Little Wolves

A GOOD DAY’S WORK





His wife Jo’s last summer had been a scorching season like the one that just ended, nights so hot the two of them slept naked, an evening ritual. He would shut off the lamp, disrobe, and cross the room where she waited for him atop the marriage quilt her mother had sewn. As soon as he lay down she straddled him, her skin feverish. When she kissed him their mouths smacked together, and her breath was hot on his neck before she bit down. His shoulders were tattooed with these teeth marks, wounds that never quite healed. She had never been like this and would never be like it again. It didn’t matter how bone sore or sun sapped he might be from working in the fields because her hunger for him had no end, and sometimes he thought she wanted to swallow him, sate herself with his mineral and salt, take him inside her and make something new.

When he shuddered into her, he prayed that what was dark in him would not root in her womb and that what was light in her would instead bear fruit. He prayed that the sins of the father would not follow the son, and if some summer nights he hesitated at the foot of the bed, he could not be blamed any more than he could possibly resist her summons. Summer passed in this way, and her belly did not melon-swell, and some mornings he caught her kneading the flatness of her stomach, praying fervently over and over the way farmers pray for rain in the dry season. God heard her, eventually, and gave them Seth.

When Seth was a boy he threw the most terrible tantrums, and all Grizz could do was hold him while he thrashed and frothed at the mouth. In the firm cage of his arms he could rage for hours, it seemed, until the demon went out of him, and he sagged and was his frail self again.

He knew what they were saying about son in town, but they didn’t know him. Had Jo not died of systemic lupus shortly after the boy’s birth, how might Seth have turned out? Had he been born in another age, he might have done something great, and his name and Grizz’s name would have been remembered for different reasons now. Something of Jo had lived in the boy, even in the final terrifying moment of his life.

GRIZZ HAD LIED TO get the pastor out here, and the man seemed to know right off. Still, it hadn’t stopped him from following Grizz up the ridge to the burial mounds at the base of the mountain where Grizz buried the boy the night before, a rose-colored stone marking the spot.

Under the round, rolling hummocks of grass all around them rested many bodies. Dakota. Fox and Sauk Indians. Before them, the Cheyenne. Before them, a thousand nameless generations. This was an ancient, spooky place, and Grizz didn’t usually come here. A man from the university had walked this property and wanted to come back with a group of students and do a dig, but Grizz refused. Such an act seemed a violation.

And now Seth had a place among them. In the dark, he’d unzipped the bag he’d dragged up through the woods and let the body spill into the deep grave he’d dug. Skin touching earth. Not looking, grateful for the cover of darkness, covering his child with warm black dirt. Seth hadn’t belonged in this century, and Grizz hoped he might find rest here in the wildest place left in the valley. And if the sheriff did ever try to follow through with his threats and send out the cadaver dogs, they might never find this body among so many others.

A tumbling of leaves rushed up from the woods and spilled past them, and the twilight quickened with swift clouds. “If Seth had lived this is where he would have come. There’s a cave behind the spot where’s he buried. He would have hid here. There’s a limestone spring close by. He would have had food and water. Maybe that’s what all the shells were for. The ones in his pockets.”

These last few nights Grizz had dreamed of fire. Fire licking up from dead leaves and the underbrush on the forest floor, cracking and spitting as it ate twigs and leaves and branches, growing into the very trees. The oaks and maples blazing from within, as though they had been given inner beings of light. They were transfigured. The fire grew and grew until it made its own wind, a living thing, hungry for flesh, and it moved on toward his farm and the sleeping town, drifting under a pall of ashes. In the dream he saw his son running just ahead of it, his long coat fanning out, saw him stop in the grove, out of breath among the statues, and turn toward the flames.

The pastor took off his glasses. He seemed angry to have been brought out here under false pretenses. “Let’s get this over with, then.” He chewed on his lower lip. “And I want to make this clear. I believe your boy intended evil. All that ammunition wasn’t just to kill one man. It wasn’t for hunting out here. Seth went into town knowing he was going to die, by his hand or others.”

Fire in a dry season, in desperate days. Fire consuming them all so that the world could start fresh again. He woke with the taste of ashes on his tongue. He woke thinking of his son.

“I know you loved Seth,” Pastor Logan said when Grizz didn’t respond.

“I would give my life to have him back.”

“You blame yourself for his death?”

He nodded, his eyes stinging. He had not meant to cry. It unsettled him to cry in front of another man, but once the tears started he was powerless to stop them.

“Do you believe that you can be forgiven?”

Grizz settled himself by looking out over the woods, the parched trees stretching all the way to his farm and town beyond it, dusky in the fading light. “Let’s not talk about me anymore. I want you to do the funeral rites. That’s why we’re here.”

The pastor took out his Bible, and Grizz came toward him with the lantern. Here were two men on a high hill that passed for a mountain in these parts, one carrying a light, the other a holy book. The risen moon hiding behind shreds of cloud and then reappearing once more and touching everything with silver. Something silvery moving in the woods below, among the stone statues that lined the driveway. Something unquiet where there should have been only peace. Something near calling out when the moon appeared. One man crying, one afraid. A secret ceremony, as grass closes over a body like a green wound.

