Little Wolves

THE WILDING





He drank until he blacked out most nights, and in the dark, feverish phantasms troubled Grizz’s sleep. Every morning his head throbbed, but he liked the hurt. He woke with the shakes, with cotton mouth; he woke in strange places, once out on the lawn with dirt under his nails, smelling of the grave, once in Seth’s bed, surrounded by the boy’s animal smell, a scent of wet leaves and sweat, where he had looked up to see his son’s Heavy Metal movie poster, a drawing of a leather-clad blonde riding a winged demon through the clouds, pinned to the ceiling above him.

The Dakota who once roamed this land did not speak the name of the dead. To speak the name of the dead was to call their ghost from the hunting grounds, to ask for possession, but Seth’s name swelled in his brain like a wood tick, feeding on blood and regret. His thoughts kept circling back to the day of the shooting, Seth loping to town with the gun against his ribs, the pastor’s wife in her basement hideaway, Will Gunderson pulling up in his cruiser, the field of sheltering corn calling to his boy. It was all there, all the story he needed, but the pieces wouldn’t fit together right inside him. All he needed to do was believe in his son’s cold rage. And then in his mind’s eye he saw the trapping cabin with its gutted creatures sewn together in unnatural ways, Seth tied to the chair, his eyes rolling back in his head as Will took pliers to the tender skin under his ribs and pinched it in the metal, twisting until Seth screamed. No. Maybe that was the story he made up to absolve Seth of his evil. Two darknesses canceling each other out.

The muscles in his shoulders and arms ached as if he’d been swinging something heavy the night before. A memory, a tiny blood-dark spot, spread in his brain. He had done it, he knew deep down under the throb of his headache: stolen his son’s own body from the funeral home and buried him up on the mountain. Grizz dressed in the clothes he had tossed on his floor the night before, chewed four aspirin from a bottle beside the bathroom sink, and after rinsing his face and combing his hair and beard, he got into his truck and drove to town.

Trinity Lutheran had the classic clapboard siding of a country church. It stood as a remnant of another time, a whitewashed vision of the past that Grizz’s family had a role in preserving as much as any of them. His great-grandfather had donated the land the church was built on, and Grizz’s name was still on the membership rolls, though he had not darkened the door of this place since Jo’s death.

He pulled up out front, parked his truck against the curb, and climbed the steep concrete stairs. The heavy oaken door groaned when he squeezed the handle and yanked it open. From inside a stained-glass window on one side showed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemene, his face upturned in prayer. Roads curved through the countryside behind Jesus, leading to a hill with three crosses, and Grizz stopped to trace the pathway with his fingers, as he had done when he was a boy. Early evening light leaked through the rosy glass to touch him where he stood.

The anguish on Christ’s face made him think of Seth. When he was thirteen Seth went through a stage where he slept with his lights on. At night Grizz heard him grumble as he twisted in his sheets and strove for sleep and it sounded to him as if there was another voice in there, a lower timbre, a voice like footsteps crushing leaves. Seth cried out because his bones were stretching inside him, his muscles lengthening, even the bones in his face shifting. Black hairs sprouted around his mouth and under his arms, and a rash of blackheads and acne spread on his face and back, sores that wept when he scrubbed them. Grizz had forgotten how much being a teenage boy hurt, the strange aches and pains, but when Seth got sick, throwing up after meals, refusing to get out of bed in the morning, Grizz knew this wasn’t ordinary growing pains.

In the examining room, the nurse had paid the boy compliments as Seth sat up on the papery sheet without his shirt on, his back and chest blotched with acne. “Such a fine young man,” she said, winking in Grizz’s direction.

“You play football?”

Seth mumbled his response.

“He doesn’t like organized sports,” Grizz offered for him. “He doesn’t like taking instructions.”

Seth slumped on the table, his head down, not looking at either of them. He’d quit the team the year before, just stripped off his padding and helmet and walked right off the field without looking back. He’d been fast. The best runner in the school, but the coach said he was a negative influence on the others.

“That’s too bad,” she said, before leaving the room.

“Why are we here, Dad?”

“We need to know for sure.”

“They won’t be able to do anything. They couldn’t for Mom.”

“You don’t know that.” Grizz ran his hands along the seam of his jeans, looked away. “They’ve made advances since then.” Jo hadn’t ever complained. He wasn’t even sure how much the lupus hurt her. She took her pills and went to bed early when the flare-ups were worst. Sometimes, when she snapped at him for smelling of the barn, for the way working with cattle seeped into his skin, under his nails, he told himself it was the lupus, the pain of being eaten up from the inside out, speaking.

