Little Wolves

SWADDLING





Nolan’s Funeral Home was on the other side of town, not far from the nursing home and the big concrete walls that protected the downtown from the river during spring floods. Grizz passed through town itself, his vision focused on the road ahead, ignoring those few who came out of the post office or corner store to witness his rust-pitted Ford rumbling past and wonder over his errand.

The funeral home itself was an ornate, plum-colored plantation-style house with white pillars on the veranda. He shut off his truck, walked right up onto the porch, and stepped into the foyer without bothering to ring the bell. A young man in a three-piece suit and vest was seated behind a polished desk going over some papers alone. He had orange short-cropped hair, a spray of freckles across his face. “Can I help you?” he asked.

He was not someone Grizz knew, likely an apprentice Nolan was training, someone from another town. “Where is he?” he asked.

“Who?”

“I’m looking for my son’s body.”

A door opened behind the young man, and Nolan himself stepped out. He wore the same dark suit as his assistant, a kerchief tucked in his pocket. Nolan was a short man, his white hair pomaded with Brylcreem, his eyes huge and owlish behind thick black glasses. He nodded at Grizz as though he’d been expecting him and waved his hand at the young man to return to the papers at his desk. “Come this way, Grizz,” he said, holding open the door.

When the door shut they were in a narrow hallway together. Paintings of English gardens, the kind with topiary and fountains, hung on the walls, none of them looking like any place around here. A hallway of mirrors and illusions complete with velvety carpet that swallowed the sound of footsteps. Nolan turned as soon as they were in the cavernous hall. “Let’s go to my office. We can talk there.”

“I want to see Seth.”

Nolan paused, his eyes blinking behind his glasses. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Where is he?”

Nolan remained impassive. “Come to my office. We’ll talk about things, make arrangements.”

“I was already told what kind of service they have planned for him and where they’re going to bury him afterward.”

“I heard,” Nolan admitted. “But I don’t sit on the church council, so that sort of thing is not up to me. My job is to prepare people to say good-bye.” He drew in a quick breath and rushed on before Grizz could respond. “There are several affordable packages that might interest you. I am mindful of your circumstances.”

Grizz let out an exasperated breath. It would serve this a*shole right if he wrung his neck right here in the hallway. He hated his suit, the fake flowery prints on the walls, the richness of the carpet beneath his feet. It was all a lie for the grieving, and now Nolan wanted him to sit in his office while he spun out a dizzying row of numbers, bid him sign some dotted line? But Nolan could still help him. He was not the enemy. “What if I was to bury him on my own land?”

“You need a permit from the county. You’d have to get a portion of your land declared a private cemetery. It’s frowned upon by the current commissioner.”

“Frowned upon?”

“Now, if you just follow me, we can talk. It’s not so bad. Do you really think God cares what section of the cemetery we bury bodies in?”

Grizz narrowed his eyes. “Show me the door that leads to your basement.”

Nolan took off his glasses and wiped them with his kerchief. “End of the hallway. Last door on your right.”

Grizz went down the hall. When he opened the door, he smelled the dampness and an odor like leaking gas. His iron-toed boots clacked on the concrete steps leading down. He didn’t even notice Nolan following until the man flicked on a fluorescent set of overhead lights, the tubing buzzing. The door clanged shut behind the men as they went down. Seth’s body waited at the bottom of the stairs in a chilly room. He’d been zipped in a black bag that sat on top of a gleaming metal table, a gurney with wheels underneath, everything polished and clean. Gutters cut into the concrete floor below the gurney led to a large drain.

When Grizz stopped, Nolan set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t do this.”

Grizz clenched his fists and stood with planted feet, bracing himself. “I need to be sure.”

“It’s him. Believe me. But there isn’t much left of his head. I’m telling you that now. It’ll have to be a closed-coffin service.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I’m trying to be honest, here. Look, if it makes you feel any better to know this, when they did the autopsy on Will Gunderson they found his body riddled with cancer. It was all over his chest and stomach. If anything your son saved him long months of agony. They both died quick.”

“Leave us be.”

Nolan did as he asked but stopped on the way out. “This shouldn’t be your last memory of your son. There are better ways to say good-bye. Remember him instead when he was a child.” He went up the stairs without looking back.

Grizz shut his eyes and put his hand on the bag. The last time he had been in a room like this was in the hospital after Jo died. The only thing that saved him in the following days was being able to bring home Seth and care for him as a baby.

Seth had never been happy unless Grizz held him or rocked him, and nights passed with him up late walking the creaky floorboards of the old farmhouse. Seth cried in colicky hiccups and spat up most of the formula he managed to get down the baby’s gullet. When he heard the baby crying he would head into the nursery room and find the child waiting for him. The two had a truce. By rolling a bottle nipple in sugar he could get Seth to take his formula. Eventually, Grizz ended up bundling the sleepless baby into the car seat and taking him for a ride in the truck.

Already the roads of the town had been so imprinted on his brain he could drive them in his sleep, and sometimes on the long road back, stretches passed with his mind so vacant he believed he had been sleeping. Seth quieted as soon as he was in the cab. Father and son owned the empty streets, the sleeping town, all of it belonging to them at that late hour. To stay awake, Grizz kept up a narration of things he saw on the road: raccoons pillaging a trash can, a hunter’s moon, Orion descending. The rumbling truck took them down roads glazed with black ice, Grizz white-knuckling the steering wheel, terrified of the deep ditches opening on either side of the road, down past farmhouses, into the ancient river valley where at last the baby descended into his uneasy rest.

At home he carefully lifted Seth out of the car seat and carried him upstairs to his crib. Before wrapping the baby in his swaddling, he held him, swaying like a branch in a light wind, and prayed, “Lord, this child is little more than a sparrow’s weight in my hands. Watch over him. Do not take him from me. What strength I have I will into this child. Down to marrow, let this boy be whole and safe and strong.”

Grizz let himself weep for what he had lost until his breath was ragged in his lungs. He couldn’t bear to open the bag. Nolan was right. He couldn’t do it, and he hated himself for his cowardice. It wasn’t Seth here, just the shell of his wrecked body. If there such a thing as a soul, a spirit, the boy’s was not here. There was only this to believe in now. Grizz, who only believed in what he could touch with his hands, needed to believe in something else. He had failed his son in life, but he would not in death.

“I’ll come back for you,” Grizz said. “I won’t let them hurt you anymore.”