rows sere and stunted, so that the wind gnawed at what remained and lifted a fine scrim of topsoil from the fields and flung it against the outbuildings. He walked with this wind under a sun that was a cinder in a vacant sky, the gun cool against his ribs.
The farthest he had ever traveled from this valley was across the state border to Sioux Falls. This was the only home he had ever known. The town of Lone Mountain perched along terraced streets overlooking the surrounding valley, a half mile wide and thickly wooded on either side. For aeons the Minnesota River had been at work eating through topsoil toward the earth’s core, carving out this place from vast prairie farmlands stretching hundreds of miles all around.
The valley had been a place of both shadow and shelter for generations of Indians—the Cheyenne, the Fox and Sauk, the Dakotas—all who came to hide from the winter winds on the prairie. Only the ghosts of the Indians remained, but these were potent ghosts with no love for the Germans who had stolen their land following a summer of war a hundred years before, and when a little girl drowned in the river, the old-timers crossed themselves and thought of the brown hands that surely pulled her under. They later said such a ghost moved in the boy, an angry spirit urging him on. Such darkness could not have come from one of their own.
They had lived here for generations after traveling across the Atlantic but still felt like sojourners. When the hail came, when the river bucked and broke its banks, when the children lay awake in the late hours fevered and coughing—they knew this place belonged to the devil, had always belonged to him. Prince of the broken world, broken now more than ever with the last family farms going under. The Torvicks. The Kantors. Jerry Kroger and his tribe of daughters. All gone.
And now this wickedness.
The boy stopped at the parsonage first, where the pastor and his wife Clara lived next to the church. Clara was his substitute English teacher at Lone Mountain High. Her husband was off visiting a homebound couple when the boy rang the bell. Alone down in the basement, Clara wasn’t able to explain later to authorities why she didn’t answer the door.
Next, he went down the main drag, moving toward a downtown that bustled with weekend traffic, so many people parked outside the pool hall and Jurgen’s Corner Grocery. No one later remembered seeing him on the sidewalk or could recall phoning the sheriff, Will Gunderson. It might just have been that Will was driving past at that very moment and what he saw—a school-age boy hunched into a coat in the fullness of Indian summer—troubled him. Will was a survivor of two tours in Vietnam, a decorated veteran, and he was a known hard-ass who had taken the boy into custody several times before this day.
He pulled over beside Seth Fallon and rolled down his window to say something. What passed between them is a mystery. Seth flung open his coat and brought out the gun. No one remembered seeing Seth come down the sidewalk, but that shotgun blast echoed all over Lone Mountain.
NAMESAKE
He came home from driving a seed truck to find his farmyard swimming with lights from four or five squad cars parked out on his lawn. His Christian name was also Seth, like his son, but most in town still called him Grizz from his days playing nose tackle for the Lone Mountain Braves. Grizz felt as sapped as the yellow leaves clinging to the trees out in the yard, and he wanted nothing more than a Steak-umm sandwich on rye bread, to wash it down with Seagram’s and Seven and sleep until the ache in his back woke him. As soon as he saw those lights, he knew it was something to do with Seth. The cars had decals from Brown and Lyon Counties, sheriffs and deputies from miles around. Dark was just beginning to spread long shadows through the yard and surrounding fields where a couple of the deputies fanned out, their Maglites carving trails through the blond corn.
Grizz stayed in the cab of his semi, watching it all from far away, his radio tuned to Lone Mountain’s only station, KLKR, where long-dead country singers like Patsy Cline crooned above the stir of static. Lights were on in the outbuildings, both the barn and the machinery shed, and