Little Wolves

HARVEST





Clara and Logan were in the kitchen carving pumpkins when Stormy Gayle announced on the radio that coyotes had attacked a small child in town. She didn’t say the boy’s name, just that he lived near the edge of town, and he’d been playing in his backyard when his mother heard him scream. By the time she made it out of the house the boy rushed toward her across the lawn. “They were trying to eat me up, Mama! Wolves!”

A mouth-sized chunk of his parka was missing, down spilling out. The child told his mother the coyotes had tried to drag him toward the trees, but they got scared by the roar of a leaf blower over in the next yard.

The town’s part-time mayor, a chain-smoking lawyer named Brian Neske, coughed into the microphone. “It’s one thing,” he told Stormy, “to lose a cat or small dog. But when our children are threatened we must take action. I want to assure listeners that the authorities are doing everything possible. We’ve called in an expert from the DNR, and traps have been set. If you have a dog or cat, don’t let it wander outside, especially not at night. If the coyotes don’t get it, we’ve laced meat with antifreeze and spread it around the woods. And if you have small children, don’t leave them unaccompanied in the yard or even walking to school.”

“Would they attack a full-grown adult?” Stormy asked.

“It’s not likely. These are scavengers. Dangerous ones, but we’ll catch them before the week is out. I’m here to announce a bounty. You can already get ten dollars a pelt at the county courthouse, and remember, you don’t even need a permit to shoot coyotes. Consider it your civic duty.”

“Will you shut that off?” Clara asked Logan. The news story was the last thing she wanted to hear. She had trouble believing those coyotes had attacked a small child. Not the same ones who had encircled her. If she shut her eyes, she could still feel the gray’s coarse black nose against the softness of her palm. Now Seth’s coyotes were hunted things.

Clara sat Indian-style on a floor spread with newspapers, sawing open the skull of a pumpkin with a serrated knife. Once it was properly lobotomized, she lifted off the lid, rolled up her shirtsleeves, and scooped inside. Soon her hands reeked sweetly of the orange guts, but she didn’t mind the mess.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Logan asked after he turned off the radio. He’d carved his pumpkin to look cross-eyed, finishing with a gap-toothed smile. His pumpkin-bumpkin, he called it.

“What do you think?” Clara’s had moon-sliver irises. Long incisors dangled from the cavern of the mouth.

“Looks a little ghoulish for a fall festival at a church.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Clara plopped handfuls of orange goop on the newspapers, carefully sorting seeds into a colander. She planned to dry the seeds overnight on wax paper, salt, and bake them crisp in olive oil tomorrow night. “But if you must know this is Grendel’s mother.”

“Ah, I should have guessed. Isn’t she the last monster old what’s-his-name has to fight?”

“She’s the second. There’s always another monster in epics. Until you die. It’s the third, a dragon, that slays Beowulf, leaving Wiglaf to moon over his body as an age of darkness spreads over the land.”

“Gloomy business, being a hero.” Logan thumped his gourd on the ground and wobbled it in the direction of Clara’s. “Prepare for battle, foul-smelling hell wench. It is I, Beowulf, wooer of maidens, mighty mead drinker, all around ass kicker. You will be smoten.”

Clara smiled. It was good to be here in the warm kitchen with him. This was the Logan who had made her laugh when they first started dating. “How will you smite me if you have no sword?”

“Oh,” he said. “I have a sword.”

She was about to say something really naughty, but just as she was making the last cut, a slit under the eyes to represent a scar, the knife slipped and swiped across her left palm. Clara didn’t feel anything. She lifted up her hand, fascinated. Bright blood mingled with cords of orange pulp that dropped wetly to the newspaper. Across from her, Logan said something as he reached for her. The knife clattered to the floor. Clara heard an oceanic sound in her ears, and she stood too quickly, making for the sink, wanting to wash the wound, and slipped on the slimy newspapers. She managed to twist as she fell, but still struck the linoleum hard enough that her breath was punched from her lungs.

Logan knelt beside her as she caught her breath. He wrapped a kitchen towel around her hand, pressing down to apply pressure. “You okay?”

She blinked up at him. “I think so.” Her other hand went to her stomach. At least she hadn’t landed right on it, but she couldn’t feel the baby. She shut her eyes and sent out a prayer. Are you all right? Mommy’s sorry she scared you. In answer, a wave of nausea made her rest her head on the cool floor.

She felt a stinging sensation in her hand as Logan dabbed at the wound. “Doesn’t look too deep,” he said. “I think we can bandage this, but you knocked yourself a good one when you fell.”

Clumsy girl. Look at what you’ve done.