BY EARLY AUTUMN THE sugar maples stood bare out in the yard. The trees had retreated inside themselves in a bad time, letting down dusty leaves and dreaming of the promised season, abundant rain and a fat summer sun. The absence of leaves told him a story about more than drought. The sight made Grizz anxious.

He turned when he heard footsteps crunching in the frosty leaves. A boy in a bright red Windbreaker approached, his head hung low, but Grizz recognized the younger Gunderson. The boy didn’t even know he was being watched until he left the woods and entered the yard. Grizz raised a hand as Lee approached, a dough-faced kid in work boots and jeans. “Morning,” Lee Gunderson said, his breath ghosting in the cold.

Grizz nodded. It seemed a long time had passed since he had driven him to the hospital. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here about the job.”

Grizz rubbed his eyes. He’d forgotten his spur-of-the-moment offer, hadn’t seriously thought a Gunderson would take him up on it. “What time is it?”

Lee glanced up at the sky, then back at Grizz. “It’s around nine, judging by the sun.” Grizz noted the watchband on the boy’s wrist, one of those lumpy deals that also played video games or some nonsense. One of Lee’s eyes tracked lazy, following its own orbit. Odd Lee. The sheriff’s boy. Right here on his property. “Your mother know you’re here?”

Lee toed the dust with his boots.

“Okay, then. But I need some coffee before we get started. You eat any breakfast?”

He mumbled something Grizz didn’t catch, his chin tucked into his chest.

“Look at me when you’re talking.”

“Chocolate cake. Two slices.”

“Your mother feed you that?”

“She doesn’t get out of bed much these days. The cake is from the church ladies.” Looking at this boy who had come through the woods without telling his own family, Grizz remembered his body and felt hungrier than he had in a while. “That isn’t a proper breakfast. Come inside and I’ll fry you some eggs.”

A few nights ago Steve and a few other local farmers had come with their combines to harvest his corn. There must have been at least a dozen men from surrounding farms. Grizz had recognized Steve’s cousin Harvey and the two Folshem brothers and Jim Brogan from down the road, among others. They brought trucks and gravity bins for transferring the corn to the silo, and all those machines had lit up the night. Grizz had watched them from the house and had not come out on the porch to thank them when they were done because he wouldn’t see a dime from the corn they were taking from his fields. There was a part of him that said they were doing this for themselves, so they could go back to their houses and talk later about how Christian and forgiving they had been, and their plump wives would nod and say That poor man, and the men would say Well, and perhaps speak of how he had not come out into the yard to thank them, not even once. He knew it was unkind to think this way, because he had not deserved their mercy, and their mercy had only made him feel more desperate and alone.

Now one boy had come onto his land, a boy from an enemy family. While the coffee percolated on the stove, Grizz fired up another burner and cut nubs of butter to coat an iron skillet. He whipped the melting butter into a froth and then cracked eight eggs, folding them together with a spatula. “I would make toast, but the loaf’s gone moldy.” The rich smell of the eggs mixed with the aroma of the coffee. It had been a long time since Grizz cooked breakfast for anyone but himself, but he enjoyed it. Seth had slept in late most days, a constant battle to get him to wake up and go to school on time.

The Mirro percolator thumped this whole time as water rose and washed over the grounds. When the eggs were done, Grizz shut off the gas stove and carried over a plate for each of them. For a boy who claimed not to be hungry, Lee shoveled in his food.

“How’s your brother?”

Lee shrugged. “The same. That girl Leah comes over all the time.”

“You mean the girl who just moved here from the Cities.” Seth’s girl.

“I’m not supposed to follow. They keep to themselves. Mostly, I take care of the pigs. My mom calls me her little man, says it all depends on me on account of me being the responsible one. It’s not easy. That’s what she’s always saying. This isn’t easy for me, you know?”

Grizz made a humming sound in his throat. “How often does the girl come over?”

Lee shrugged once more, and Grizz decided not to press him. What had it been like growing up in the household of Will Gunderson? Lee raised his gaze. “I charge three dollars an hour, and I can only come on Saturdays, when my mother is working at the nursing home.”

“Those are fair terms.”

“What kind of work do you have for me today?”

GRIZZ TOOK HIM OUT to the truck garden, among the viny rows of potato plants overgrown with weeds. He pointed out the difference between the potatoes and the weeds, the velvety lamb’s ears and pestilent burdock that grew among the crop. The plants were carefully hilled, and Grizz loosened the ground with a spade and then tugged one up by the base and shook out the loose black dirt from the small clump of potatoes. “These are Yukon Gold,” he said, “about half the size they should be.”

Lee whistled. “We only got eighty bushels an acre this year in corn. It’s bad all over the county.”

