Little Wolves

RITES





Logan faced the congregation in his alb, a white robe meant to remind them of their baptism, as he began to tell them about Sheriff Will Gunderson. Clara listened to his homily now and measured his words against the man she had known, if only in passing.

Gossips had told her that during divorce proceedings his wife, Laura, alleged physical abuse. Within a few days Clara had been warned what might happen if she drove even a few miles over the speed limit or failed to come to a full stop at any intersection. The ex-wife sat in the very front pew, flanked on either side by her sons. Directly behind the family sat Steve, Laura’s father, and the rest of the sprawling Krieger clan, including Gretel and Bynthia in a side aisle in her wheelchair.

Clara’s only encounter with Sheriff Will Gunderson had happened in the town grocery store. Will had been a thin man, black haired, his arms long and ropy. When she entered the store, he had been leaning against a counter, his hand lightly touching a cashier’s, a teenage girl laughing too loudly at something he said. His smile vanished the moment the bell dinged to announce Clara’s entrance. She had felt his gaze on her, tracking her as she moved to the next aisle and left them alone. No, she had only seen him in passing, but Will had seemed a man at ease in his skin, a man of appetites. The entire town packed the sanctuary. Normally, the front of the church was a no-man’s-land that only Clara occupied, but today she was wedged in tight a few rows behind the grieving family, surrounded by people she had never met. Like others in the crowd, she fanned herself with her bulletin. It was too damn hot to be dressed like this, and she felt sympathy for Logan in all his priestly layers, his face shining in the heat. Though the windows were open in the hopes of a cooling breeze, the air remained stagnant.

Midway through Logan’s homily, a wind picked up out of the east, and the sanctuary filled with a putrefying odor. Logan, his face scanning the crowd, froze. The unnatural smell swelled in the room, a searing cloud that burned inside Clara’s nose. Stricken, Logan suffered a coughing fit, and the smooth and orderly service began to break down.

The nightmare. Clara remembered his dream of seeing the devil out in the crowd, an ordinary man in a suit. She looked around her, and he could have been any of the men here. Logan’s face purpled, as if the smell had stolen the breath from his lungs. People began to shift in their pews, muttering among themselves, and a good minute passed before the church secretary emerged from a side door bearing a cup of ice water. Logan shook as he guzzled it, spilling some on his alb and vestments. The terrible odor seemed to gather strength.

A man spoke from the balcony, and Clara craned her neck along with many others. The balcony, occupied by the hard-liners, the ones who could remember when the service was still conducted in German, was entirely gray haired. The man spoke again. “It’s all right, Pastor,” he called down, “just a little fresh country air.”

Logan handed the glass back to the secretary. He smiled faintly and wiped his brow while nervous laughter rolled through the room. The smell had seemed to rise from the fields where the boy had killed himself, but it hadn’t. It had come from the hog barns east of town. The Gunderson farm, which the boys were going to inherit, the biggest in the valley with six barns and vast holding pits for all that manure. It was ordinary hog shit they were smelling, nothing supernatural. The laughter didn’t last long; they all knew why they were here and were anxious to escape the cloying heat. Clara roasted along with them, her dark dress stretching around her big stomach, imagining the baby inside her baking like a lumpy potpie.

“With the death of Sheriff Gunderson we lost a hero, a father, a protector. We cannot forget his sacrifice. With his passing, we want to know that we are safe. We want safety for our children. We want to be sure God will protect us in our hour of need.”

His eyes scanned the room as he found his words. “And yet, God does not call us to lead safe lives. If anything our faith makes us more vulnerable to the world, which belongs to the devil.” His words made Clara nervous. She felt the rest of the congregation straining toward him. He was not going to gloss over what had happened. He named the sheriff’s death a murder. He named the boy a suicide. Clara knew the congregation around her also listened intently because people had stopped fanning themselves with their bulletins. A stillness settled.

