taken care of matters. There were ways even then. Can you imagine if you had? She would still be alive. Will might still be alive. This whole ungodly mess would never have happened.”
“No. Jo was sick. Even if wasn’t for the childbirth, the lupus would have killed her within a couple of years. Doc said so.”
“All dead, all except you,” he repeated. He tapped the side of the door with the crowbar again and then tossed it back into the pickup’s bed. “Here’s how the rest of this is going to shake down. A few weeks from now a group of us will come combine your corn. The money will go to Nolan, to pay his expenses and for his discretion.”
“I need that money to pay the bank.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you tried this stunt. Stupid, so fucking stupid.”
Grizz had only one bit of leverage. “I know about the hunting cabin,” he said. “I know that Will Gunderson took people there. I’ve seen the inside.”
Steve was shaking his head. “You best forget such rumors. It won’t do you any good to think about it.”
Grizz gripped the steering wheel. “I saw those things he made with my own eyes. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“No, I can’t say I do.” He swallowed the dry air, spit in the road. “Listen, Grizz, the money will also pay for a stone, right in the section where I said he was going to be buried. Far as the rest of the town will know, your son was buried in a private ceremony. Only you and Nolan and I will know different. You say anything to anybody, try any more stunts like this, and I send cadaver dogs onto your property, and I will find and dig up the body and put it where it belongs according to the law. I will make sure you do jail time for this, and you’ll lose the farm for sure. Are we understood? Next time, you’ll lose more than a few teeth. This is what mercy feels like. I’m letting you go for the good of this town. You hear me, Seth Fallon Sr.? This is over. The end.”
Grizz smiled through his blood. “There isn’t any ending,” he said as he turned the keys.
HARVEST
Clara and Logan were in the kitchen carving pumpkins when Stormy Gayle announced on the radio that coyotes had attacked a small child in town. She didn’t say the boy’s name, just that he lived near the edge of town, and he’d been playing in his backyard when his mother heard him scream. By the time she made it out of the house the boy rushed toward her across the lawn. “They were trying to eat me up, Mama! Wolves!”
A mouth-sized chunk of his parka was missing, down spilling out. The child told his mother the coyotes had tried to drag him toward the trees, but they got scared by the roar of a leaf blower over in the next yard.
The town’s part-time mayor, a chain-smoking lawyer named Brian Neske, coughed into the microphone. “It’s one thing,” he told Stormy, “to lose a cat or small dog. But when our children are threatened we must take action. I want to assure listeners that the authorities are doing everything possible. We’ve called in an expert from the DNR, and traps have been set. If you have a dog or cat, don’t let it wander outside, especially not at night. If the coyotes don’t get it, we’ve laced meat with antifreeze and spread it around the woods. And if you have small children, don’t leave them unaccompanied in the yard or even walking to school.”
“Would they attack a full-grown adult?” Stormy asked.
“It’s not likely. These are scavengers. Dangerous ones, but we’ll catch them before the week is out. I’m here to announce a bounty. You can already get ten dollars a pelt at the county courthouse, and remember, you don’t even need a permit to shoot coyotes. Consider it your civic duty.”
“Will you shut that off?” Clara asked Logan. The news story was the last thing she wanted to hear. She had trouble believing those coyotes had attacked a small child. Not the same ones who had encircled her. If she shut her eyes, she could still feel the gray’s coarse black nose against the softness of her palm. Now Seth’s coyotes were hunted things.
Clara sat Indian-style on a floor spread with newspapers, sawing open the skull of a pumpkin with a serrated