whole. She wanted to tell Leah that she was beautiful, that she would find someone to love her one day, and that all of this would seem like one bad dream she’d woken from, but she didn’t say any of those things.
Leah’s mascara ran in black streams from the corners of her eyes. “I’m so messed up.” The sound of footsteps clumping past in the hallway outside made her tense. “I have to go now.”
“You come see me anytime, okay?”
Leah hugged her once more, burying her face in Clara’s shoulder. “I gotta get out of this fucking town,” she said, and then she was gone.
IN THE QUIET OF the room, Clara went to the back and sat at Seth’s desk, the princely island of space around the desk still in force with him dead. She had to wedge her big stomach to fit in, and the wooden chair groaned under her weight. The desks had iron legs painted copper and wooden lids the students could lift up to store their textbooks and papers within deep cavities. Clara lifted the lid and peered inside. Empty, except for the heavy textbook Seth had dropped to the floor to silence the other students the first day of class.
On a hunch, Clara cracked open the book and flipped to the pages at the front where the Beowulf text was laid out. The students weren’t supposed to write in their books, but intricate illustrations decorated Seth’s. He’d been scrawling the runic letters she had taught, just like at the bottom of the drawing someone left at her house. HeWhoSleeps is waking. HeWhoSleeps has heard our call. HeWhoSleeps is coming. HeWhoSleeps will bring death to us all. The final rune smeared, as if he’d drawn it in a hurry.
Clara touched the runes with her hands, felt the grooves the words cut into the paper. He’d pressed down hard with his pen, almost tearing the page. His last week in class, Seth had turned sullen, let his hair hood his eyes. He’d known even then what he was about to do, was talking to the demon inside him. The skin prickled on the back of her neck. Clara stood and shut the window against the chilly wind blowing in.
THE WILDING
He drank until he blacked out most nights, and in the dark, feverish phantasms troubled Grizz’s sleep. Every morning his head throbbed, but he liked the hurt. He woke with the shakes, with cotton mouth; he woke in strange places, once out on the lawn with dirt under his nails, smelling of the grave, once in Seth’s bed, surrounded by the boy’s animal smell, a scent of wet leaves and sweat, where he had looked up to see his son’s Heavy Metal movie poster, a drawing of a leather-clad blonde riding a winged demon through the clouds, pinned to the ceiling above him.
The Dakota who once roamed this land did not speak the name of the dead. To speak the name of the dead was to call their ghost from the hunting grounds, to ask for possession, but Seth’s name swelled in his brain like a wood tick, feeding on blood and regret. His thoughts kept circling back to the day of the shooting, Seth loping to town with the gun against his ribs, the pastor’s wife in her basement hideaway, Will Gunderson pulling up in his cruiser, the field of sheltering corn calling to his boy. It was all there, all the story he needed, but the pieces wouldn’t fit together right inside him. All he needed to do was believe in his son’s cold rage. And then in his mind’s eye he saw the trapping cabin with its gutted creatures sewn together in unnatural ways, Seth tied to the chair, his eyes rolling back in his head as Will took pliers to the tender skin under his ribs and pinched it in the metal, twisting until Seth screamed. No. Maybe that was the story he made up to absolve Seth of his evil. Two darknesses canceling each other out.
The muscles in his shoulders and arms ached as if he’d been swinging something heavy the night before. A memory, a tiny blood-dark spot, spread in his brain. He had done it, he knew deep down under the throb of his headache: stolen his son’s own body from the funeral home and buried him up on the mountain. Grizz dressed in the clothes he had tossed on his floor the night before, chewed four aspirin from a bottle