Little Wolves

BOOK TWO





LOUP GAROU





One day when Clara was walking down the cereal aisle of the grocery store with her father, a woman had paused to appraise Clara. “What a beautiful little girl,” she said to her father. “She must favor her mother.”

He had smiled, thin lipped, and put his hand on the top of Clara’s head. “No. She doesn’t look a thing like that woman.” Something in his tone made the stranger draw back.

Clara wasn’t any more than seven when this happened, but she knew an opportunity when it came her way. While the woman was still in earshot, she asked her father, “What did my mother look like?” But his hand only tightened atop her head, tugging at the roots of her hair, and he hurried her down the aisle without speaking.

In the next aisle her father leaned down at eye level and said in a low voice, “Don’t ever shame me like that again.” When he took his hand away from her head, strands of her brown hair were stuck to his palm. To this day, remembering made Clara’s scalp ache.

She ran away the first time that afternoon. While her father napped on the couch in front of an episode of Bonanza, she loaded up a canvas tote bag with a loaf of Wonder bread, a jar of strawberry jam, and a copy of her favorite book, Madeline and the Gypsies. She didn’t make it far from the apartment where they lived in Savage, because it started raining as soon as she stepped out of the door.

Clara took shelter under an old weeping willow and listened to the plink-plink-plink of the rain striking the river. The long green branches of the willow swept the grass like a woman’s tresses, the hair of some Medusa whipping in the wind. With her back against the trunk she had a vision of her mother for the first time, a woman stepping through the beaded curtain of the branches to stand before her in a summery dress the color of emeralds, her chestnut hair flowing past her shoulders. Her eyes were green, green like the tree, the grass, the rainlight. Her smile was so sweet and sad it made Clara’s breath catch in her throat. She seemed to beckon Clara toward the river’s slippery bank, where water licked at the shore.

Then in the distance Clara heard the screen door slap shut and her father calling and calling her name, and she turned in his direction, and when she looked back again the woman was gone, the branches waving where she had stepped through, and she felt so downlow and lonesome in that instant that she pulled up her knees to her chest and wept and that was how her father came to find her. He wasn’t mad. “This is a pleasant spot,” he said, and he sat with her awhile on the damp lawn, passing her his handkerchief.

Clara did not tell him about her mother’s ghost, because she knew he would dismiss it. Instead she snuggled close to him. “Tell me about the wolf boy,” she said, “the one Copper rescued from the prairie fire.”

“Do you mean the loup garou he later became?”

“The werewolf,” she translated with a delicious shiver. Now that she had grown older, the stories had darkened. This story he told during the daylight hours only. “Yes, that one.”

“But as you know, to tell his story, I must speak of another one. Of the trapper and his daughter.”

THIS HAPPENED IN THE springtime, a starvation season on the prairies when the winter stores were exhausted and the ground too cold for planting. In this time there was a girl who lived with her father in a valley shadowed by a lone mountain. Every year the girl’s father left her to go trapping north of the Purgatory River, and every year he was gone longer and returned with fewer and fewer furs to trade at the post.

One year he had been gone for only a few days when late at night she heard someone banging at the door. “Come quickly, girl,” he cried out in a querulous voice. In the dark she fumbled with the latch. When the door opened he rushed inside, slammed it shut, and bolted it tight. He leaned the half-stock prairie rifle he always carried with him against a log cabin wall and then further blockaded the door with a log chair.

“Papa?” the girl said in confusion, still half asleep. He had not been due back from his trapping expedition for another three days. “What’s happening?”

Even in the darkness of the room she could see a horror story written on his face. Claw marks gashed open either cheek, one eye puffed pink and swollen, and strings of dried blood matted his beard.

“Shush, girl,” he said, holding a finger to his lips when she gasped at the sight of him. “It’s coming.”

Before she could ask what, an eerie wailing erupted from the woods. The girl went to the window, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. In the moonlight she saw a shadowy streak out near the oak savanna. Her father snatched up his rifle and checked the priming. Deep in the woods an animal reared up on two legs. The girl beheld shaggy hair around its face, a lean, muscled torso, and long, curling claws. It stood unsteadily as a bear might stand, sniffing the air. Two large eyes caught and held her in a lambent gaze. Even from this distance she saw something flash in those eyes, a glint of recognition.

