Little Wolves

THE CORNFIELD





After his truck passed on the road, Clara was alone in the fading day. She thought of Seth with his desk all the way in the back of the room, a circle of space around him. A kid with a face so gaunt he almost looked cadaverous. Steorfan. The word flashed inside her the first time she looked into his eyes, an Old English word for “starving,” a word that once simply meant “death.” She didn’t know why it popped into her brain. Seth’s eyes were slanted and golden brown, and the way his dark clothing draped on him made him appear tall and lean and dangerous.

He had been tracked along with the kids not in precalculus and college chemistry, the ones who didn’t expect anything more out of life than to head up to Bowden Technical College for a year to study plumbing or electrical maintenance before returning to Lone Mountain. His class was hell on teachers, and they came to Clara during her fifth period, right after lunch, a riot of noise and distraction. Her first day they continued talking after the bell while she paced in front of the room, deeply regretting wearing heels because she wasn’t used to being on her feet all day long.

The boys sprawled in their desks while the girls gaggled. Clara went over to the doorway and switched the lights off and on to get their attention, but this just made them ooh and aah. They were going to make an example of her to set the tone. Clara’s blood pressure spiked when she realized she had lost control of them before she even got started. A young teacher who didn’t know what she was doing. A mistake to take this job. Logan had argued against the long-term-substitute position when it was offered, reminding her that she was supposed to be finishing her dissertation, an investigation of the remaining Old English texts that described the massacre of St. Brice’s Day under the reign of King Aethelred the Unready. Clara raised her voice again to tell them about Beowulf, which they had just started reading before their last teacher, Mr. Gleason, had a stroke.

Then Seth rose from his place at the back of the room, holding one of the heavy English literature textbooks. In a single, smooth gesture he let it drop from chin height to the floor. The book whipcracked the linoleum. The entire room hushed and turned in his direction, the quiet kids up front tensing and hunkering down in their seats. “Shut the hell up,” Seth told them, “and let the lady talk.”

Clara didn’t say anything right away. Her mouth felt coated with paste, and her eyes watered because her feet were killing her. In the new silence, she took off her heels and tossed them into a corner and let her swollen feet kiss the cold floor. She sipped from her water, drew in her breath, and shut her eyes. Then she began to sing them the story in Anglo-Saxon as it was meant to be told, her voice starting low and then rising in pitch, a lilting soprano that drew in all the cadences of Old English alliteration and bound it together in a weave of sound. Clara, a music minor at the U, had sung in the choir but never soloed before this. She felt all their eyes on her. She hadn’t done this for the earlier class, the smart kids who bent to their reading and the questions at the end of the section without giving her trouble.

“Do you know what language that was?” she asked the silent room. “What story I was telling?” A few mouths gaped; she had their attention. She walked the room and began to speak of it, a kingdom under siege, the nightly terror in the mead-hall. The class went on and they opened their books and dived into the text itself, but it was the stories and songs and legends they wanted. The words and mysteries and how inside the words they spoke every day they carried the memory of this lost world. How it was said that Hitler’s troops fought so hard at the end of World War II because deep in their icy German hearts they remembered Ragnarok, and the end of the world. The gods at war with frost giants, men at war with the gods, even the women as Valkyries riding in on shrieking clouds to pick out the heroic dead. And after class that first day, Seth paused at the door and showed his teeth when he smiled. “Neat trick,” he said before ducking under the door into the churn of bodies in the hallway.

He was the key to the class, the one they feared. Hold his attention and the rest would follow. Clara had the feeling she had been tested in some crucial way, and she had passed. The moment gave her a strange confidence, and the students responded to this confidence, even if it was all bluff and bravado.

Fifth period became her favorite time of the day. She made the room dark for them by drawing the heavy felt curtains along one wall of windows and then lighting a couple of candles along the lip of the chalkboard. They loved riddles and mysteries, so she put up a riddle each day on the chalkboard from the Anglo-Saxon Book of Exeter for them to puzzle over. They drew maps of England, studied the Danish sagas that had inspired Beowulf, histories featuring men with names like Ivar the Boneless and Ragnar Shaggy-pants, who was executed by being lowered into a pit of vipers. It was all a little corny maybe, but she had found a way to make this ancient story come alive. They needed her, a PhD washout who hadn’t been able to finish her dissertation, a pregnant woman with all sorts of fears and hang-ups of her own, but someone who knew the world and could talk to them about it on their own level. She learned how desperate many of them were to get out of this town, how eager for news of life in the outside world, for what awaited them—a few of them—at college.

