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
Deeper, 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