“Get away from the window,” her father said. He eased up the glass from the casement and balanced his rifle on the ledge so that it poked out into the night. The creature wailed once more before the trapper answered with his gun. A cloud of smoke filled the cabin, and when it cleared the moonlit glade where the thing had stood lay empty. The trapper bit off a fresh cap and poured it in the half stock, cursing as he tapped it down with a priming bolt.

She was glad he had not hit it. Those eyes had been luminous in the shadows, summoning.

At a puncheon table she used lucifer matches to light a lantern. Her father sat on a stump so she could tend his wounds, dabbing them with a cloth and then wringing out blood into a bucket. He took long pulls from a bottle of rye whiskey. “How deep are the wounds?”

The worst ran down the center of his cheek, an ugly ribbon of skin through which she glimpsed bone. “I’ll need my needle for just the one, but the rest should heal on their own.” While she worked, drawing tight the thread, she asked him to tell what happened, hoping to distract him.

He began by telling her how the animals he had caught in his traps were unlike anything he’d seen. By the time he checked his traplines all that remained was the fur. Something was eating the muskrats in the traps, devouring the meat and blood, and leaving behind only tufted pelts.

For three days and nights he ran his traplines and collected what pelts were salvageable, until one morning he came upon something else: a prairie wolf, a shaggy bitch, alive and struggling in the teeth of the trap. He figured this was it, the source of all his troubles. He’d heard of cunning wolves doing this before. He drew his knife and put her out of her misery, and when he did he heard something behind him. An unearthly shrieking.

The girl shuddered. She had heard the pain in that howl.

“I didn’t even see it, just felt it. It was all over me, biting and clawing. I fought back, lashing out with my fists. Somehow I hurt it enough to chase it away. God help me, but I ran after that. I left behind the remaining traps, the few pelts worth saving, and took my gun and ran. For two nights I’ve been traveling here, stopping to light fires at night, hearing that thing out there, circling the edge of the flames.”

He slept for a short while on his rope bed, his breathing labored, his bottle of rye whiskey empty. In the light of the lantern she surveyed his wounds, knowing the deepest one would scar. Abruptly, his snoring stopped, his eyes popped open, and he woke screaming. She went to him and touched the back of her hand to his forehead, which burned as if with fever or infection. “Oh, Papa.”

“No human or animal moves like that. There is a powerful dark magic in that thing. It was a loup garou.”

“I know,” she said, thinking on what she had seen. “I believe you.”

“I can feel the taint spreading inside me. The next moon, I’ll begin to change, and then you won’t be safe around me anymore.”

“You wouldn’t ever hurt me.”

“I’m going to have to go away.”

She touched his shoulder. “Please. Let’s go see the preacher. He’ll know what to do.”

He groaned. “I’m so tired. I’m going to rest for just this night. In the morning, I’ll go. You’ll be safe, because the loup garou will follow me. I’m going to go where I will be far from any people, out on the prairies.”

“The Indians are out there,” she said, thinking of the Dakota warriors who had been their worst fear until this night.

He shut his eyes again. “There is only one way to fight the loup garou. You have to draw its blood. Draw blood from it, and it will change into its human form and tell you the secret it holds.”

“Papa, what will I do if you are gone?” But his breathing had deepened. She went to her side of the cabin, descending into restless sleep. She did not hear him leave in the night, but in the morning his bed lay empty. That he had left his rifle here frightened her, as though her father was surrendering, offering himself as a sacrifice.

The girl did what she always did to pass the day. She gathered eggs from their laying hens, collected maple syrup in buckets from the trees in their grove. She was thirteen years old, and not strong enough to plow, but she knew these woods, the places where the wild grapes and berries grew.

A week passed until one night she heard something outside padding around the cabin. The boards of the porch creaked. When she called out “Papa” it went silent again. A hand scratched at the door. It whined softly, searching for a way in. Moonlight flooded in through the window. She pictured those claws, the gouges on her father’s face. It pressed against the door, but the latch held fast. She lay awake, listening to it. “Papa?” she said again, but whatever was out there was not him.

“WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?” CLARA asked. “That’s not the ending.” Her father coughed into his handkerchief. “This wet grass has soaked straight through my backside. Let’s get inside before we catch chill.”

