husband, Charlie. Nora and Charlie shared one of those marriages, Catholic and Lutheran, which caused so much woe on either side of their families. Nora had told Clara all about it, her voice so loud during the church social hour that people at other tables turned to listen. “ ‘It’s all the same to me,’ Charlie used to say. ‘To get to New Ulm you can take Highway Twenty-Nine or you can take the Fourteen. They both end up in the same damn place.’ ”
It had been Nora’s husband, Charlie, who insisted the statue be placed in the middle of the green growing things. Nora told her she had resisted at first, but the statue grew on her. In the statue’s arms she took some comfort. Here was a woman given a sacred task, bearing God’s child into a world that would mock him and impale him on a tree. She did not break when that man was spat upon and crucified. Her love had been absolute. The resurrected Christ came back to women first.
BOY FROM THE STARS
In the days that passed, Grizz held firm on not allowing a funeral. He filed the paperwork asking for the right to bury his son on his own land, then waited on word from the county and tried to keep his mind off it with chores. There was always more work on a farm than any one body could do alone, especially in the fall. Two hundred acres of corn and soybeans to be harvested, fifty-three head of cattle to feed and water, new siding for the barn, twenty acres of bottomland meadow hay and alfalfa to bale and stack in the mow, and machinery to be oiled and groomed for the coming harvest and winter.
He could fill himself up with such numbers and work. It was how he had lived with the boy after Jo died, so much work it stripped away the words he might have spoken across the dinner table, words that might have called Seth out of the darkness he carried inside him.
Any thought of that commissioner set his teeth on edge, even as he sought to lose himself in his labor. The hay in the lower meadow needed cutting, so the day following Grizz’s visit to the funeral home he hitched the mower to the International and set out to do the work. Even with the tractor in full thrum and the blades of the cutter scything out long rows of grass, he felt unsettled. Occasionally on the mountain he caught a winking of light, of sun on glass or gleaming metal. As though he was being signaled by a mirror. The hair raised on his nape. There was someone out there watching him; he felt sure of it.
Something else troubled him as well. These last few years Seth’s coyotes always came to greet him shortly after he started haying, loping down from their mountain warren to frolic in the fields. He feared the moment as much he longed to see them, for they were only alive because of what Seth had done years earlier, and he had lain awake these last few nights with the windows open to listen for their singing, but the night remained silent.
The coyotes came for the mice the tractor scared up from the grass. When the mice fled, the coyotes leaped after them, pouncing with curved spines to pin the rodents under their paws, then gobbling them up in a single gulp. When Seth was alive, Grizz had recoiled at the sight of them, the way anyone raised on a farm reacts to a predator invading his space, fox or egg-thieving skunk. Seth’s little wolves were big, rangy creatures, but their lean snouts and long, comical ears belied something more dangerous. These were efficient killers, and they left little to waste. In the spring when the cows calved in the pasture, the coyotes were always there, gorging on the placenta and afterbirth, their muzzles bloody in the early light. He had told Seth that if they harmed even one of those calves he would shoot them all, but they hadn’t, not yet. Seth had held them at bay.
These last few years, the sight of them coming down from the mountain had cheered the boy during the hot work of haying. Grizz would hear his boy’s laughter, a rare sound, when Seth sat behind him on the rack. Sometimes he would call, and the coyotes would answer, especially with evening coming on. The