Little Wolves

WELCOME TO THE COUNTRY





Logan had already been up for an hour by the time Clara came downstairs. He sat alone at the dining room table, leaning on his elbows, his blond hair dark with sweat. He was wearing a T-shirt, skimpy Lycra shorts, and tube socks pulled up nearly to his knees. Logan didn’t turn his head to wish her good morning when she entered the room, but he kept his attention fixed on the rain outside, muttering something—a prayer?—under his breath.

She had come downstairs wearing only a blue terry-cloth robe. She wanted to get a cup of coffee and then head upstairs to soak in a bath and write some more, but spotting Logan changed her plans. “I’m going to fry some eggs,” she told him. “Want any?”

Logan startled at the sound of her voice. Then he shook his head without turning her way. “I can’t eat so early in the morning, especially not after a run.”

Clara crossed the room and touched his damp face with the back of her hand, feeling the Braille of his boyish beard. “You need to eat something,” she said. Above his hollow cheeks, his eyes sank into their sockets. Day by day, Clara was growing rounder while her husband shrank, as if she were one of those spiders who feeds on her mate, drinking in his juices until he’s only a sack to lay the eggs in. What a terrible thought. She was having such thoughts these days. Clara knew Logan was fasting in the mornings again, heading straight over to church and starting his day by kneeling before the altar, his hunger a punishment for not having the answers his congregation required. Perhaps it was wrong of her to tempt him with fried eggs, but looking at him now—her pale, handsome husband with his knobby knees and receding hairline—a motherly tenderness welled in her. “What were you thinking about here, sitting in the dark?”

“Satan,” he said, glancing her way and smiling ruefully.

“Oh, is that all?” She pulled over a chair so she could sit beside him.

“Feels strange to say aloud. Sort of foolish.”

Was it? She knew Logan loved the story of Martin Luther battling the devil in his last days, flinging a book across the room and reminding Lucifer of his baptism. What was God without the devil, heaven without hell? Though he considered himself a modern seminarian, quick to point out that accounts of demon possession in the Gospels were likely manifestations of mental illness, Clara knew that he also believed in the devil. That the devil was active in this world made Logan’s work urgent.

Clara put her hand over his. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I don’t know exactly,” he said, squirming in his chair, edging deeper into the cushioned seat, “except that I was up in the pulpit looking out over my parishioners when I spotted him. He was ordinary looking, just a guy in a dark suit, but with eyes he took away my voice. I tried to speak, but it was like there were hands”—Logan paused and massaged his throat with his free hand—“choking the words. The congregation knew something was wrong, but I was alone up there. No one even noticed him there except for me. The devil there, smiling.”

“How awful.” His hand beneath hers was cold, as if the rain had soaked straight through him on his morning jog. She wondered if Logan’s telling of the dream was also meant to rebuke her for not being in church last Sunday. She knew exactly the rational reason behind what he’d seen, and that it was called the Hag’s Dream, or sleep paralysis. While you sleep your body locks down your muscles to keep you from acting out your dreams. But sometimes you wake up partially; you rise to a conscious state and realize your body is paralyzed and in that moment you panic and see the thing you most fear. In the Middle Ages it was a mare, a black horse, which is how the word “nightmare,” comes down to us through the ages.

Clara knew what Logan’s dream was because she knew her etymology, like any good linguist. But she said nothing to her husband, because it wouldn’t help him feel any better. She also had trouble sleeping, her dreams restless and furtive, as if she had tuned in to the voices scattered about town, where the story of what happened went on and on, a psychic echo. Writing in her notebook, telling her father’s stories, soothed the voices and let her rest. Writing was her prayer.

The only language she spoke for a time was her hand on his. Nightmares aside, it felt good to be with him in the gloomy morning, touching. The next words slipped out of her without thinking. “Was it a mistake to come here?” When Logan flinched she wished she could take it back.

Logan withdrew his hand. “Doesn’t do any good to think about that. We’re here.”

The room next to them was still cluttered with unpacked boxes a couple of months after their arrival. “We could go,” Clara said, her voice barely a whisper. “You could tell the synod bishop it wasn’t a good fit, ask for reassignment.”

A faint flush crept into Logan’s cheeks as he studied her. “Three years, Clara. If you spend less than that in your first call, it looks bad on your record. We waited two months for this assignment. How would I get another call?”

There was nothing kind in his blue eyes so she looked away from him.