These stories were less frequent now that Clara had grown older, and she feared the day they would stop entirely. Like the man in the story, her father was going farther away from her, or she from him. Clara let him lead her by the hand back to the apartment they kept above his store.

She had realized she could see her mother, this woman whose memory her father denied her, but only when he wasn’t near, so she kept running away. She didn’t consciously mean to hurt him. Each time she ran away, the weather changed, as if her father had the power to call down storms. And each time he came to find her, no matter what it cost him physically. He didn’t ask questions nor did he scold her. For a long time after he died Clara had the sense of him out there, still searching for her, trying to keep her safe. The dead carve out a space inside us, taking up residence like a man stepping under a willow tree in the rain to sit beside the ghost of our former selves. In this manner each of us is haunted, and who would have it any other way?

BEFORE SHE KNEW IT, school started on Monday, and Clara was back in the thick of things. The sophomores of first and second period came to class toting ten pound bags of Gold Medal flour wrapped in panty hose along with their usual notebooks and supplies. “How do you like my new baby, Mrs. Warren?” the first girl through the door asked Clara, swinging the thing in her arms. Foam-filled panty hose bulged out in the shape of pudgy arms and legs around the flour sack. She had sewn round blue buttons into the lopsided head for the eyes and mouth. This smiling head lolled on the neck when she balanced it on her hip.

“Baby?” Clara said, confused. It looked like a doll dreamed up by Dante. She struggled to recall the blonde’s name. Her chirpy voice, at 8:15 in the morning, hurt Clara’s ears.

“It’s baby week in home ec,” said another, a brunette who always had chewing gum packed into her chipmunk cheeks. She trailed behind the girl, lugging her own flour-sack baby. “We have to carry these around for a week, to learn what it’s like to have a baby. That way we won’t get knocked up.”

Clara smoothed down her blouse over her stomach. “Does the sack of flour wake you up six times a night?”

“Not exactly,” she said, sagging into her desk. What was her name? Tara? Tina? That was it: Tina. “We have to call Miss Drimble sometime between two and three in the morning and leave a message on her machine. Every night. Then we have to call back and tell her the baby is sleeping fifteen minutes later.”

“Isn’t that like the dumbest thing ever?” the first girl chimed in from her own desk.

Clara nodded. Like totally, but who was she to judge another teacher’s methods? The flour-sack babies were all the sophomores could talk about. They had to introduce Clara to them as they came in the door. Each baby had a name, a Crayola birth certificate, and a little book where the student recorded the times they supposedly changed diapers and administered feedings. Clara was walking the rows when she came across Lee Gunderson, the sheriff’s younger son. She’d forgotten he was in this class. Unlike his older brother, he kept to himself. He had long hair, his eyes slightly slanted. The taint the boy must feel was the same as any soldier or policeman feels after surviving bloodshed, family trauma. Clara knew that psychologists called this sense of always feeling branded the mark of Cain.

There was something mechanical to his smile. Clara paused at his desk. His baby had uneven eyes, a smile like a gash along the lower jaw. “Hi, Lee. What’s your baby’s name?”

“Billy,” he said without looking at her. It took her a moment to realize that Billy was short for William, his father’s name.

Clara patted his shoulder. “That’s a good name,” she said.

He nodded again. His clothing, she noticed as she continued down the rows, smelled faintly of mildew and smoke.

Though the bags made a mess, a faint white powder coating the floor from the careless boys, the ones who tossed their flour-sack babies back and forth in a juggling game—daring Clara to report them to Miss Drimble—by the time the first two classes left she was glad of the distraction. The smell made her hungry. On her aching feet, with a baby adrift in her stomach, sloshing around as she moved to put up the daily vocab words on the chalkboard, she smelled the fine, invisible powder and daydreamed of sugar cookies and buttermilk rolls hot from the oven, of sweet houses made from gingerbread set deep in the woods to snare the unwary.

The students seemed happy to have her back. Some complained about the strictness of the substitute, Miss Hartle, but they bent to their work after making a few lame jokes. Clara had entered the fray of their lives once more, just another odd addition like the sacks of flour they were forced to lug around. They were happy to see her again, but it seemed clear that, for the first two periods at least, they would have been fine without her.