“We should get you to the hospital, get you checked out.”

“You think so?” A new terrible thought branched inside her. What if there was no baby? What if the baby was lost? Here now, all Logan’s attention focused on her hand. What would happen to the fragile peace they had built once the baby arrived? And yet she was grateful when Logan insisted they go to the hospital to get her checked out.

The drive to Fell Creek took them into a starless dark split only by their headlights. The highway rose up out of the river valley, out onto flat, open prairies, passing isolated farmhouses, each huddled next to its own yard lamp and shelterbelt of trees. Clara shut her eyes and imagined what would happen if they just kept going past the hospital, past Mankato, all the way up to their old life in the Twin Cities. They didn’t talk, but Logan drove with one hand on the wheel, the other lightly touching her arm.

After the on-call doctor probed the wound with iodine and mummified it in fresh gauze, he bid Clara undress and put on a papery gown so he could check her for vaginal bleeding. The doctor was middle aged, a thick barrel mustache around his mouth, the ends like tusks. “Why don’t you wait in the other room?” he asked Logan in a firm voice. It didn’t sound like a suggestion.

“I’m staying.” The doctor frowned, the ends of his mustache drooping, and had Clara climb up on the examining table, put her legs in the air. He snapped on his on rubber gloves and hovered over her, pressing at her belly and side, then hard against the inside of her thighs as he inched up the gown. When his fingers slipped inside her without warning, Clara gasped audibly.

“That hurt?” he said.

She nodded, more shocked than anything.

He drew out his hand and studied the glove. “You’re not bleeding at least.”

No, just violated, she thought. Clara’s gynecologist, Dr. Frank, was a tall beanpole of a man who reminded her of Ichabod Crane, but his hands and voice were gentle, and she trusted him in a way she didn’t trust this man.

With his stethoscope, he pressed up near her breasts before moving it to her stomach. “Sounds just fine in there. Little savage beating on his drum.” He turned to Logan. “You wanna hear it?”

Logan came over and put the stethoscope in his ears. His eyes found Clara’s while he listened to the baby.

On the drive home, he didn’t hold her hand. The pure country darkness of the open prairies spread all around them, swallowing up the Nova. Clara had never imagined a darkness so vast.

“I’m scared, too,” Logan said after a long silence between them.

She didn’t have to ask about what.

“I never really imagined myself as a father. This is going to sound strange, but babies scare the shit out of me. Every time I do a baptism in church I’m always worried I’m going to drop one. They’re in these long, ruffly gowns, squirming all around. How can anything so small even survive in this world?”

Love, she thought. A mother’s love should be the most powerful force on earth. She hoped it would be true of her when the time came and that Logan would find the same inside himself. “Maybe, it’s more natural than we think. How many couples out there actually feel prepared for the baby when it comes?”

She looked away. The road bent, and her stomach lurched as they began the steep descent into the valley. Traveler, she thought, “one who travails.” The old word promising the birth of both suffering and wisdom. She felt a sudden sense of vertigo as the road dropped. The woods, the shade, the wolves, the mountain she had never seen. She was afraid, too, but also relieved to be away from the open prairies. Whatever happened, this was where they were meant to be.

Logan squeezed her hand. “What I’m trying to tell you is that tonight, hearing the baby’s heartbeat, I’m glad the baby is fine.”

“Our baby,” she added.

CLARA HAD MOVED BACK in with her father following her brutal fight with her fiancé Gregory. She was between jobs and apartments, between just plain everything. By the time Clara came to live with him, Stanley had also been on dialysis for two years.

A hospice nurse came to visit in the mornings, because his kidneys were failing. When Clara got home from her new job waiting tables at a local diner, she went around correcting the woman’s mistakes, shutting the drapes and curtains in rooms throughout the house, the way her father liked it. Her father had been a fearful man, as if he were waiting for someone to come punish him for his past.

As Clara shut the curtains, she imagined her father’s slow terror as the nurse insisted on throwing them open, exposing him to the world. He lay on the bed like some creature fallen from primeval trees, his fingernails coiling like a sloth’s talons. She would need to cut them, since the nurse refused. Her father trembled when she came in, blinking up into the light when she turned on the lamp beside him. The IV beside his bed dripped steadily into the taped and bruised opening in his arms. “Hello, Daddy,” she said.

“Clarie.” His voice was a husk of itself.

“They drain you again today?” Tuesdays another nurse also came, trundling in a dialysis machine that siphoned out his blood and ran it through a filter.

“Vampires.”

Clara squeezed his hand. “Vampires don’t put fresh blood back inside you.”

