child. When he had been coming through the corn it was to the mountain he had been running. There were secret limestone caves that only the boy knew, places so deep beneath the earth that had he gone there maybe even men with hounds would not have been able to track him. Seth, who studied survival magazines and planned on joining the army when he graduated, could live out there a long time, until even the story of the man he murdered bled into daylight and was forgotten. If there was anything Seth knew and loved it was the wild. Grizz tended this idea of his boy, a guttering flame cupped in his hands. Seth living in a cave, hunting geese and pheasants in the fall, tracking deer with thin, bony ribs through birchwood bogs in winter. Seth alone, no longer troubled by his demons. Seth alive, knowing his dad had not failed him.
He gripped the ax as he approached the bull. The bull did not run; a Beltie bull is not as aggressive as other breeds and maybe not as clever as Grizz had given him credit for. The bull lowered his head and kept cropping the lawn, watching Grizz with his doleful eye.
They both looked up when they heard the sound of tires crunching on gravel. A long tongue of dust billowed up from the half-mile driveway as a gleaming red sedan rolled closer. Whoever was approaching now was someone Grizz did not want to see. As his anger against the bull ebbed, he became aware of how he hurt and resented whoever was approaching for making him feel anything again.
The long driveway was lined by ancient bur-oak trees and cottonwoods, so the car passed in and out of the sun. The driver kept slowing, either to stare at the mossy concrete statues underneath the trees or because they were afraid. They must not have been from around here, because everyone in town knew this stretch of woods along the Fallon driveway and had named it the Frozen Garden.
Most of the statues were figures from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha that Grizz had fashioned from river stones, concrete, and mesh wire over the years. The forms were layered with cowrie shells and old glass bottles so that they caught and held what light made it through the trees. They crouched behind hewn stumps and were half hidden by bramble. Wenonah, impregnated and then abandoned by the West-Wind, lifted her arms to the branches above her. Megissogwon, the magician, a caped figure with a long beard, craned his neck as though watching the road. Close by, the beaver king, Ahmeek, squatted atop a weedy knoll.
Keeping one eye on the bull, Grizz walked over to the machinery shed, opened the door, leaned the ax against the wall, and shut it behind him. He would wait out the stranger here. He watched through a greasy window as the sedan coasted in. The windows were tinted, but he could see the driver was young and female, her straw-colored hair tied back in a ponytail. She stepped out, dressed in a long burgundy skirt and creamy blouse, her uniform from the pool hall, and eyed the cattle milling on the lawn nervously.
He knew who she was, though he had never met her. Leah. Leah Meyers, Seth’s girlfriend. Seth was secretive about such things, but Grizz knew he’d been taking her down to Aden’s Landing, where all the teenagers went to drink and make mischief, because he’d come back late one night when Grizz was waiting up for him, and the smell of the river had been on Seth’s skin. He had forgiven his boy the worry he caused, because it’d been a long time since he’d seen him so happy.
“Tell me about her,” he had said that night, and Seth did. She was a niece of the sheriff’s. She had come from the Cities and didn’t know enough to avoid a boy with a reputation like Seth’s. Her family was trying to make a go of it in town, her dad keeping books at the co-op. She didn’t like talking about what had brought them here to the “boondocks,” but there’d been some trouble, both with her and her father. She was entranced by the stretch of woods where the statues were, by the Longfellow lore, and the curse Seth told her the family was living under, the bloody history of the property. And yet she had broken up with Seth