“We can’t leave them in the lurch. Not after this.” Logan continued when she didn’t say anything, “Besides, coming here was your idea, remember?”

“People make mistakes all the time. There’s no shame in admitting it.”

Logan rose from his chair, closing off the conversation. He was moving away from her once more, going off to shower and then to the church next door. “I’ve found a home for those kittens,” he said, surprising her. “Last Sunday, after the service.”

“What?”

“I think that’s part of what’s bothering me, my allergies, just having them in the basement. The Nelson family said they would take them. All their cats died from the distemper. Now they have rats in the barn again.”

Clara couldn’t bear to look at him. “I want to come with when you take them.”

“No. The Nelsons are very private people.” Logan averted his gaze. Had she caught him in a lie? Was he planning on dumping those kittens by the side of the road or worse? It occurred to her that she didn’t know what he was capable of doing. If Clara saw the Nelsons in church she would ask them about the kittens, but she had no idea whom he was talking about. Most of Logan’s congregation were still strangers to her.

“They’ll all die. They’re too small. They were born too late in the fall.”

“Welcome to the country,” Logan said.

“I didn’t know when I married you that you had a mean streak.”

Logan touched her hair, patting it. This should have bothered her even more, but his touch took away the other words she was going to say, and she let his fingers linger there. It surprised her how much she wanted him to touch her, when she had just been ready to spit in his eye. She shut her eyes while he massaged her scalp. “You feel things too keenly,” he said.

His voice was lower, calming. His fingers found the ridges in her skull, pressed gently at the tension. “I’m not trying to be mean,” he said. “You knew from the night you found them you couldn’t keep them.”

“Just let me keep them one more day.”

Logan kissed the top of her head. “A few more days. I’ll take them on Friday. The Nelsons are good people, Clara.”

By “good people” it was clear what he meant. His kind of people. Church people. She let the comment pass because she could feel the baby stirring inside her. She let it pass because her husband who had been avoiding her was touching her, his hands moving from her hair to her shoulders. “The baby,” she told him. “It’s kicking. Do you want to feel it?”

Logan’s hands went still.

She opened her robe. Her breasts were heavy and full. Beneath them the globe of her belly stretched, blue veins wending over the surface. Something, a hand or a foot, thrust outward from the skin.

“Clara,” he said. “The curtains are open.”

The world outside gauzy with rain. “I don’t care.” She guided Logan’s hand to her stomach, closing her own over the top. They didn’t have to wait more than a minute. Feeling Logan’s cold hand, the baby thumped once more and then sank back into the depths within her.

“Weird, huh?” she said to fill the silence. Clara knew he was studying the curve of her breasts. She had seen the longing and loneliness in him from the very first time she met him. Now, she wanted him to stay. She wanted him to keep touching her. And shouldn’t he want her even more, since she almost died? Shouldn’t he affirm this life, hers, his, the mystery inside her? They hadn’t made love since finding out about the baby.

Clara’s conversion to Lutheranism was inextricably bound up in the physicality of her husband. Logan had been her father’s pastor. A few weeks after her father died, Clara attended services at Logan’s church one gray Sunday and was surprised when Logan asked her to brunch at the café down the street. They would meet again for coffee in a few days, then dinner out, followed by dinner at his place. He needed her, she saw, just as much as she needed him. In his quietness she read depth; in his shy touch, innocence. The first time she undressed for him, undid the buttons on her blouse, she had watched the pupils in his light blue eyes darken with desire. “I knew I would love you before I ever met you,” he told her later in her bedroom that night. “It was the sound of your name in the stories your father told about you. Clara, clear as running water. Clara, like clarity. Clean like the sky. I knew you before I ever saw you.”

Behind them the phone jostled on the receiver.

Logan’s hand was still on her stomach, tracing slow circles. Her hand on his.

Don’t. Stay.

Logan went to get the phone.

WAS IT ONLY A few months earlier she had spread out the map on the kitchen table, her index finger tracing the black road that raveled along the river? She remembered tasting the name silently with her tongue against her teeth: Lone Mountain. The pull of something dark and sweet wafted inside her, a scent like burning sugar. Childhood whispers.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Logan said.

She touched the tiny dot, measuring. It looked to be about two hundred miles west of the Twin Cities. She imagined endless cornfields, a flat prairie expanse, and then that cleft in the land where the road vanished into the valley. The big woods, sudden escape, shade. Her voice sounded tinny when she responded. “I think we should go.”

