapped shut with an audible clacking, like a metal hinge. “You don’t know that family, do you? You don’t know the slightest thing.”

Clara’s voice was small. “I knew him,” she said.

“Did you? After living here for one month? I don’t believe any of us knows what others think. Only God can look inside a person’s heart. Do you know what I am thinking right now, dear?”

“Stop this,” Nora tried to interrupt. “I don’t like where this conversation is going.”

“Something wicked,” said Clara, raising her chin and meeting the woman’s gaze.

Gretel’s smile twitched the corners of her mouth; she was enjoying this exchange, Clara realized, probably not used to people talking back to her. “There’s a difference between thinking and doing,” she said.

“Not much,” said Clara.

“Yes,” insisted Gretel. “Sometimes the difference between thinking and doing is a matter of life or death.”

AFTER THIS EXCHANGE THE rest of the conversation blurred for Clara, and she was quiet, her thoughts elsewhere. The German chocolate cake proved to be dry, spackled with a hard coconut frosting. The women gathered up the plates and headed into the kitchen. Doreen and Helen had left already, but Clara lingered, still hoping to redeem herself from her earlier foolishness. She wanted to walk home with Nora. She stayed because she needed a friend, but when she had offered to help with the dishes, Rosa had gently said, “Not in your condition.”

“Condition,” muttered Clara. She hated that word, as though the baby was some type of fungus growing under her armpits. Precious Moments figurines sat on the surfaces of sideboards and buffets lining the walls, each occupying its own lace-fringed doily. The figurines had fat angelic faces and teardrop eyes. Clara found them faintly creepy.

Gretel pushed in a woman in a wheelchair from one of the back rooms and left her there, rejoining the other women in the kitchen without any explanation. The woman was so ancient most of her white hair had fallen out, except in clumps on either side of her head. She slumped in the wheelchair, lightly snoring, a yarn afghan thrown over knees despite the heat. When Clara stepped back, she jostled the Precious Moments figurines on one of the buffet tables, startling the woman awake. She raised her head, sniffing like a hound, her eyes milky blue. “Hello, Duchess,” she said, when her eyes found Clara.

“It’s Clara, actually,” she said once she got her breath. “I’m the pastor’s wife.”

“I know who you are.” The woman’s mouth was a dark pink cave; her caretaker must have neglected to put in her dentures. “It’s cold in here,” she continued, shivering. “That’s what hell is like, winter without end. Fire eats you up quick, but the cold is a slow kind of burning.”

They had just gotten done talking about eternal life as this woman must have known. Clara heard the others in the kitchen chatting in low voices as they washed and dried Rosa’s good silverware and china. “Why did you call me Duchess?”

“It’s who you are.”

“Oh,” Clara said. “How nice to be a duchess.”

“Don’t put on airs. We took you in as one of our own. Our little displaced person. But you were bad, you and the other one.”

The hair stood up on Clara’s arms. The woman’s whitish-blue eyes had fixed her with a hostile glare. “What did I do?”

“You know what you did.” She waved a speckled hand over her afghan. “Always serving tea and then turning the cup over to read the leaves. Telling us when to plant, if our husbands had been faithful. You walked with spirits; you lay down in sin.”

Clara froze. If hell was winter without end, it was all she saw in the woman’s eyes, emptiness and violence. But the woman’s voice ebbed with every word. Even her head sagged slightly, as if the story she told were draining her.

“Well, I won’t do it anymore.”

“That’s what you promised.” Her head was like a sunflower, too heavy for the stalk. It sagged toward the blanket. “You promised. But you were a liar. You had to be punished.”

“How?”

When a moment passed without the woman speaking, Clara leaned in close. The old woman smelled of talcum powder and decay, as if pieces of her were already rotting from the inside.

Nora appeared behind her. “I see you’ve met Bynthia.”

Clara stood and looked into Nora’s periwinkle eyes. “I need to get home,” she said, “will you walk with me?”

Once they were outdoors in the heat of Indian summer, the old woman’s words seemed insubstantial. Nora hobbled beside her on her bad hip, gossiping. “Sorry about Gretel. Some days, I feel like I have to wash my mouth out with cider vinegar just to hold my own in a conversation with that woman.”

The Catholic church’s bells rang the hour across the town.

“Bynthia called me Duchess.”

Nora halted.

“You know that name, don’t you?”

“Stop at my house and we’ll talk more there.”

They walked the remaining block in silence before going up the steps to Nora’s porch. Inside the house, Clara smelled soil and the perfume of flowers. Vines from a pothos plant twisted along the arched entryway and climbed over an inset bookcase. An umbrella tree blocked out the light coming in the living room window, and spider ferns dangled from the ceiling. Even the carpet and sofa were a matching pistachio color, the curtains darkly evergreen. Nora told her to make herself at home while she went to fix them each some ice water. A few minutes later she returned, the ice water sloshing because of her ungainly gait as she passed a cold glass to Clara.

Clara set her glass on a coaster. “You were going to tell me about the Duchess.”

Nora sat heavily, grunting as she did so. “First of all, Bynthia is ninety-five years old and she’s lived on the wrong side of the crazy river for the last decade or so. She’s Gretel’s mother. They’re relations of Sheriff Steve Krieger.”

“Then why does that name bother you so much? Why did I remind her of this woman?”

Nora glanced at Clara’s hand. “It’s your left hand, dear. How many women have such a … wound. Some of the old-timers look at you and remember. There’s been talk, but we couldn’t be sure. Who are you, Clara? Who are your people?”

“My people?” Clara settled into the couch’s soft cushions. “I don’t really know. I was raised alone by my father. He refused to talk about his family or my mother. He would only say that she died in a car accident in the wintertime. He would tell me stories, but they were fairy tales, really. There was always a mountain in them, sometimes wolves and winter storms. That’s all I know, not even my mother’s name. After he died, I couldn’t find my own birth certificate among his records. I don’t know how he registered me for school without it, how he got me my social security number. It’s as if I don’t exist, except through his stories.”

