Little Wolves

LOCK-IN





Lee Gunderson surprised Clara and Logan when he showed up for the Luther League’s fall festival lock-in. He had walked from his farm outside town and arrived without sleeping bag or change of clothes. He also didn’t have the required signed permission slip, so Logan tried to call his mother but was unable to reach her. It seemed cruel to send the boy back home, so they let him stay. The other children left a circle of space around him. Clara was there to keep order along with a couple of other adult volunteers. Logan had told her how he struggled working with young people, and the kids might be especially wild on All Hallow’s Eve. “Children and bees can smell fear,” he said.

“Try stronger deodorant.”

But she was here. She oversaw the apple bobbing and watched the older teens play hide-and-seek in the darkened sanctuary and basement, a few still finding shadowy recesses where they could make out. Only around sixteen youths from the Luther League came, most parents wanting to keep their children close to home this year. There had been talk of canceling all Halloween trick-or-treating because of the coyotes that had been seen roaming the night. No one knew how dangerous they were.

Around midnight, Logan put in a Betamax tape of The Goonies for the boys to watch while they fell asleep, and Clara took the girls next door to the parsonage. The girls unrolled sleeping bags on the living room floor and passed the hour telling ghost stories about the woman in the woods. She had long claws they said, her hair a ragged nest, and she wanted a child, any child. If she snatched you she would take you off in the woods with her, and you wouldn’t ever be seen again. The ghost stories devolved into gossip about boys and then to giggling, which Clara finally silenced.

The girls slept well, much better, she would discover, than Logan and the boys.

All sounds magnify in the dark, especially the sound of something wounded or afraid, Logan later told Clara. He had given his blankets to the Gunderson child and made a makeshift bed of choir robes in the corner of the room for himself. A few hours before dawn, Logan woke to the sound of whimpering.

He propped himself on his elbows to better hear. Boys mummified in sleeping bags were cast about on the chilly linoleum floor, their lumpy shapes glistening like seals on some unfamiliar shore. The children were all worn out from the games and movies, soundly sleeping, except one.

When the crying rose to a choked sobbing, Logan picked his way among the sleepers. He found him still shuddering, his breathing husky and labored. The boy’s face was a blank, contorted mask, and he cringed when Logan loomed over him.

“Hush,” Logan said, speaking in a low, soothing tone as he touched his shoulder, smelling the blankets he had loaned him a few hours ago were soaked with urine. “You were having a bad dream.”

The boy mumbled something inaudible. A dream language. Logan crouched beside him to give him time to rise from his nightmare. Lee had oily, dark hair and the chubby, shape-shifting features of a teenager whose adult face was not yet formed. Logan could only imagine what he had been dreaming as he slept on a cold floor in a strange room less than a block from where his father had been murdered.

Lee’s nostrils flared. “Do you smell it? Do you smell the gunpowder?”

“No.” This was a lie. When Lee named the odor, Logan smelled it, too. Peppery and sulfuric, the gunpowder burned inside his nostrils. But it was simply not possible, not here.

“I’m all wet.”

“We’ll have to call your mom, have her bring fresh clothing.”

“No. You won’t be able to wake her.”

“Won’t hurt to try,” Logan continued. “You never know. She might be awake and thinking of you right now.”

Lee trembled, urine chilling against his skin. “No. Not when she’s taken her pills.”

The other boys were stirring. They’d wake soon, their senses heightened by hunger, and know this child had wet himself. The girls, sleeping with Clara next door, would be over in a few hours. Time was of the essence.

“Come with me, then,” Logan said. “We’ll find something for you upstairs.” He helped the boy bundle the blankets and carried them to an out-of-the-way corner. Then he led Lee up a rear stairwell in the dark. The neon glow of an exit sign bathed the stairs in red light, and Logan thought of what eerie places even churches seemed at night; something hellish must have touched the boy in his sleep. The gunpowder smell remained on them both.

When they reached the back room, he hit a switch, waited for the fluorescent bulb to flicker on, and then fetched a dark choir robe intended for a petite woman from a mothballed closet. “Here,” he said. “You can wear this until morning. Take it to the men’s room and rinse yourself in the sink. Use the paper towels for drying.”

Lee’s stink saturated the tight quarters. He took the robe reluctantly. He was shivering all over, as if lice boiled under his skin.

“You want to tell me about your dream?” Logan asked.

A shake of his head.

“Sometimes you feel better if you name your fear aloud.”

“He’s hunting me,” Lee said, his gaze to the floor. “Seth is after me, too. I saw him. I saw him all covered in blood.”

The boy’s voice was flat, toneless. Logan said nothing, waiting for him to go on.

“I could feel him in the church. The blood was dripping down his clothes. Then he put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream. He leaned down and he was laughing; he was laughing but it sounded like something breaking inside him. I kicked and struggled and tried to wake up, but I just couldn’t.”

“Lee, do you want to pray with me?”