Logan sipped from his tea. His cheeks were ruddy from a fever, the steam of his drink. “After two months of dead-end interviews in this synod, it comes down to this.”

Clara sat down so they were at eye level. The sky outside held pewter-colored clouds, and a few fat raindrops rinsed down the window. “Ever since you told me the name of that town, I’ve known we should go there.”

Logan shifted in his seat. “It’s a dying church, Clara. Every year three times more funerals than baptisms. The whole region is dying, that way of life. They can barely afford to pay me synod guidelines.”

“We have each other,” Clara assured him. Baptisms and deaths and the numbers of baptized members versus the average worship attendance on Sunday. Numbers and facts and figures as he debated each open position in the synod. For a spiritual man, Logan obsessed over such things. And she knew why else he was afraid. In his last year at seminary, Logan had suffered a severe series of anxiety attacks during finals week. Clara had been the one to find him, rigid on his bed, paralyzed with some nameless terror. She had been the one to talk him out of the spell. He had gone to see a private therapist, afraid that if the news reached the board, they would make him undergo a new battery of psychological tests, and he would not be able to graduate.

She folded her arms across her chest. She wanted to tell him that she felt like she had to do this, now that she was going to be a mother herself. She wanted to tell him how badly she had wanted a mother growing up, someone to explain the mysteries of womanhood, how she had run away in search of her mother, how she needed her mother more than ever with a baby growing inside her. Instead she said, “How many interviews have you gone to?”

Logan frowned. “They’re used to getting experienced pastors at these places, even if they no longer have the budget for it. And the answer is five.”

“Only one of the five has called you.”

Logan had been raised in the swank Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago, the only child of two agnostic psychotherapists who later divorced. When his parents bickered, he would sneak out of the house, walk to the Lutheran church down the street, and climb into the balcony where he napped on the padded pew, light from a stained-glass window pouring over him.

Against his parents’ wishes he started attending services every Sunday, befriended the pastor, and would go on to study religion at Concordia in Moorhead, Minnesota, before finishing his master of divinity at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. It was a rebellion in reverse, their only child choosing what his father termed “the ultimate delusion.” Relations between Logan and his parents remained chilly to this day. They had not seen them since the wedding.

Logan held her ghost hand, the nubs where the fingers were missing. He was drawn by a wound that repulsed others. “Those stories your father told you. You think this might be the place?”

“I don’t know,” Clara admitted. “I don’t know if it’s the place she was going or where she died or maybe none of these things. But he used to speak of a mountain in his stories. How many places are there in that part of the world with the word ‘mountain’ in the name?”

“Where was she going with a baby in the backseat in the middle of a blizzard?”

“My dad only said she was crazy.”

Logan tensed. “Like postpartum?”

“They didn’t have a name for it then. And he didn’t keep any pictures of her, wouldn’t even tell me her name. You saw when we went through his things. He didn’t even have my birth certificate in his record files.” Her fingers traced circles on the kitchen table before she looked into his eyes again. “We need to go there. You’ve been called. They’ll have archives in the courthouse or even at the local newspaper. Someone will remember the story. I just have a gut feeling about this, okay?”

Logan blew his nose in a napkin. “Help me understand, Clara, because it sounds crazy. Why would you want to live in the place where your mother died?”

AFTER HE LEFT THAT morning, Clara sat at the dining room table drinking coffee and lingering over her old textbooks. She would have to give them back now that she wasn’t going to be teaching there anymore. In the background the local radio station, KLKR, quoted from Reagan’s secretary of agriculture, who had said earlier that day in his press conference that farmers should “Get big or get out.” Stormy Gayle, the announcer, hissed into the microphone in response, “This is what we’ve come to in this country. What will happen to the land when it is no longer worked by families who know the soil? What will happen to families when there is no longer land to anchor them?” Clara shut the radio off, saw from the clock that it was 9:45, second period for her on a normal day, sophomore English.

She needed to go the grocery store because the refrigerator was bare, but she didn’t want to face people in town yet. She needed time. While paging through one of the English literature textbooks she would no longer be teaching from, Clara heard a wet whump sound, the sound of a body or some heavy object leaning against the back door.