Even so, she made plenty of mistakes, pried when she shouldn’t have. During a classroom discussion about Grendel descending from Cain, about original sin and monsters, Kelan Gunderson had raised his hand. His black hair was trimmed in a neat crew cut around his square face, and he wore a letterman’s jacket in the school colors, scarlet and gold. Kelan, Seth, and Leah had been an inseparable trio in the hallways.

“Mrs. Warren,” Kelan asked, “do you believe in the devil?”

Caught off guard, Clara laughed nervously at first, thinking of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady impressions on Saturday Night Live. But Kelan wasn’t smiling, and the rest of the class seemed to await an honest answer. Did she? Was it necessary to believe in the devil if you believed in God? Clara had always considered the devil just an ancient bogeyman, as mythic as Grendel, an excuse for the darker aspects of humanity, but she couldn’t say that here, not as the pastor’s wife. She was not used to being in a position of authority.

“You heard what happened over in Amroy?” Kelan went on when she hesitated. “Some Satanists killed a farmer’s pig for one of their rituals. Cut off its head; gutted the body.” This announcement sparked a host of side discussions throughout the class, rumors of rituals back in the woods or on isolated farms that involved molested children, animal dismemberment, secret graves.

“Did any of you see this with your own eyes?” Clara said, trying to get control of the conversation once more.

“My dad’s the sheriff,” Kelan continued. “He could tell you stories about what goes on in this town.” The other students in the room quieted. She felt a collective leaning toward Kelan. Seth they feared for his size and violence, but Kelan held sway with personality. Being the son of the sheriff made every story he told matter that much more. Worse, Clara felt somehow that they needed to believe that these things were happening nearby out in the woods. Such stories offered the delicious shiver that comes from walking in a nightmare and returning safe to your ordinary world.

“Look,” said Clara, “if you read the accounts of serial killers, it’s not the devil they report giving them marching orders. It’s not the devil’s voice they claim to hear up in their heads.”

It’s God who they say told them to kill, she was about to say. But Kelan cut her off. “Do you believe in him, Mrs. Warren? You didn’t answer my question.”

She wasn’t going to lie. These kids had grown up with lies. Adults telling lies to children to keep them afraid or to keep them safe. If Clara held sway here in this room, it was as a truth teller. She hadn’t lied, and she wasn’t going to start. “What do you think?” she said, turning the question back on him.

“The devil is a roaring lion in this world,” he said, his gray eyes shining, and his words flit about the hushed room like bats.

Clara had not meant to think of Kelan now. In truth there was something smug and condescending about the boy that got under her skin. She was trying to remember Seth, the last time she saw him. Clara had been concentrating so she could finish grading a batch of five-paragraph essays from the sophomores on the definition of a hero. She needed to finish them and then get home and start dinner for Logan. It was late in the day, and most of her fellow teachers had gone home, an unnatural quiet spreading in the halls. Clara had the window open to let in a breeze and cleanse the room from the day’s gathered odors—chalk and mildewing dictionaries and teenageboy odors.

Clara had looked up and he was there, dressed in dark jeans, a denim jacket with patches of his favorite metal bands sewn on. His long hair, washed and feathered, glistened. “Seth? I didn’t even hear you come in.”

“Can I ask you something?” His hands were in his jacket’s pockets as he came toward her. “Why’d you come here?”

“We needed a job.”

Seth frowned. He was studying her hand, the missing fingers. Most of the students couldn’t stop staring, but Seth only seemed curious. “You told us your mother died in a car accident.”

She nodded. She hadn’t told the full story, just enough to satisfy their curiosity. The unexpected blizzard. The woman with the baby in the backseat. The only bits of the story she knew, really.

“My mom died when I was a baby, too. She only held me once.”

“I’m sorry.” And this was something she had not expected, either: the way the students came to her after class to talk about such things.

“She had lupus. She had been really sick a long time.” He swallowed. “You remind me of her, pictures I’ve seen.”

“I do?” Clara wasn’t sure what to say. She thought of the notes and was relieved on one hand that he might think of her in such a way. Maybe that was the connection between them, both missing mothers, both longing to hear a mother’s voice. Feral, like her.

“I’ve got lupus, too,” he said. “I found out a few years ago.”

She didn’t know what it was, just that it could cause great pain. Hadn’t it killed Flannery O’Connor?

“That creative response you asked for … there’s something I don’t get about these people.”

“Go on,” she said, grateful for the change of subject.

“All the gods die in Ragnarok, right? It’s like the end of everything. So what’s the point?”