“It’s what she called me here, living in the dark.”

“That bitch. You want me to call and complain again? She shouldn’t be opening your curtains when both of us have told her not to.”

“No use.”

“Did she clean your bedsores?”

He coughed wetly. The nurse, a woman named Regina, would scrub him raw and bloody, or not at all, leaving his sores to fester. Sometimes Clara had to clean him, a task she dreaded. When she pressed her hand on his forehead, the skin felt clammy. The nurse had told her that he wouldn’t live to see the snow melt. He was going to die and take his secrets with him. Clara went into the bathroom and fetched fingernail clippers. Stanley’s eyes were shut when she came back in the room, his breathing raspy. She cut ivory half-moons from his left hand, holding the palm gingerly, careful not to draw blood. Each snip of the clippers made his eyelashes flutter, but other than that there was no response. “I want to know about my mother. I want to know if you loved her.”

A vein pulsed thinly at his temple, the only sign of his irritation. “I’ve told you everything you need to know.”

“You’ve spoken in riddles. When you’re gone I’m going to go looking for her.”

One rheumy eye flicked open. “You must never go back there.”

“Why not?”

But the eye had sealed shut again and soon, despite her questions and her clipping, he was asleep. Clara carried the curving nails into the bathroom where she balled them up in a tissue and discarded them in the waste bin. She went back into his room, pulled up the sheets around him, and was turning up the dials on his electric blanket when the doorbell rang. Clara frowned. If this was the nurse Regina, she was going to have words with her.

But waiting for her on the porch was a young man in a dark coat, his face chapped by blowing wind and snow.

“Can I help you?”

“You must be his daughter, Clara.”

“I am.” Clara hadn’t invited him in yet. The house’s heat rushed out the door, another thing her penny-pinching father disliked. “Who are you?”

He pulled off leather gloves and held out his hand. “I’m Pastor Logan,” he said. His eyes were pale blue, almost turquoise, with lovely lashes. He had whitish-blond hair, high cheekbones. Clara held his perfectly smooth hand in hers, which he must have taken as an invitation to come inside. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I was coming home from church, and I saw your car in the driveway.”

Uninvited, he took off his coat and hung it from a peg. Clara shut the door reluctantly. She saw his collar now, the dark clerical shirt. His presence here, his seeming familiarity, bothered her. “I still don’t know why you’re here.”

His brow furrowed. “I’m your father’s pastor, from St. Mark’s Lutheran a few blocks down. Your dad didn’t mention me?”

“I didn’t even know my dad went to church.”

“Oh, Stanley’s been a member for years. He even served on the council before he started dialysis.”

In the foyer’s tight space she was aware of his aftershave, a hint of cinnamon, and underneath the earthy scent of his skin. “We didn’t even go to church growing up.”

He absorbed this as if it was old news to him. “How’s Stanley doing?”

“The same.” There was something airy and elemental about the pastor’s Nordic good looks, his gleaming white teeth.

“Would you mind if I gave him communion?” He held up a slender black case.

“I doubt he’s even awake. He’s just had his dialysis treatment.” For some reason she felt angry with this pastor and with her father for not telling her, as if he was leading a secret life. And it was a good secret, unlike the rest of what he kept from her, but it bothered her the same.

“Okay if I look in on him? I’ve been coming every week.”

Clara relented, and when they went into his bedroom, her father’s eyes were open, and he even smiled for the young pastor. Clara looked at her father with a sense of mingled wonder and betrayal. After all these fiercely agnostic years, the old man had been taking religion on the side. Was he taking out insurance with the reaper knocking? His eyes blinked in the lamplight, hooded by furry gray brows. He had a lifelong drinker’s face, his nose split with red veins. “I’m so glad you got to meet my Clara,” he said. “She’s living with me, just temporarily. She’s a student, you know, a linguist. She’s going to be a professor one day.”

“Yes, I know.” The pastor turned toward her, smiling. “He talks about you all the time. It’s good that you’re here with him.” He set his black case down on the nightstand and cracked it open. Inside, plastic cups shaped like thimbles nestled in red velvet lining. He took out the cups along with a canister of wine and a thin tube packed with crackers. “Would you like to join us?” he asked Clara.

“No,” she said, crossing her arms.

The pastor filled the small cups with wine, his hands shaking so that some spilled on the nightstand. She saw that he was preparing her father to cross over, to go somewhere she couldn’t follow. It shouldn’t have mattered, the stale wafers, the bitter wine, but when the pastor said, “This is my body, broken for you,” snapping the wafer in half and placing it on her father’s tongue, the old man exhaled lightly, his eyelashes fluttering. And when he said, “This is my blood, spilled for you,” and tipped the cup past her father’s cracking lips, he shut his eyes and his breathing deepened, as though the wine were spreading inside him, cleansing impurities. Clara looked away, her eyes full.