His head was still lowered. “I’m sorry,” he said. “So, so sorry.” In that moment it sounded like all the sorrows in the world were wrapped in his voice.

“It’s okay. You just go change. Then I want you to meet me downstairs in the kitchen. Milk and cookies are the best cure for nightmares that I know.”

His shoulders still quaking, the boy went down the hallway to the bathroom. Logan walked to the kitchen, carefully shutting a swinging door so as not to wake the other boys. He put on a light above the stove and set out two plates with some cheap store-bought cookies, the kind with cream inside. Then he poured two tall glasses of milk. In the room beyond, the other boys slept on, oblivious.

Logan waited and waited. Lee did not come.

Eventually, he walked down the hall and knocked on the bathroom door. When there was no response he opened it to find the empty robe lying on the floor in a black puddle.

Lee was gone. He had walked off into the icy night in his wet clothes. He had run, run as if being pursued.

Later, as Logan told Clara all this, he shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t get over what he said to me. How he apologized. It was about more than the blankets. It sounded like a confession.”

THE GIRLS’ STORY OF the woman in the woods made Clara dream of her mother again, and when she woke she knew what she had to do. After all the teens had gone home and Logan left on errands, she set out the next morning. This whole time Sylvia’s grave had been right outside Clara’s window. Why had her father buried her here instead of taking her back to the Cities? Why had he never told Clara where she could find her? In the days since Nora had told her, the knowledge she was out here prickled inside her brain, made her hyperattuned to her body and breath.

Now she was out in the yard in the early day. A north wind whisked clouds as thin as tissue paper across a peerless sky milky with early morning light. The grass below her was yellow and water starved, the earth stretching taut in the cold, like the skin on her stretched belly, thick as a drum. While the air tasted of snow, none had fallen yet, but Clara felt it gathering somewhere, building strength as it swept across the Dakota prairies.

Did anyone see her in the town below? She had on Logan’s red down jacket because her own was too small. Underneath it, a wool sweater covered a shapeless maternity dress, brown as a potato sack. Clara was having trouble finding decent clothes this far from any shopping centers. Her breath smoked in gauzy streams in the cold. Below her she saw the grid of the sleeping town, a few trucks moving along the main drag, but she felt cut off from them. Why then this strange sense of being watched? This sense that eyes were on her even now?

She walked the rows, seeking out a pattern of organization. The older tombstones bore laments in German. SEELIG SIN DIE TODEN DIE DEN HERRN STERBEN, DEN IHRE WERKE FOLGEN IHNEN NACH. Clara traced the cold marble with her fingers, guessing at some of the words since Anglo-Saxon was close to Low German. Though he is dead, his work follows after him. People had left plastic flowers, the bright yellows and reds the only color in this place. She recited the names: Gunther, Helga, Wolfgang, Frieda. Names of the original settlers who carved out “civilization” from these woods, who killed the Indians and tamed the wolves and made the land safe for livestock and crop rotations. Shannon. Halvorsen. Brecken. Scheuler. Names of those who continued to hold sway in Logan’s church, whom her husband dared not anger.

She went deeper into the cemetery, the marble tombstones growing less ornate as she came to what she guessed was the suicide corner here at the edge closest to the woods. No more angels. Clara found no grave for Sylvia Meyers. Maybe she was not here? It didn’t make sense for her father to bury her here. She had been so wrapped up in her search that she hadn’t even noticed where she was until she saw the name below her. It was a simple gravestone of polished purple granite. SETH FALLON: DECEMBER 11, 1970–SEPTEMBER 13, 1987. Logan had told her the story of the boy’s strange burial, Seth’s body now up on the mountain.

Clara knelt in the grass. She felt a prickling along the ends of her fingers. The leafless woods loomed nearby. All the corn had come out of the field where Seth killed himself, only a few bent stalks leaning crookedly in the tilled black rows.

A crackling in the leaves made her turn. Only two of the three coyotes stood there, panting in the cold, their ribs showing through their skinny hides. The big gray was not with them. One came forward, whining, but danced away again when Clara stood, dusting the grass from her knees, and approached. They retreated into the woods, but stopped to look back at her, beckoning.

A pregnant woman alone in the woods with dangerous animals. Something like them had harried her mother through this very stretch of woods. She had died here, less than a quarter mile from town. She had died with Clara shielded close against her, absorbing the last of her warmth.

Wolves. But there were no coyotes back then, and the last wolf in the county had been killed more than a century ago. The old-timers had told her this. It had only been a few years that coyotes had come back, migrating from South Dakota to fill a place on the food chain.

She was our Duchess. A displaced person. She had to be punished for her sin.

The coyotes loped down an old deer track. Even without leaves the woods were thick and shadowy, the branches of the bur oaks braiding a canopy above her. She pushed on through sumac and bramble, following the sounds of the coyotes ahead. Eventually, they reached a small meadow, where the gray lay on his belly in the grass.