“The point? You mean of living?”

“Living even when you know it’s all going to go to shit, no matter what you do.”

She decided to ignore the profanity. Seth’s class was blunt spoken, and early on as a substitute she had developed tin ears. “I guess the point is to make sure your death matters. To die heroically so you can enter Valhalla. To do something of worth.”

Seth’s Adam’s apple danced in his throat. He stepped forward and took something from his jacket pocket, an object wrapped in tissue paper, and placed it on her desk.

“What’s this?”

He glanced toward the hallway and then at her. “Mrs. Warren, you need to be careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just watch yourself,” he said.

Clara stood.

Seth was walking away, his gaze to the floor. Clara unwrapped the tissue paper to reveal two hand-painted miniatures, the kind used for Dungeons & Dragons. The first miniature had the legs of a human, but the shoulders turned muscular and hairy and were topped with a leering wolf’s head. A werewolf. The second figure had auburn hair, like Clara, and wore a long sweeping gown, her mouth open as though speaking a song or spell. A priestess. Each figure was exquisitely detailed and painted in bold colors. The priestess clutched a staff in her left hand. Clara felt sure if she studied it under a magnifying glass she would see two fingers missing, cleaved by an X-acto knife. She wrapped the miniatures in the tissue paper and put them away in her drawer. It was only later that she remembered Yggdrasil and the story of the two children, Lif and Lift-hrasir, who survive the end of the world by hiding in a tree. Of Balder coming back from the dead, and the sons of gods who witness the green world made again.

It didn’t matter anymore; he was dead, and Clara had failed him or worse maybe even given him some kind of false valor to do something horrendous. His blood was on her hands. And now there was someone out there who agreed, who had put the drawing under her doorjamb like an accusation. Hadn’t she been teaching children about doom?

The boy’s father had been here and gone. Seth cut the word “wergild” in his desk, and as he had done so, had he known his father would come to her with it? A blood debt. Had he meant that this wouldn’t end with his death, that it might trigger something worse? She remembered him, what was good in him, and she was more confused than ever.

Clara looked in the direction the wind had snatched the drawing, off into the cemetery and the field beyond. The sun was setting, but there might still be a chance to find it. In her thin maternity blouse and skirt, she stepped out onto the grass and started climbing the hill. She didn’t know where she was going, except that she had the feeling that whoever had left this for her had come this way, a faint scent of cordite on the breeze. In this stage of her pregnancy, Clara had never smelled so keenly what the world had to offer.

Below her the town lay still. She realized she was repeating Seth’s journey from a few days ago, heading for the country, for shelter, a hiding place. She was sweating in the muggy air from the walk, her feet aching from the hard ground. She’d walked far enough to reach a deep slough filled with tall, waving grasses. On the other side of the slough stood the waiting corn, the field where Seth killed himself. It had to be it. The cornfield ringed round by woods.

Before she knew what she was doing, she’d taken a few steps into the slough. The thick grasses were high as her waist and alive in the wind, stalks bending with each gust. The seed heads of the grass ticked and frayed in the wind. The corn beckoned to her, but she didn’t have the courage to enter. As her eyes scanned it, she saw something that took her breath away.

A figure in a long coat stepped out of the field at that very moment. The boy. Dark hair. The same haggard coat hanging down near his shoes. The vision she had seen that afternoon he came to her door and rang the bell. Seth Fallon.

Her heart pushed up in her throat, and her breathing shallowed. He just walked out of the corn, from the place where he had ended himself, his eyes finding her right away. She stepped back, away from the slough of waving grasses, her blood gone cold.

Impossible. You are dead. You put a shotgun into your mouth and pulled the trigger. They found your body. Maybe a hundred yards separated her, but the figure clearly wore Seth’s coat, his face a dark smear. He wasn’t watching Clara, however. He stood surveying the town, the same spread of valley she had taken in moments before.

Impossible. The morning of the shooting she climbed the stairs after hearing the gun. I saw you cross the graveyard and vanish. I heard screaming down the street. And all I did was press my back to the wall and sink to the floor, knowing without seeing what had happened. How could I have known? Why won’t you leave me alone even now?

Inside her the child twisted and tumbled. A throbbing at the end of her fingers. She was soaked with icy sweat.

Then the figure turned around and vanished into the corn. Clara hurried home, past the cemetery, shivering all over. She was not supposed to have seen what she just saw. You’ve come back for me, my student. You’ve come back and you’re not going to let me sleep, are you? You are restless because you should be in your grave. There was too much she didn’t know. Why? What could the dead ask of her?