“They call me freak at school.”

“Don’t pay them any mind.”

Grizz knew this was bad advice. Ignoring bullies only made them grow worse, inventing more devious methods of inflicting pain, verbal or physical, to draw a reaction, but when he looked up he saw Seth was studying him, his eyes curious. “How did Mom live with it? You never talk about her.”

Grizz had always had a hard time talking about Jo. He thought about what to say now, not wanting to describe her illness. Sometimes Seth smiled his small secret smile because there was music inside him when he was alone in his thoughts. And Grizz had to turn away, the familiar expression reminding him too sharply of the boy’s mother. Seth’s hand for drawing, his fancy-flighting, his desperate capacity to love the wrong things: all this he inherited from her.

“She wanted a baby more than anything,” he began. They talked awhile longer, the two of them in the examining room, not looking at one another. He told Seth about how his mother liked old folk songs. He told about how she longed to see the ocean, and here he fell into the story without meaning to. They had started on a trip to Florida a few years before Seth was born but broke down right outside Seaforth, only a hundred miles away. “The money for the trip went to pay for a new tranny instead. At the motel that night she filled the tub, added in bath salts. We put on our suits and climbed in.” He smiled at the memory. “Sure, she cried a little, but then she shut her eyes. ‘Tell me how it is,’ she said. Well, I had never been, so I did my best.”

A knock came at the door, Dr. Salverson with his news, but they already knew what he had to say.

“MR. FALLON? SETH?” THE pastor’s voice calling him by his Christian name startled Grizz. No one called him Seth anymore. The pastor must have heard the door open and come looking. He didn’t look much older than an altar boy himself, a thin spiderweb of a beard around his mouth, pale hair and skin. His eyes skimmed over Grizz, noting the mud spattering his jeans, the dirt around his collar, his very nails black with it.

“I’ve come to ask you something,” Grizz said.

“Let’s go to my office and talk.”

They stopped at a fountain where the pastor took a paper cup from a dispenser and filled it to offer to Grizz. After Grizz refused, they continued down the hallway to the pastor’s office, where he gestured toward a seat and retreated behind his desk. “I want to tell you how sorry I am about your son,” he said as he sat down in his swivel chair.

Grizz stayed standing but took off his seed cap and kneaded it in his hands. “I’d like you to come out to my property and do a private ceremony. A cleansing or blessing to get rid of bad spirits. Whatever you people call it. I’m asking on behalf of the boy’s mother.”

Pastor Logan coughed, then sipped some of his water, his frown deepening. “You mean like an exorcism? I don’t know. It’s not really something Lutherans do. But maybe after the funeral—”

“There isn’t going to be any funeral.”

“Pardon?”

“Not here. My son won’t be buried with your suicides.”

Pastor Logan swiveled in his chair, nervous. “You got the permit the county said you were after?”

“No.”

“Then he’s going to be cremated?”

“They didn’t mention that option at the funeral home.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for some time now. It might be a good way around this … impasse.”

Grizz continued to twist his hat in his hands. “I haven’t met anyone who buries people that way.” He thought of his uncle Harry who lost his hand in an accident with the corn picker. He retrieved it and kept it up in his icebox all his life, among the rump roasts and frozen peas. When he died, he was buried with it so the Lord could resurrect him properly for Judgment Day.

Logan nodded and went on. “Regarding your son, I am bound by the church’s rules and bylaws, like it or not. What I mean is that if Seth was cremated we could put all of this behind us.”

Grizz felt his mind clicking, justifying his actions. “You’re not following. How would he be resurrected then, if he was only ashes?”

“I follow. But God doesn’t play by our rules. It says in the Bible that we will be given new bodies in heaven. New bodies, a new earth.”

Grizz hadn’t come to argue over such things. Cremation, strangely, hadn’t crossed his mind. It was not something done in his experience. You died and you were put in a box and your place in death reflected your place in life. To be ashes, dust. It was what people did in the Cities. Or like the Hindus or Vikings. But it didn’t matter, not after what he’d done. “What I am asking is for you to come out to the house and speak a few words.”

The pastor began to massage the center of his forehead. “There is something I’m not understanding here.”

Even in his tiredness Grizz could see why. “Headache?”

“It feels like nails were driven there.”

“You been drinking the water from that fountain regular-like?”

“Sure.”

Grizz said nothing.