The two smaller ones circled it warily. The alpha lay gasping, and bright blood splattered the ground around him. Clara saw when she knelt beside him that he was caught in a trap, the serrated teeth closed around his front paw. She smelled spoiling hamburger, or whatever meat the trapper had used to lure him in. He’d gotten greedy, careless.

This coyote nosed her hand. Clara stroked his soft fur gently. He growled but did not snatch at her with his jaws. “This is going to hurt,” Clara said. “I’m sorry but there is no other way.” The gray tried to heave himself off the ground and strained against the trap that held him, snarling and gnashing as his tendons tore and fresh blood sprayed from the wound. The trap, bolted into the ground by a chain, hardly budged.

Clara backed away. The other coyotes yipped as he thrashed and then finally settled in a heap.

She came close once more. “You can’t do that,” she said in the quietest voice possible. She knelt again beside him. Under her breath she was singing an old spell, an Anglo-Saxon galdor to soothe a monster. His lids were shut, and she thought maybe he had lost consciousness, but when she reached for the trap, the yellow eyes snapped open. He growled once more, his black lips exposing his razor canines.

Clara’s fingers fumbled with the metal. The great hinge did not want to give way, the iron cold against her naked fingers. When the coyote suddenly lunged forward and clamped down on her arm, she started to scream, but realized he hadn’t punctured the cloth with his sharp teeth. He was just holding on. She swallowed, finished her spell, and slipped her hands deeper into the trap to get more leverage. Then she tugged with all her might, straining until the trap opened just enough that the gray could slide his injured paw out.

He pulled away from her, limping on three legs. Clara saw that he had left behind digits from his partly severed paw in the trap. When she let go off the hinge, the trap snapped again, causing the gray to snarl. Delicately, she plucked the long, bloody claws from the grass and put them in her pocket. The smaller coyotes licked the gray’s face, sniffed at his wound, and then they bounded off together into the woods.

Clara should have headed home, but down in the valley she could make out the farm where Grizz Fallon lived, smoke coiling from his chimney. If it was true that Seth had tamed these coyotes, his father might know what to do with them, some way to keep them from coming into town where it was only a matter of time before they were killed. Or hurt someone. She followed the same old deer path down through the woods toward the house and then cut across the property, passing a wheelbarrow abandoned next to the stump of a fresh statue, a creation twisting into the tree itself. The statues were leering figures under the November sky, their pearly skins glittering as they watched, through bottle-green eyes of glass, Clara walk among them. A forest of stone monsters, the foes of Hiawatha. She imagined Seth as a boy playing among them, a toy bow flinging arrows at the frozen figures.

The farmhouse below stood on a small rise overlooking the yard. Though the white paint of the boards peeled away, betraying its age, the limestone foundation looked sturdy, except for a warping, wraparound porch.

Skeletons of abandoned farm equipment were tucked back in the grove, an old H tractor up on blocks, a rusting cattle trailer beside an open corn bin that had willow trees growing inside it. The barn had the same matching limestone foundation as the house. Cattle milled uneasily in their pens, wading through deep pools of manure that also caked their hides and hung in dirty green strings from their faces. They pressed close to a wire fence as she approached, and one, shorter than the rest, bellowed, his primal challenge ringing through the empty yard.

The house faced east to take in the mountain and rising sun. The mountain. Clara had caught glimpses of it from the road, but now with fall stripping the leaves from the trees it rose before her, the curved slope like the gray back of some immense sleeping animal. She saw the form of a giant in the shape, the small hills beside it his shoulders, the rounded head of waving grasses. As mountains went, it was smaller than she’d imagined it, no more than three hundred feet by her estimate, but it was like nothing else around it. A sacred place, her father promised, with a healing limestone spring that spilled down to join the river. Some large bird, an eagle or a red-tailed hawk, circled the summit, riding a thermal in a gyre. The kid was buried up there. It was where the coyotes denned, the place of her father’s stories. I’ve told you all you need to know, he’d promised her when they last spoke. Here was the mountain, and Clara had found her home, though she could not climb it today, with the smell of snow in the air, with all that was happening in this place. Her earlier sense of worry had not evaporated. She faced the silent house, fingering the coyote’s claws in her pocket, for courage or luck.

“Hello,” she called out, knowing before she even stepped up to knock on the door that no one was there. The walk had done her good, woke up her sluggish mind. In the cold, she felt her blood beating and the snug presence of the baby inside her. She sat on the porch to catch her breath just as Grizz Fallon walked out of the grove, lugging a bundle of wood, an ax slung over his shoulder.

He had not spotted her yet, and for a moment she thought of ducking around the porch and hurrying home. Instead, she waited as Grizz walked her way. She’d forgotten his size, broader in the shoulders than Seth, his long arms looped around the logs he carried, the knuckles thick and scarred from years of labor. He wore tan coveralls and a quilted flannel shirt, an orange hunting cap pulled low. “Mrs. Warren? What brings you here?”