“This is not our home, not here, this hard place, this heat. There is a house with many rooms. It was bought and paid for on the cross, and not by anything we have done. It is a place beyond all earthly strife, where we will be free of our troubles and in the presence of the Prince of Peace. Our Father is calling us, if we have ears to hear. He tells us to forgive those who have wronged us, if we ourselves want his forgiveness. He reminds us to love our neighbors, even when that is the hardest thing to do. Even when our neighbor is a child like Seth, who has done a great evil, for it is only in forgiveness that we will be made whole again. A God who sends his own Son into the world is one who knows our pain. A God who marks the fall of every sparrow, knows the number of hairs on our heads.” Logan touched his own thinning scalp, smiled with twinkling eyes. Then his voice grew quieter, softening. The smell in the room had dissipated but not the heat.

“He is calling to you now. Listen. Come, Holy Spirit, come. We need you here. In Christ’s name we ask forgiveness for our sins, so that we’ll be made whole. As we are forgiven, so do we also forgive. We remember Seth Allis Fallon, who was baptized here at this church. As we are forgiven, so do we find the strength to forgive him. We ask that you watch over the family of Will Gunderson, who was your faithful servant in this life. We turn our eyes inward, and there we find you. We ask you for your healing presence. We will not live in fear but instead in your perfect love.” Logan paused. “Please bow your heads with me for a moment in prayer.”

AFTER THE SERVICE, CLARA normally stood with Logan to greet people as they walked out, shaking hands, but the widow had taken their spot, chatting with people heading down into the basement to fuel up on sandwiches, bologna on buttered white bread, with a heaping of potato salad to the side, a comforting meal before heading out to the cemetery for the burial.

The widow wore a black dress short enough to show some leg. She didn’t have on any stockings, and her toenails were a splash of red. Her hair was honey blonde, permed in a frowsy yellow cloud around her face. She looked like a woman who wasn’t ready yet for old age. Widowhood had granted her a passing fame. A circle of well-wishers surrounded her, but they parted to make way for others. The widow greeted Logan, thanked him for his kind words, and then turned immediately to say, “Why, you must be Clara.” Her smile was warm, gracious. “I’m Laura Gunderson, the sheriff’s wife.”

Clara searched herself for words of comfort to offer but came up empty.

Undeterred by her tied tongue, Laura went on. “Well, I’m officially his ex-wife, but as I was just telling these ladies here, we got back together only recently.”

The other women she referred to had melted away, gone downstairs for the luncheon. Cold sandwiches and colder air in the basement. Laura’s two sons stood nearby, Kelan in a blazer two sizes too large for him. His father’s? He looked uncomfortable in all his layers, desperate to be anywhere but here. The younger one kept his arms wrapped around himself, his eyes red from crying, his misery tangible. “You must have had some guardian angel on your shoulder,” Laura continued. “That’s what everyone is saying.” This statement, vapid in some mouths, was disturbing from a woman whose husband evidently didn’t have any such angel.

“Something like that,” Clara said, thinking of the hand on her shoulder that day. She glanced at Kelan, saw the boy studying her. The older boy dry-eyed, maybe not knowing what to make of a world that no longer had his father in it. He smiled slyly when their eyes met. Do you believe in the devil? she remembered him asking. How would she answer that question now? If the devil had passed among them he had worn the shape of a boy, a long coat, dirty tennis shoes. Clara rubbed the ends of her fingers on her left hand, nervous in this family’s presence. The widow’s cheeriness. The sullen older child.

Laura surprised her then by putting her hands on Clara’s belly. Clara’s dress was cotton, thin and stretched, and she felt the shock of those hands right through the fabric. “You’re going to have a boy,” she announced.

“Umm … we don’t really know yet.” Clara felt unsteady on her feet.

“A boy,” she insisted, finally taking her hands away.

Clara wanted to be away from her. The rest of the congregation milled uncertainly behind them, trapped in the hot room. You were only supposed to shake hands and speak a few words and then keep the line moving. She had the feeling that Laura was enjoying being the center of attention, making everyone wait so she could talk to her.

Laura leaned in. “I’m pregnant, too,” she confided in a low whisper. She shook her head. “Will had been visiting me every night before he died. We were planning on getting married all over again.”

“Congratulations,” Clara mumbled. She felt Logan’s impatience next to her, because they needed to keep going. People bunched up behind them, clotting in the heat.