She set her book down and went through the kitchen. She opened the back door and found a piece of paper had been slid under the jamb. She unfolded it. In her hands she held a pencil drawing of a wolf, jaws stretching wide to swallow the whole world. A single tree letting down its leaves upheld the earth, but even this was being squeezed by a serpent. She knew exactly what it was, a drawing of Ragnarok. She had been teaching Seth’s class of juniors about Norse mythology so they could understand the pagan darkness in Beowulf better, where lives were ruled by wyrd. The wolf was Fenrir, who devours middle earth at the end of time. Under the drawing someone had written a note in runic letters: There is no one who will be spared.

And on the back of the page someone had neatly printed out a riddle:

A man tries to speak



with his throat torn



One woman shrieks



blood in the corn



Man in a pit



her without sleep



one drowns in shit



the other weeps



Wolves under moon



child in her skin



the end comes soon



she will suffer for her sin.



Someone knew. Someone knew about the notes she had been keeping.

The first note she discovered near the overhead projector, pleated in a neat square with her full name printed on the outside. It was Clara’s third day as a long-term substitute, and she needed to get the journals written out on the transparencies for first period. She unfolded the note, wondering who had left it there:

You have such a nice laugh, it makes me warm inside. But even when you are laughing your eyes look sad. You look like the loneliest person in the world.

Clara didn’t know what to do with it. She searched her mind for the faces of those who sat near the overhead, who might have slipped this note here. Part of her wanted to throw it away. Keeping it invited an intimacy. Keeping it meant the words printed there were true in ways she wasn’t ready to think about. She put it in her desk drawer, telling herself she would throw it away after school. But she never did, and every other day when she came in the notes were waiting for her in the same place, tucked carefully under the big bulky overhead.

He’s always gone at night. Where does your husband go? Where could he go with such a pretty wife at home? If you were mine, I wouldn’t leave you alone like that.

He was watching her. She was being watched even after school. But she always had that feeling, living in a small town for the first time in her life, like everything she did or said was being measured and judged. The handwriting of the notes was blocky, printed in all caps, and in places the ink smudged. Someone worked on these in the late hours.

She thought she knew the writer, even though there was never a name. She thought she caught it in the glint of his eye when he watched her up in front of the room. And as deeply as they disturbed her, a small part of her was flattered. She was pregnant, after all, a married woman. Any day, any time, she only had to turn the letters in to the principal. To tell him her hunch, but then so what? It’s not like she could prove anything.

The thing that troubled her most was why she held on to the letters afterward, why she had them still downstairs in a kitchen drawer under the hand towels, the pages folded and refolded so many times that some of the words blurred. She had wanted to turn them in when the sheriff came to interview her. She needed to show her husband. But by now it would have made her look guilty as well, and she hadn’t done anything, had she? She hadn’t encouraged him in any way. Or was it enough, sometimes to simply return his look in class, to stand talking as though there weren’t anyone in the room but the two of them?

I don’t know what to do anymore. Sometimes I watch you. Late at night. You keep a light on even after your husband has come home again. Do you feel me out there in the dark? I love you, dumb as that sounds. It’s what I wanted to tell you. One day I will find the guts to tell you with more than these words. I will tell them all in a way no one can forget.

HER HANDS TREMBLED AS she smoothed the edges of the paper she held now. Seth. She had seen him working on this very same drawing the week before the shooting, and now someone had brought it here to her door. Seth Allis Fallon. There had been nothing between them. The only thing between them was that she had wanted to mother him, a student all the other teachers loathed and feared. Had he misread how she wanted to keep him safe, even from himself? How stupid, how arrogant of her to think that she had tamed him.

The drawing was a cover for the story he never bothered to turn in, the riddle some dark and bloody parody of the ones she had taught his class, but seemed to refer to both Seth’s and the sheriff’s death. It spooked her, especially the parts about the woman with “a child in her skin.” This could only be Clara, could only mean that she was being hunted, but there was no reason for her to feel any danger, not anymore, and what was her sin?

We are all born into Adam’s sin, her husband Logan had said to her once, each of us tasting exile in our mutual fall. Out of this grows our longing for the lost garden, for the paradise we might know again. It’s what he told her the first time they talked about faith, holding her damaged hand in his, speaking of a place where they might be whole inside and out. And if she doubted anything, she did not doubt this man’s goodness, even if she feared him doubting hers.

She scanned the yard, but there was no one there, just the winding gravel path that led to Logan’s church and, beyond the empty graveyard, the blond field of corn and the encroaching woods.