AFTER SCHOOL SHE WAS erasing the board following seventh period when Leah came in. She hadn’t even heard her enter the room, just the squeak of the desk as she sat. Clara clapped her hands to remove the chalk dust. She smiled, but Leah’s smile in return was faint. They had already hugged earlier, during fifth-period English lit. “What is it?” Clara asked.

Leah nodded at the door, and Clara reluctantly shut it. She knew she was not supposed to be in an enclosed room with a student. Leah’s hair was unwashed and stringy, and she wore a boy’s baggy sweatshirt with an Iron Maiden print on the front. “I’m so glad you’re back, Mrs. Warren. I wish you could stay.”

Clara smiled. In truth it had felt good to be up on her feet in front of the room, leading discussions, telling stories, parsing words. She still carried a small, energized glow from the day. She had realized how wrapped inside herself she had been these last few weeks, tangled up in her own problems. She belonged here in the classroom. Perhaps she even belonged in this town. “Oh, you’ll see me again. Once this baby gets born.”

Outside in the parking lot they heard cars starting and loud boasting about the game this coming Friday, the blast of celebratory music to signal freedom from school’s daily oppression. Clara had the windows open to let in a cool breeze and cleanse the room from the lingering odors of the flour-sack babies. The big green felt curtains stirred slightly as an icy breeze that tasted of blowing grit passed through them.

Leah chewed at her nails, already ragged. “Do you still think about him?”

“I do.”

“He talked about you all the time. He was obsessed with your class. It was all your stories of battle and warriors.”

Her feet aching from the long day, Clara sat on the edge of her desk.

“I’ve been going to Kelan’s house after school,” Leah went on. “We can do whatever we want down in his basement. His mom doesn’t care. Kelan knows stuff. He knows things that you wouldn’t believe. Have you ever done a séance, Mrs. Warren?” She trailed her finger along the smooth surface of the desk.

“You should really be talking to a counselor, Leah.”

“I am. Useless old prick over in Fell Creek. My dad makes me go.” She tapped her nails on the desk.

Leah’s eyes looked cagey, darting about the room. “Do you hear the coyotes? Sometimes it sounds like they’re right under my window. Like they’ve followed me home, and they’re just waiting for me to go outside. Everyone in town is talking about them.”

“They belonged to Seth, didn’t they?”

Leah nodded. “They were the only thing he loved, really. He said the world hates them, but they find a way to survive. He wouldn’t let any of us go near them, even though Kelan begged him. Seth said they were dangerous.” Leah exhaled and then tugged at her baggy sweatshirt. “I must look like shit.”

Is this what she had come to tell Clara, that she was damaged now? People could see Clara’s damage, the bad hand, the person who could never be whole. She wanted to tell Leah that she was beautiful, that she would find someone to love her one day, and that all of this would seem like one bad dream she’d woken from, but she didn’t say any of those things.

Leah’s mascara ran in black streams from the corners of her eyes. “I’m so messed up.” The sound of footsteps clumping past in the hallway outside made her tense. “I have to go now.”

“You come see me anytime, okay?”

Leah hugged her once more, burying her face in Clara’s shoulder. “I gotta get out of this f*cking town,” she said, and then she was gone.

IN THE QUIET OF the room, Clara went to the back and sat at Seth’s desk, the princely island of space around the desk still in force with him dead. She had to wedge her big stomach to fit in, and the wooden chair groaned under her weight. The desks had iron legs painted copper and wooden lids the students could lift up to store their textbooks and papers within deep cavities. Clara lifted the lid and peered inside. Empty, except for the heavy textbook Seth had dropped to the floor to silence the other students the first day of class.

On a hunch, Clara cracked open the book and flipped to the pages at the front where the Beowulf text was laid out. The students weren’t supposed to write in their books, but intricate illustrations decorated Seth’s. He’d been scrawling the runic letters she had taught, just like at the bottom of the drawing someone left at her house. HeWhoSleeps is waking. HeWhoSleeps has heard our call. HeWhoSleeps is coming. HeWhoSleeps will bring death to us all. The final rune smeared, as if he’d drawn it in a hurry.

Clara touched the runes with her hands, felt the grooves the words cut into the paper. He’d pressed down hard with his pen, almost tearing the page. His last week in class, Seth had turned sullen, let his hair hood his eyes. He’d known even then what he was about to do, was talking to the demon inside him. The skin prickled on the back of her neck. Clara stood and shut the window against the chilly wind blowing in.