Little Wolves

LONE MOUNTAIN





Once there was a mountain, a bald grassy place that looked like the skull of a man, all brow and crown, because long ago a giant had trampled the valley before sinking up to his eyeballs and drowning. The little ponds around it were his footsteps, the mounds beside it his shoulders as he shrugged underground. Maybe he was not dead. Maybe he was only sleeping. The wind off the river was his breath. Night in the valley was sentient with his dreaming. Cows that escaped pasture fences went to the mountain and vanished. He slept his sleep of a thousand years and waited and no oaks or maples grew from the grasses over his head.

“Is the giant mean? I don’t want him to wake up.” She never tired of hearing such stories, imagining the hatchet-faced mountain rising above the fields.

“Don’t you worry. He’s old and sleepy, but he watches and waits. He only wakes in times of trouble. There are wolves that live in his caves, and he sends them forth to help those in need.”

“His emis—?”

“Emissaries. They do his bidding.”

“Like the ones who came for the woman. To keep her from hurting the baby. Like the coyote who found the baby after all those people died in the war?”

“Yes, the very ones.”

“Why did the woman want to hurt the baby?”

The giant in the mountain was as old as the moon or stars, as ancient as a stone left by the seashore. Things fastened to him like lichen or mollusks so the rocks found on the mountain were like nothing on the earth. The last tallgrass prairie became the giant’s beard and eyebrows. Nowhere else in the valley could you find the Great Plains prickly pear cactus, green and bristling, among the cedar trees and prairie bush clover thick with bees.

Granodiorite. Gabbro. The rocks were living things the Indians said flew about the stars at night. The boulders were witnesses to creation. A hundred years before, the mountain was holy to the Dakotas. The sick went there to drink from a limestone spring; infertile women ate the dirt. Where red rock showed through the grass, pink as skin, the young men painted their visions. Thunderbeings and black bears and buffalo. Sometimes just a hand etched into the stone to say I was here, if only for a single heartbeat of the one who lives within the mountain.

“Will you take me there, Daddy?”

“Maybe when spring comes again. When I’m feeling more peppy and can make the climb. Then we’ll pack a picnic and sit on the mountaintop and feel the wind in the grass.”

“When?”

“Someday.”



There was no mountain near the town of Lone Mountain so far as Clara could tell, the streets as quiet as a secret on Sunday morning. The competing spires of Trinity Lutheran and Our Lady of the Sorrows peeked above leafy treetops. Silt laden, the Minnesota River wound like a thick ribbon of caramel in the valley below.

It was a pretty enough town at first glance, the women sweeping their porches, the men cutting precise patterns on riding lawnmowers. Victorian houses with gables and wide porches surrounded Hiawatha Park, a green space where the town enacted the annual Longfellow Pageant. Black iron lampposts lined the main street where buildings of dun-colored brick bore the mark of previous decades, advertisements for Lee’s overalls and mugs of Sanka. Farmers wearing seed caps parked their trucks along the curb. At the pool hall, they passed rainy mornings playing a card game called sheepshead to determine who would have to pay for coffee. Know the price of beans or the weather forecast, and you might find your way into a conversation. Logan had told her that people lived in this town for twenty-five years and were still counted as strangers.

There was the grocery store, Jurgen’s Corner, and a bait shop, the Bookworm, which sold yellowing paperbacks and comic books along with supplies for fishermen wishing to ply the brown river. The town movie theater had shut down, but the marquee still advertised Red Dawn with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. Downtown also held a hardware store, two bars, and a Chinese restaurant, the Golden Dragon. Two bars and two churches made for an even balance of liquid spirits and holy spirits in Clara’s estimation. The high school and nursing home were across town from where Clara lived. On either end of the valley, where County Road 29 dropped from the prairie tableland as it sliced through town, big billboards had been erected, each featuring smiling babies meant to represent fetuses. I HAD A HEARTBEAT AT TWO MONTHS, read one, while the other, in stark black and white, admonished THOU SHALT NOT KILL.

The entire town clung to the south face of a steeply sloping hill overlooking the river lowlands, prone to flooding, where the Harvestland silos loomed over taverns and railroad tracks and mobile homes occupied by migrant workers during the pea and corn harvest at the Del Monte plant in nearby Amroy.

The town had all of these things by her accounting, but no sign of the mountain for which it was named, and this troubled her. During Clara’s first few weeks here she made a habit of bumping over county roads in Logan’s ’69 Nova in search of one. She spotted a few low green hills knobbed by granite outcroppings and spindly cedars, but nothing like the vision of the mountain she held in her imagination. The locals she interrogated proved evasive.

“Oh, the mountain,” said one codger when she asked about it during social hour in the church basement. “It’s just east of town a little ways.”

Clara nodded as if this made sense, wondering if the mountain could be little more than a glorified hill named by the homesick Germans who settled this valley.

“No, no,” the man’s brother interrupted, his mouth full of half-chewed chocolate-chip cookie. “You want to get there, you hook a left at the granite pit, head southeast down the gravel road ’bout a quarter mile. You can’t miss it.”

Clara knew who these men were because Logan had given her a church directory from a few years back with pictures from the congregation. The Hendriks brothers, Abel and Abram, were Dutch bachelor farmers who lived a few miles outside town.

Both men had bald, sunburned heads and bulbous frog eyes and puffy mouths. They wore western-style long-sleeved shirts and suede dress coats with patches on the elbows. Both sat up in the balcony along with a group of senior citizens Logan had already identified as malcontents after he roped off the balcony one Sunday, hoping they would sit closer to the front. Without a word they tore down his barrier, their sisters and wives leading the way, and climbed the steep winding stairs to sit where they had sat for generations. Gloating, triumphant. “Stiff necked as the Israelites in Canaan,” Logan groused after the service. These German Americans had endured Indian uprisings, locust plagues, two worlds wars, the Depression, a hail storm that destroyed most of the windows of the church, and an ongoing farming crisis killing their way of life. They would survive one upstart pastor fresh out of seminary trying to get them to change their ways.

So Clara wasn’t surprised these men were directing her according to landmarks they took for granted, guided by a compass she was not born with. Neither of the Hendriks brothers offered to shake her hand or introduced himself, partly because she was a young female and partly because some residents here expected her to know who they were without being told.

The Hendriks brother with his mouth full of food was also staring at Clara’s breasts, swollen because of the pregnancy, while he licked a crumb from his lip. Clara held up her left hand to her chin, as though contemplating something, to show her missing fingers. The old man swallowed hard and coughed. He gulped boiling coffee from a Styrofoam cup and, wincing, looked away. Most men didn’t ask about the hand; they shuddered to imagine it touching them. She was damaged goods, and that’s all they needed to know. Clara leaned forward, pressing her advantage. “Which granite pit do you mean?”



So many of her father’s stories featured this missing mountain, a sacred, healing place. If she could find it, she would find the place where she was from. Knowing this would root her. A part of Clara felt as if she had opened the door that day and received the obliterating blast from Seth’s shotgun, scattering bits and pieces of her true self all about where they could never possibly be gathered together again. She needed to get right before this baby came.