“Is there something wrong with this water?”

“Well, for one thing it’s so full of minerals you could build a bridge with it. There’s rust in it, and even if the fountain is new, the pipes that bring the water in are full of lead.”

“And no one has told me until now?”

“Everyone knows. Makes me shit fire biscuits every time I drink it. But it won’t kill you. Long as you let that faucet run for a while so the lead can drain out.”

He sighed, appearing even paler than before, and blinked at Grizz with his watery eyes. “Look, Mr. Fallon. There’s no easy way to talk about this, but we need to speak plainly about your son’s death. Your son was baptized here. He was a child of God.”

“The only thing that matters to me or anyone else is that he was my child, a Fallon. That name means something in this town.”

Logan leaned forward and set his elbows on the desk. “I know that you feel persecuted.”

“What do you know about my family? About this town?”

“I know about the accident that killed your father. I know that you did time in Sauk County for statutory rape. And that the girl waited for you until she was eighteen, and she married you before the justice of the peace, despite her family’s objections. I know this wife died shortly after giving birth to Seth and that you raised him alone. I can only imagine how hard it was for you.”

Grizz froze. What had Steve Krieger told this man? Steve had been the one so many years ago to encourage Jo’s family to press charges against Grizz after he caught them in the backseat of Grizz’s Impala. Grizz had been thinking that the pastor might be an impartial witness as an outsider. Once he came out to his property he planned to tell him about that shack in the woods. But if Steve had already painted him as crazy or criminal it might not be any use. That word “accident.” How had he pronounced it?

“They say your great-grandfather was at the hangings in Mankato. They say he was the one who cut the ropes that dropped thirty-eight Indians to their deaths. They say one of those Indians laid a curse on your family and that you bring bad luck to the area.”

Grizz smiled grimly. “They say all that, but they don’t tell you about the water?”

“Some is stuff I’ve been reading in the archives in the library. It’s been a hard week. I wanted to understand. I know about the statues, why you make them.”

Grizz went ahead and sat down. He was quiet for a long time. “Do you know when Seth was only thirteen he bit a boy in his class?”

“I know he was troubled. That he had a history—”

“I’m not talking just teeth marks. He bit a chunk out of the boy’s face and swallowed it. The other boy needed surgery. No one bullied Seth ever again. Instead he became the bully. He became the nightmare.”

The pastor sat back in his chair. “It doesn’t do any good to think about those things now.”

“I can’t stop. I can’t stop thinking about the day he came into town. I still don’t understand. Seth was violent. He could be cruel, but something like this—it was beyond even him.”

“You may have to live with not knowing.” His hands traced his thin beard, and he was quiet for a moment. “You ever hear of sin eaters?”

Grizz shook his head.

“The Welsh had a tradition. When a person was dying they brought in a sin eater, some outcast from the community. They put bread on the one dying and let it soak in the sins. Then the sin eater stepped forward and ate the bread.”

“What are you saying?”

“In unhealthy systems, I’m talking families or communities, there will be a scapegoat. I know that’s what they’ve done to you. I’m telling you that I’m on your side, Mr. Fallon. You’re not an outcast in my eyes. Whatever they told me, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is you think happened that day, it’s over if you want it to be. I only know that we need to put your son to rest.”

“You believe in hell?”

“Yes.”

“You think my boy is in hell?”

“I don’t know. I’m not God.”

“But the Bible has to be awful clear on this point. He committed murder then shot himself. If I want to see my boy again, then I need …”

When Grizz couldn’t finish his sentence, Logan added, “I don’t know what was happening in Seth’s head when he went out there. It’s said that nothing can separate us from the love of God, no power or principality. I believe in your son’s baptism. I believe that God loved your son. And I know that God loves you. Do you believe that?”

“No.”

“I don’t have any such thing as a cleansing service. Not like what you’re asking for. But I will come out to your land and pray with you. I will break bread with you.”

“It’s for his mother. His mother would want it.”

“It’s for you that I’m coming.”

GRIZZ DIDN’T EVEN MAKE it out of town before he saw cherries in his rear view mirror. Jesus, just what he needed. He pulled off along the edge of a slough. Sheriff Steve let him stew for a good minute before he got out and approached his truck. He paused, studying the cargo Grizz had left in the pickup’s bed and then plucked out a crowbar. He used this to tap against the window, which Grizz rolled down reluctantly.

“Mind shutting off the engine?”

“I do. I don’t know if she’ll restart.”