“Laura,” he said, interrupting the conversation. “We’re very sorry for your loss. I want to assure you that you and your boys are in our prayers.”

“Yes,” said Laura. “That’s very kind of you.” With a regal nod, she let them pass.

ASHEN SUNLIGHT WASHED THROUGH the curtains the next morning, and the air in the room smelled crisply of burning leaves. Autumn had arrived at last, all at once, a cold front blasting down out of Canada. As if God were clearing the air now that the sheriff was under the ground. It felt like a good morning to laze under the sheets. Clara fluffed her pillow and settled back while Logan dressed.

“Good Lutherans don’t believe in ghosts,” he was saying, fresh from the shower, clad only in tighty-whities and black socks, his chest and legs pink with steam.

“But what about the Holy Ghost,” Clara said. “It doesn’t seem fair if God gets to have a ghost, but none of the rest of us does.”

She had finally told him about her sense of Seth’s ghost troubling her, the drawing of the wolf someone placed at the door, the figure at the edge of the corn.

Logan plucked his ironed khakis from a wire and stepped into them. “Whoever said that God was fair?”

“Not me. Glad I don’t have that job.”

“I don’t have that job, either.” He straightened. White-blond hair circled up from his stomach and feathered his pale chest. His muscles were taut and tense, the blue veins prominent. Her beautiful, boyish husband smiled briefly at her sarcasm, but his eyes were serious. “I would be careful about encouraging whatever it was you think you sensed. This ghost or spirit.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He took down an indigo-colored clerical shirt and shrugged it on. “In Ephesians it says we struggle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, the powers of this dark world. Against evil.”

She clapped a hand to her forehead. “So now I’m possessed?” Hysteria, she thought. In Greek the word meant “from the womb,” since supposedly only women could get hysterical. It was useless to try talking to Logan about these things. There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. She had let him have his devil, but he wouldn’t allow her a simple ghost.

Sighing, Logan sat at the foot of the bed and pulled on his socks. “You never knew your mother. I think you long for her.”

What did that have to do with Seth’s ghost? And yet she had told Logan once before about running away, about that sense of her mother calling to her. “You remember what we talked when we first talked about coming here?” she said. He rubbed her feet through the comforter, listening while she told him what she’d learned about her mother from Bynthia and Nora. Who her mother really was.

Logan was quiet for a long time. “Do you think it’s true?”

“Nora seemed sure of it.”

“I worry about you.” His hand smoothed the blanket over her legs, stopping just above her knee, squeezing. His voice gently insistent. “What if you don’t like the answers you find?”

She caught his hand, squeezed back. “We’re all mixed up in this, aren’t we?”

He sighed in answer. “Maybe there are some things we aren’t meant to know. And you think you’re hearing things again now in a moment of great stress. Seeing things.”

“I know what I saw.”

“It’s just this. If there really is something not of the living talking to you, then you should be careful. I believe this spirit means you harm.”

Clara let go of his hand and turned over on her side, away from him. Poltergeist: from the Low German, meaning “rumbling spirit.” She didn’t know what was worse, that Logan believed her or that he had made what she saw into something frightening.

On his way out, Logan paused at the door. “Let the dead be dead, Clara. Let the dead rest.”

“And what if I can’t?”

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, SHE decided to paint the bedroom down the hall using the only passable shade of yellow she had found at Toby’s Hardware downtown. She needed to take her mind off her unfinished dissertation waiting in the desk drawer. The wolf stories her father had told her wandered through her imagination while what was supposed to be her true work, her lonely research, gathered dust. And now there was a job offer. In less than a week Clara would be a teacher again.

The paint can promised to evoke memories of a summer afternoon, but once applied looked like partially digested mustard. She had taped plastic sheeting to the hardwood floor and laid down newspaper, but the paint came off the brushes in thin, watery streams that spattered and speckled everything—the oak paneling, the floor, her arms and face and clothes.

Logan returned later that day, his tread heavy. For a thin man her husband carried himself with gravitas.

“Ta-da,” Clara said, spreading her arms, when he came in.

He raised an eyebrow. “Who killed Tweety Bird?”

“This, my darling, is Lemony Surprise.” She wanted a happy color with the baby due in December. An antidote for the long, dark winter of the child’s birth.