Nora was quiet for a long time. “Why did you come here?”

“My husband was called. The call committee hired him.”

“Yes, I heard. I also heard from Simon Wiley that he was sure your husband was going to turn us down. We were all surprised when he accepted. So I figure you talked him into it.”

“I did. I’ve been looking for records of my mother for a long time.”

“You might just have found her,” Nora said.

A hard knot in the center of her chest tightened her breathing. This was it, the news she had longed for. The air grew light up in her head, and she had to take a drink of water to compose herself. “All my life, I’ve lived with this gap inside me. This empty place. I need to know about her.”

Nora sipped from her glass, then set it down. “Sylvia came here a little after the war, married a schoolteacher in town. She was an immigrant, but we couldn’t be sure where she was from. She came here under the Displaced Persons Act. She was petite like you, but darker, raven haired. Shortly after the wedding, she leased out a building downtown. Lord knows where she got the money, considering her husband’s salary. Draped the windows with posters of Paris and London. The Duchess’s Beauty Emporium opened a few weeks later.”

“Did you ever go there?”

“Oh, all the young girls did. Sylvia was good with hair. You could bring a picture from a magazine, and she could weave up any bob or beehive you asked for. But that wasn’t the real draw.”

“Bynthia told me about the tea leaves.”

“Yes. She would tell fortunes after serving you tea. She had this thick, dreamy accent. It was all very European, mysterious. She predicted I would meet Charlie at the dance hall over in Henderson, predicted him right down to the color of his eyes.”

“Bynthia made it sound like the town punished her.”

“Punished?” Nora’s expression darkened, her lips thinning. “Nobody punished her.”

“I saw that woman’s eyes. Pure malevolence. Surely, she was guilty of something worse than reading some leaves.”

“Sylvia was a free thinker, if you know what I mean. One of the high school boys came to see her. She was helping him with a correspondence course, near as I remember. They worked together late at night, and I guess you could say they grew close.”

Clara twisted her hands nervously on her lap. She was trying to take all of this in, not sure what to believe. First, there was the toothless old woman, who had looked like she materialized straight from an episode of late-night cable television, Fright Show or something. Now this, her mother’s story. Duchess. A woman Clara’s father had hated so much he erased her from his life.

“We don’t talk about this. Nobody has talked about this in many years. Then you show up. What I’m saying about Sylvia and the boy is that they were caught together. Naked in the back storeroom of the shop. Remember we’re talking about the early 1960s. Hell, if that happened even today there would be trouble. Still, it might have all blown over, but Sylvia pressed for a divorce from the teacher. She said she was in love with the boy.”

“Wait. What happened to her?”

“You mean your mother?”

“If that’s who she was.”

“Your father’s name was Stanley?”

“Yes.”

“He spoke Latin?”

Clara nodded. “He ran a corner grocery store up in Savage for most of the years I was growing up, but we had whole shelves in our apartment stacked with books in Latin. I must have been the only sixth grader in the county who’d read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the original language.”

Nora looked wistful, absently running her hands through her hair. “Sylvia had a nervous breakdown, from what we heard. She had to be institutionalized. Your father moved to the Cities to get away from all this. Start fresh. This Sylvia Meyers was your mother. I’m sure of it. She had the same eyes, dreamy and farseeing. Like she was looking on into a world of spirit none of us could see. Your father and mother were gone as far we knew. Shamed. We thought that was the last of it.”

“She came back, though.”

“For her lover, in December, a few days before Christmas. I think they were trying to run away. They left in a hurry, in the midst of a storm. But the car must have slid off the road into a slough. It turned over at the bottom of the canyon, crushing the roof. Sylvia made it out of the car. She tried to walk back to town, but she never made it here.”

“She had a baby with her.”

“It was Sheriff Steve who found the baby. He took the baby, but he had to leave Sylvia behind. He couldn’t carry both her and the baby through the deep snow.”

Clara’s head was spinning. She sank deeper into the couch, shut her eyes. It was the vision of the woman she had seen, lost in the woods, surrounded by wolves. But there were no wolves in this story. “Why did she take the baby? Why not just leave me if she wanted to run away with this guy?”

“Why do people do anything? Maybe she wanted to hurt your father.”

“I don’t understand why he wouldn’t say anything.”

“What father could bear to tell his daughter such a story? How could he forgive his wife?”

“I’m going to have to say something, aren’t I? Tell them who I am.”

“No. It doesn’t make any difference. You are Clara Warren, the pastor’s wife. You are a schoolteacher. A damn fine one from what I hear. You are an expectant mother. That’s all anyone needs to know. Leave the ugliness in the past.”

Clara sighed. “There must be some kind of article from a newspaper, something to substantiate all this?”

“No. The first newspaper office burned down years ago. Why would seeing something in writing make it more or less true? The only article ever printed didn’t even mention a baby, just the accident and the death of the woman. Sheriff Steve made sure of it. No one knows, really, but a few people like me.”

“And Bynthia.”

“I knew Stanley. If he didn’t tell you, he had reasons for it. He told you enough to bring you here, didn’t he?”

“What did they do with her body?”

“She’s out there, has been this whole time. Sylvia Meyers was buried in the suicide section.”

“The suicide section?”

“Pastor Schoenwald didn’t want her with the saints. She’s right out there at the furthest edge near the woods. Kids still tell stories about her, about the woman in the woods. It’s said that some nights if you are back there in the trees you’ll hear her calling and calling for her baby.”

Nora put her hand over Clara’s and squeezed. “Now her baby has come home.”