With his other hand, the sheriff reached past Grizz and twisted the keys. The engine coughed and stuttered to a halt. When it was quiet he went on calmly. “I got a call from the funeral home this morning. A break-in. Someone pried open the back door with a tool of some sort or another. They must have done it last night.”

Grizz said nothing while Steve tapped his door with the crowbar.

“How do you like that? Only thing missing was a corpse. The body of your son. Can you imagine it? Who would do such a thing?”

Grizz looked off down the road. He didn’t owe him a single word.

“It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? I know from Nolan your discussion with county authorities didn’t go so well.”

“It’s true. I had to get part of my land declared a cemetery. It might take months.”

“So, you know why I pulled you over?”

“Not really.”

“You don’t seem too concerned that the body of your only child has gone missing.”

Grizz shrugged.

“I’m going to ask you politely just once. Did you bury him up on the mountain, Seth? It’s what I would have done. Why don’t you take me and show me the spot where you put him?”

“Why don’t you go f*ck yourself?”

Again, he moved quickly, or maybe Grizz was so beyond exhaustion he hardly saw straight. He felt the fist rather than saw it, smashing into the side of his face. His mouth filled with blood. When he bent over, streams of it gushed into his lap, a lone tooth in the hot rush of fluid.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Steve massaging his knuckles. “I could arrest you right now, goddamnit. I found this crowbar in your truck, the tarp you probably used to drag his body through the woods. You tampered with state evidence when you took his body. You committed a felony when you broke into the home. I should, but I won’t. You want to know why? Then all this mess stays on people’s minds. Then I have to deal with another set of reporters coming in from outside asking questions, hounding our schoolkids and parents. We take care of our own messes here, Grizz, and your family is the biggest mess of all. Has been from the very beginning.”

A car passed them on the road, and the sheriff turned away to lift his hat, likely smiling to let them know that there was nothing happening over here. Grizz rubbed his chin, checking to see if the jawbone was broken. His tongue found the empty place where the tooth had been knocked out. He sopped the strings of blood from his chin with his sleeve, thinking, When the time comes I am going to hit you back, again and again and again, until I smash every bone in your face.

When the car was gone, the sheriff leaned in, resting his elbows on the window. He went on in his subdued voice, “They’re all dead now, all except you. Kind of makes you wonder, don’t it?”

“What are you talking about?” His words slurred; he needed to hold on to his rage to make it home.

“Your dad. Will. Seth. Jo.” Jo had been Steve’s second cousin, his godchild. “And the whole time you were over in Sauk County, she waited for you. She was so damned stubborn. Why anyone would come here to live with you, even knowing what you are, is a mystery to me. Why she wanted you.”

“Jo was happy.”

“Then you had to go and get her pregnant. You knew what would happen. You could have taken care of matters. There were ways even then. Can you imagine if you had? She would still be alive. Will might still be alive. This whole ungodly mess would never have happened.”

“No. Jo was sick. Even if wasn’t for the childbirth, the lupus would have killed her within a couple of years. Doc said so.”

“All dead, all except you,” he repeated. He tapped the side of the door with the crowbar again and then tossed it back into the pickup’s bed. “Here’s how the rest of this is going to shake down. A few weeks from now a group of us will come combine your corn. The money will go to Nolan, to pay his expenses and for his discretion.”

“I need that money to pay the bank.”

“You should’ve thought of that before you tried this stunt. Stupid, so f*cking stupid.”

Grizz had only one bit of leverage. “I know about the hunting cabin,” he said. “I know that Will Gunderson took people there. I’ve seen the inside.”

Steve was shaking his head. “You best forget such rumors. It won’t do you any good to think about it.”

Grizz gripped the steering wheel. “I saw those things he made with my own eyes. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“No, I can’t say I do.” He swallowed the dry air, spit in the road. “Listen, Grizz, the money will also pay for a stone, right in the section where I said he was going to be buried. Far as the rest of the town will know, your son was buried in a private ceremony. Only you and Nolan and I will know different. You say anything to anybody, try any more stunts like this, and I send cadaver dogs onto your property, and I will find and dig up the body and put it where it belongs according to the law. I will make sure you do jail time for this, and you’ll lose the farm for sure. Are we understood? Next time, you’ll lose more than a few teeth. This is what mercy feels like. I’m letting you go for the good of this town. You hear me, Seth Fallon Sr.? This is over. The end.”

Grizz smiled through his blood. “There isn’t any ending,” he said as he turned the keys.