“It’s a surprise, all right. Looks like someone threw up creamed corn everywhere.”

She drew in a deep breath, which should have calmed her except for the chemical fumes of the paint. She hoped there was no lead in this cheap stuff, nothing that might harm the baby. The fumes burned inside her nose. “I’m almost done. The ceiling took forever. There must be a million nooks and crannies in these textured ceilings. God, when these walls were still that awful gray color it was like being in a cave.” With a stroke of her brush she covered the final gray spot and stood again, her hands on her hips. Logan hadn’t said anything, so she turned to him. “Did you finish your sermon?”

“It’s as finished as it’s going to get,” he muttered. “It’s the end of Pentecost, and I’m preaching from the Book of Acts instead of the lectionary. I don’t know what possessed me—the Book of Acts is not exactly easy to preach on.”

Red was the color of Pentecost, she remembered. For a moment she pictured doing this room up in red, saw herself standing inside it like standing within the bloody chamber of a great heart. “It’s because you don’t like the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is all over the Book of Acts.”

“Holy Spirit,” Logan corrected. “And I like him well enough. It’s a blasphemy to say otherwise.”

Or her, she thought. Clara knew the word for spirit translated from the Greek as “wind” or “breath,” and she liked those translations best of all, something fierce and invisible moving in the trees, her hair. A caress in spring, a slap in winter. And the two of them living in a country of wind out on the prairie.

Logan crossed the room and pulled the curtains shut. “Doesn’t look so bad in the half dark.”

“Like swimming in a big custard pie.” The thought made Clara’s stomach grumble.

He turned to her, smiling. “And look at you,” he said.

“I know I’m a mess.” Paint freckled her arms and face.

“A glorious mess, yes. Beautiful. With your hair up in that kerchief you’re like some homey vision from the past.”

“Are you saying I should dress like this more often?”

He wrapped her in his arms, the shelf of her big stomach an awkward barrier between them. “Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For this.” He spread his hands to encompass the room. “And for putting up with me when I behave like an ass.”

“I’m sorry for my own part.” There were those notes, which she still hadn’t thrown away, but she knew in that moment that she would never speak of them. There were all the ways she felt she had failed him as a wife. The pregnancy. The kittens. The boy she had not been able to save. Bringing them here to this place.

Her eyes were damp again, but this time he kissed her tears away. “I need you,” he said, and he led her back to the bedroom. He undid her kerchief and Clara shook out her hair. He kissed her mouth, her throat, the hollow above her breastbone before unbuttoning her shirt. He even let his hands linger on her stomach, but the baby was quiet inside her, asleep. Clara helped him undress, and then they climbed under the sheets together, Logan pressing against her from behind, his teeth against her shoulder blades, his hands reaching around to cup her breasts.

Outside, Clara heard the trash cans tip over. A neighbor’s dog barking and then silence. Logan’s lips along her shoulder, his face in her hair, his teeth nipping at the softness of her neck. Then he shuddered; they both did. It had been so long, so very long, and never like this, from behind, with such urgency. He kissed the lobe of her ear and moaned once, softly, a sound that was almost like an apology.

THE NEXT MORNING CLARA dropped the notes into a Folgers coffee can sitting on the garage floor, lit a match, and let them burn. “Yes, I know it’s not a practical disposal method,” she said to Loki, the smallest of the kittens, who circled her ankles, purring, “but the Danes would have approved.”

The kittens now occupied a box in the garage, their litter box near the door. After their mother had disappeared one morning, gone or eaten by the coyotes, Clara talked Logan into letting the kittens live out here. He did not like having to park his Nova outside, but it was better to have the kittens here rather than in the house, and he agreed that the Nelsons could wait until next year when the kittens were big enough to survive on their own before they gave them away. As long as Clara promised she would give them up when the time came. She had managed to keep these kittens alive, had bargained them a home.

She sat on the cold concrete floor, and they came to her—Loki, Freya, and Gandalf the Gray—and let her gather them in her lap. Last of all, she dropped in Seth’s final gift, the werewolf and priestess miniatures in their tissue wrapping, and watched as flames took them.