Little Wolves (6 page)

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.

WELCOME TO THE COUNTRY

L
ogan 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.