Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,40

sat back. “Could I come see you in person?”

“Look, I can’t think about this right now. I’ve got too much going on. Busy, busy.”

“Okay. A few more days then.”

“What? You’re not listening.”

“I’ll call back Wednesday. Good day, Mrs. Warren.” He hung up before she could say more.

LOGAN AND CLARA ATE off paper plates that night, and after dinner he left for another visit, one he’d set up a few weeks ago, before things went wrong. “You work too hard,” she warned him on his way out the door. “I worry about you.” Really, what she wanted was for him to stay here. They deserved a night together. No responsibilities. Just the two of them up late talking like when they were engaged.

“This is only temporary,” he said on his way out, “things’ll get better.”

She looked away. He was pouring himself into this place. The weight he’d lost made his blue eyes even more piercing and prominent above the hollows of his cheeks. He was pouring himself out as she tried to hold what fell in her hands.

“When the funeral is over and done with, we’ll go to Fell Creek, to the supper club there. They make the most delicious popovers.”

He kissed her, not on the mouth. The center of her forehead. His lips dry, cracking. She didn’t know how to hold him here. What a young wife should say or do.

A moment later, his Nova rumbled in the driveway, and then he was gone.

In the first year of his ministry Logan was on a mission to visit each and every one of his parishioners. Many of the elderly citizens in the congregation had finished their schooling in the eighth grade during the Depression and World War II. The homes and hobbies of these people revealed an unexpected diversity: a bachelor farmer who was a championship chess player; a one-hundred-three-year-old lady who spent her days, summer or winter, tatting snowflakes she gave away each Sunday at church; a veteran who had been there for the liberation of Auschwitz.

He visited homes where newspapers were stacked to the ceiling, occasional homes of filth that clouded his hair and clothing with an ashtray smell of desperation. To all of them he carried simple questions: What is it you like about your church? What makes you proud to be a part of your congregation?

In a month’s time Logan had visited more than thirty households, and as one they were confounded by his questions. Pastor, one of the bachelor farmers had explained, it’s just that we’re used to talking about what’s wrong.

Clara stood in the kitchen, looking out into the night that had swallowed up her husband, the gas stove heating a grumbling kettle behind her. She was about to check on it when she noticed something running at the edge of the yard, forms close to the ground. She shut off the lights and let her eyes adjust to the night outside. The coyotes were back again. The largest of them was a gray with a frosty-silver back. A yard lamp behind the church caught the tawny glistening of his fur. The coyotes moved in formation, following behind the gray.

They surrounded an old dog’s pen in a neighbor’s backyard across the way from Nora. There they yipped and chattered at the dog, who lay inside his kennel with his muzzle on his forepaws, an old man being tormented by teenagers. Then the dog rose slowly to his haunches and loosed a deep booming bark followed by ferocious growling, his fur bristling. The coyotes continued to circle his pen, yipping and dancing. The old dog woofed again, and the coyotes, tiring of their game, trotted off into the night, chuckling like punks.

Clara had never seen anything so strange and beautiful and ritualistic. The kettle spat and jumped on the stove behind her. Just when she was about to turn around, another flicker of movement caught her eye. Sorena, the mother cat. Sorena must have smelled the coyotes out there because she was running full speed, streaking across the yard. Or maybe the coyotes had flushed her from her hiding place, because the gray came on behind her, a flash of silver under the yard lamp. The kettle whistled and then screamed.

The cat shot up a crab-apple tree while the gray and the other coyotes circled the base. Even behind the window Clara could hear Sorena hissing at them below. The gray alpha leaned his weight against the trunk. He was big, the size of a German