“I planted sweet corn and peas and carrots, but this is all we have left.” Earlier in the summer, Grizz had hand carried buckets of water from the well to save what he could from the relentless sun. Now he rubbed the potatoes to clean off the dirt and tossed them into a gallon bucket.

Without being instructed further, Lee worked the dirt with his shovel, crouched, and tugged out a plant of his own. He held up a potato mealy with holes. “What do I do with the bad ones?”

Grizz took it from his hand and hurled it off into the trees. He left the boy to go do chores. There was a surprise he was preparing in the woods, something he’d been working on to keep his mind occupied, to escape his troubling fire dreams. When he came back an hour later, Lee had finished a row and filled three of the gallon buckets. He was a better worker than his son had been. Together they carried the buckets up to the porch, where Grizz had filled a pitcher with well water and grape powdered Kool-Aid. The well water was so cold it made his fillings ache.

Lee stood and dusted his jeans when they were done, heading for the back field. “Hold on,” said Grizz. “We’ll finish the potatoes another day. I got something to show you.” He trundled over a wheelbarrow he’d made ready for the purpose and slit open a bag of dried concrete with a spade. Grizz showed Lee how to mix it with gravel and water to get just the right consistency. Chilly well water splashed up and soaked Lee’s sleeve, but he didn’t complain. Grizz let the boy push the laden wheelbarrow up the driveway and into the woods.

An empty figure of mesh wires waited there, leaning against a tree. Metal posts had been driven through the legs and spine to give it support.

“You’re making more of them?” Years had passed since Grizz had added anything to the Frozen Garden, his forest of statues growing mossy with time. “What’s this one going to be?”

“That’s Minnehaha herself, the hero’s bride.”

She leaned against a silver oak, her head drooping. Around them on the ground lay more gallon buckets with broken green glass bottles and the cowrie shells Grizz used for skin.

“What happened to her?”

“She dies of sickness in the story. It happens before his last battle, before Hiawatha must face Pau-Puk-Keewis, his ultimate enemy.”

Lee touched the empty metal wires. “Why do you make the statues? Everyone in town says it because you’re crazy.”

“What do you think?”

Lee rubbed the arm he’d wounded coming down the mountain, kneading the muscle as he peered up at Grizz. “I think it’s because you’re sad. You’ve been sad for a long time.”

Grizz swallowed. “I guess that’s a good enough reason. They were for my brother. Maybe an apology for all that I couldn’t do for him.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“This was all before your time. You never got to see the pageant, did you?”

“I was just a baby when they did the last one. Dad said it got to be too much trouble for the town. And every year less people visited to see it.”

“It’s true.” Grizz picked up the spatula and started scooping in the cement before it could dry. Minnehaha was going to be his largest statue yet, well over eight feet tall.

“Why do you miss it?”

“Nostalgia, I guess. It brought people together. It was an old story that people made sure to keep alive and pass on.” But even as Grizz spoke he knew it was more than that. The play was a direct line to his family’s past, his great-grandfather’s role in the hangings, an entire town craving redemption for what they’d done to Indians a hundred years before, dressing up in the costumes of the ones they had killed or driven away. He handed an extra spade to Lee, and they filled the base of the empty skeleton with concrete, Grizz smoothing and shaping the rough edges into a textured skin.

“Now comes the fun part. Before the concrete dries we got to put in cowrie shells and glass. Make her pretty. So when the sun shines people will see her from the road.”

“You going to put some clothes on her?”

Grizz had styled realistic clefts in the buttocks and given the giantess a massive bosom. “Nah. It’ll scandalize the little old ladies driving by on the road.”

Lee stepped back to study the statue taking shape, maybe trying to imagine. “Seth used to tell us about the naked woman they found here in the woods.”

Grizz sucked on his teeth at the mention of the woman, unsure how to respond. “Hypothermia. That was why she didn’t have any clothes on. If you’re freezing to death it feels like you’re burning up. When did Seth tell you all this?”

Lee was about to say more when the sound of snapping twigs made them turn. A young man in a russet rain slicker approached, his eyes grim and slitted. Kelan, Lee’s older brother. Lee dropped his spade into the wheelbarrow and lowered his head.

“You get on home,” his older brother told him.

“He was just helping me,” Grizz said, standing. “We have an arrangement.”

“F*ck your arrangement. Let’s go, Lee.”

“I want to stay,” Lee said. “It’s my choice.”

In answer, Kelan came forward and grabbed his little brother by the ear. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Mom thought you had fallen into one of the hog pits. She was worried sick.”

“Let him go,” Grizz said.

Lee struggled and kicked, and there were tears in his eyes, but when Kelan released him he bunched his hands into his coat pockets and started walking, not looking behind him.

“You stay away from my brother,” Kelan said, jabbing a finger in Grizz’s direction.

Grizz could have caught the finger in midair if he wanted and snapped it like a chicken bone.

The boy was walking away. The strange presence of both brothers on his land troubled him. You may have to live with not knowing, the pastor had said, but Grizz couldn’t leave it at that.