Little Wolves (10 page)

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?

SWADDLING

N
olan’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 asshole 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.”

WOLFGIRL

D
eeper, further back into her past, there was a wind in the trees outdoors, a wastrel wind. She was six years old, an only child, living with her father in an apartment above the Four Corners, a small grocery store he owned and operated in the suburban town of Savage, Minnesota. That winter, December 1968, it was so cold at night she could hear the elm trees out in the windbreak splitting open, a shriek as their broken branches fell. They dropped with a tremendous thump that shook both the windows and the snow from the roof. Huge icicles draped from eaves, like the claws of some dragon resting on the roof, blown in by the storm. She imagined him up there, scales of his pale lizard belly scraping the tiles. Snow fell and stuck to barren trees and brought more branches to the ground. The night was full of falling snow and falling stars and the wind rising and falling from beyond.

It was the kind of night that made the girl and her father think of the mother, a night when he knew his daughter would bother him long after bedtime, waking him from a deep slumber to ask if she could sleep in his room, because she couldn’t stand to be alone. Not when there was a wind outside, a wind with claws.

He came into her room, a thin man, already graying in his early thirties, his eyes deep-set in their sockets like those paintings she had seen of Keats as a consumptive. He smelled of scotch and Marlboros. He had been a Latin teacher once, a man fluent in a dead language, before the state phased it out of the curriculum. “Tell me a story,” she would beg. “Please.”

He sat beside her on the bed. Sometimes he held her hand in his, touched the ends of her ghost fingers as if the story hid there. This was all he could bear to tell her. “Once upon a time,” he began.

A baby girl was born, entering the world covered in a fine wolfish pelt that darkened her cheeks, shoulders, and back. When they lay the baby on her mother’s belly, the woman recoiled. The girl’s eyes were narrowed to canine slits, and even her cries sounded like subdued yelps. No one in the room, not even an elderly nurse who had seen thousands of births in her lifetime, spoke at first. Then the doctor handed the father gleaming surgical scissors and told him to cut the bloody cord
. “Mein Gott,”
the mother said when she found her breath
.

“Go ahead,” the doctor encouraged behind his face mask, showing the father the bloodied clip where he’d pinched off the placenta. “Cut right here.”

The baby’s father nodded. He muttered some reassurance to his wife. Hearing her father’s voice, the baby stretched forth one tiny hand. Such ancient hands they seemed to him, all pruned and wrinkled. Old soul. It was as if his wife had given birth to a little furry old person now reaching to take hold of him. The baby squalled this whole time, raspy-sounding hiccups like it was drowning in its own fluids. The father reached out with his other hand, and the baby grabbed his pinkie and held on. This touch startled them both and hushed the baby. The father’s eyes filled, and he could not speak. Then a new calmness entered him, and he did what was necessary and cut the cord and let the nurse bundle the child away
.

He reached for her in the shocking moment of her birth and would go on reaching until he breathed his last. The baby weighed only four pounds
.

A little monster, that’s what her mother thought she had birthed. She was being punished; her sin had stained even her womb. She tried to breast-feed the thing and failed. Pale, exhausted, she would go on spilling bloody clumps between her legs long after the doctors sewed her up. It was as if the birthing had torn something out of her, something terrible and secret that she would never have again. And the baby reminded her of nothing more than a runt kitten, something too small and wounded to survive. Slate gray eyes and mewling. “Take it away,” she told the nurse. “I need my rest.”

If the child had been born with a caul instead, the mother might have known what it meant and not been so unnerved. She would have dried and preserved the caul and then pinned it to a wall above the bed to keep the child from changing into a werewolf when the moon fattened. But this glistening gray fur that covered the entire body, as fine as corn silk, disgusted her. The mother was frightened of wolves, and here one had come from her own belly
.

She didn’t know all fetuses were furred for a time in the womb, and that babies born more than a month premature, like this one, sometimes still bore a vestigial reminder of humankind’s bestial origins. By the time the young doctor came to explain to the mother why her baby appeared so freakish, it was too late. He tried naming the condition, telling her it was called lanugo and that it would last a few weeks before the fur was absorbed into the body. “Your baby is small but fierce,” he assured her. “She is going to live.”

Much later that night, as the woman’s husband slept in an armchair beside her, the nurse wheeled the child and her cradle into the room and left again. When the mother awoke, it was waiting for her, and she knew what she had to do. Quietly, wearing only her hospital gown, she snuck her husband’s keys from the lamp stand and took the baby and walked barefoot into the snowy parking lot and was not seen again
.