The young pastor visited twice a week, and Clara found herself timing her day so that she would be home when he arrived. Sometimes, when her father was sleeping, they went into the kitchen and talked.

“The closest I’ve come to religion is reading Rilke,” she told him one afternoon. “ ‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror,’ ” she recited from memory.

“ ‘Which we still are just able to endure,’ ” he continued, surprising her, “ ‘and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.’ ”

Clara cupped her face in her hands, leaned toward him. “You know the Duino Elegies?”

“I read them in the original German the year I studied abroad. I adore Rilke.” He was quiet for a moment, considering. “Rilke says that we live out our lives in the horizontal.” He drew his hand slowly along the surface of the table, “but every now and then, even in an ordinary life, we touch the vertical.” He lifted his hands from the table, spread them. “We get some glimpse of heaven. Faith is like that. Most of the time, I don’t sense God. I stumble through my days as blind as the next person, but every now and then I touch the vertical.”

Somewhere during this recitation, Clara had touched his hand unconsciously after he lowered it to the table, and she held on. They had both blushed when they realized, and even then she hadn’t let go.

AFTER THEY RETURNED FROM the hospital, Clara lay in bed waiting for the baby to rise as a fish does from the depths. Why was she so sure this child was a boy? The boys cause the most trouble, the widows told her. Logan sighed in his sleep beside her, tired out from the drive, but Clara was stirred up. Gusts of wind and rain shook and rattled the house. The north window flexed inward like a membrane, and outside the bare maples scraped one another.

Mother. Clara’s first ghost, her childhood imaginary companion. In the wind she heard her mother trying to get home through the snow. The snow was coming, a winter out of time. Clara’s eyes grew heavy, lulled by the sound of falling water. She shut them for a moment, but somewhere distantly a door banging open and shut woke her. The wind moaned long and low, and it was so cold in the room she wanted only to nestle under the covers, spooned against her husband. Her left hand hurt, the missing fingers stretching out in the dark, regrowing from the nubs. The pure pain of it popped her eyes open.

She was here in the room, having arrived with the storm. Clara heard her before she saw her, the sound of dripping, a board groaning. She had plugged a night-light into the wall so she wouldn’t have to stumble around if she needed to use the bathroom, but the bulb crackled and went out. In the new darkness, Clara sensed her near the bed, a deepening of shadow. Logan turned over in his sleep, muttering incoherently. The floorboards creaked again, a sound like a sigh. Clara pushed up against the headboard, shut her eyes to banish her. The nerves in her hurt hand bristled.

“I’m sorry, Mother. You’ve been out there the whole time, and now you have a new companion in the suicide corner, don’t you? Did he wake you up from your sleep? I heard about you, Mother. I know your story now. Go away.”

Clara opened her eyes again, and in the pitch of the room she saw her. The woman’s hair rose and fell as though the wind had come inside along with her. Her skin blue as moonlight on snow. Her hospital gown shimmering. She looked cold, covered by a sheen of thin ice melting and pooling in a puddle at her feet.

“He left you, didn’t he? Left you out to die in the snow, so he could carry me back. And now you’re angry with me. That’s it, isn’t it? You would have been free and alive if it wasn’t for me?”

The woman carried something in her arms, a bundle in the shape of a child. A present for her daughter. The bundle squirmed.

Clara heard a thin screaming. A child lost somewhere and crying for help. Then the blanket her mother held out to her unwrapped. What spilled out at first looked like a baby but was white as a corpse. The child was no more than a round ball of maggots, seething and boiling. These maggots spread up the woman’s arms, burrowing into her blue skin or unfurling one by one before dropping to the floor. The crying turned to a shriek, full throated. Her mother was still coming toward her even as the maggots ate her alive, her icy skin peeling away in clumps until she was bone, a skeleton woman, a skull with livid dark hair. She reached for Clara, disintegrating as she came.

Then the light switched on, and Logan, above her, pressed a finger to her lips.

Her throat ached. She had been screaming. She had been the one making that awful sound.

He stroked her forehead. “You’re burning up,” he said.

He brought her Tylenol.

Clara took the pills and watched as he toweled up a spill of water on the floor—she had knocked over her glass in her sleep.

She and Logan were a young couple with too few belongings to fill a big parsonage echoing with a century’s worth of memories. When you walk in a place, she thought, spill blood, surely the echoes of your passing remain long after you were there.