She folded her arms across her chest. She wanted to tell him that she felt like she had to do this, now that she was going to be a mother herself. She wanted to tell him how badly she had wanted a mother growing up, someone to explain the mysteries of womanhood, how she had run away in search of her mother, how she needed her mother more than ever with a baby growing inside her. Instead she said, “How many interviews have you gone to?”
Logan frowned. “They’re used to getting experienced pastors at these places, even if they no longer have the budget for it. And the answer is five.”
“Only one of the five has called you.”
Logan had been raised in the swank Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago, the only child of two agnostic psychotherapists who later divorced. When his parents bickered, he would sneak out of the house, walk to the Lutheran church down the street, and climb into the balcony where he napped on the padded pew, light from a stained-glass window pouring over him.
Against his parents’ wishes he started attending services every Sunday, befriended the pastor, and would go on to study religion at Concordia in Moorhead, Minnesota, before finishing his master of divinity at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. It was a rebellion in reverse, their only child choosing what his father termed “the ultimate delusion.” Relations between Logan and his parents remained chilly to this day. They had not seen them since the wedding.
Logan held her ghost hand, the nubs where the fingers were missing. He was drawn by a wound that repulsed others. “Those stories your father told you. You think this might be the place?”
“I don’t know,” Clara admitted. “I don’t know if it’s the place she was going or where she died or maybe none of these things. But he used to speak of a mountain in his stories. How many places are there in that part of the world with the word ‘mountain’ in the name?”
“Where was she going with a baby in the backseat in the middle of a blizzard?”
“My dad only said she was crazy.”
Logan tensed. “Like postpartum?”
“They didn’t have a name for it then. And he didn’t keep any pictures of her, wouldn’t even tell me her name. You saw when we went through his things. He didn’t even have my birth certificate in his record files.” Her fingers traced circles on the kitchen table before she looked into his eyes again. “We need to go there. You’ve been called. They’ll have archives in the courthouse or even at the local newspaper. Someone will remember the story. I just have a gut feeling about this, okay?”
Logan blew his nose in a napkin. “Help me understand, Clara, because it sounds crazy. Why would you want to live in the place where your mother died?”
AFTER HE LEFT THAT morning, Clara sat at the dining room table drinking coffee and lingering over her old textbooks. She would have to give them back now that she wasn’t going to be teaching there anymore. In the background the local radio station, KLKR, quoted from Reagan’s secretary of agriculture, who had said earlier that day in his press conference that farmers should “Get big or get out.” Stormy Gayle, the announcer, hissed into the microphone in response, “This is what we’ve come to in this country. What will happen to the land when it is no longer worked by families who know the soil? What will happen to families when there is no longer land to anchor them?” Clara shut the radio off, saw from the clock that it was 9:45, second period for her on a normal day, sophomore English.
She needed to go the grocery store because the refrigerator was bare, but she didn’t want to face people in town yet. She needed time. While paging through one of the English literature textbooks she would no longer be teaching from, Clara heard a wet whump sound, the sound of a body or some heavy object leaning against the back door.
She set her book down and went through the kitchen. She opened the back door and found a piece of paper had been slid under the jamb. She unfolded it. In her hands she held a pencil drawing of a wolf, jaws stretching wide to swallow the whole world. A single tree letting down its leaves upheld the earth, but even this was being squeezed by a