it around his waist. With the boy pulling from above and Grizz grabbing at the sharp spurs, he had climbed out of that killing pit.
Lee had come for him in his last moment. Lee had pulled him up and stood there shivering, waiting for a punishment that never arrived.
“Where is your brother?” Grizz gasped for breath.
“He’s going to take her into the woods. Where they always take them.”
Logan, dressed in layers of liturgical clothing, the alb, the stole, the big square cross around his throat, sang the Holden Evening Prayer:
Now as evening falls around us,
We shall raise our songs to you.
God of daybreak, God of shadows.
Come to light our hearts anew.
BY ADVENT THE SNOWS were already knee deep. It would be April before they saw the bare ground again. A season of long-lasting darkness this far north with the roads leading out of town glazed with impassible ice. The widows heard voices out in the snow. They heard the voices of those who had gone on before, husbands and children. The widows with their sparrow bones and porous skin listened in the snow and heard someone calling. “Come, the way is soft. Those you love are waiting.” They listened; they followed. At the beginning of December, the congregation buried two of them and Clara struggled to remember their faces after they were gone, the shape of their small hands within her own.
After Grizz had killed Kelan, he leaned against a tree and sank in the snow. He went into shock or something like it. Clara had no choice but to go back inside the cabin and search the sheriff’s corpse for the keys to his cruiser. It had to be done. She was not going to have the baby out here. Clara had driven both of them home, passing the overturned truck in the ditch, and she made it as far as Nora’s house, before the pain of the contractions halted her and she could go no further.
Dena was born in Nora’s living room, among the spider ferns and umbrella trees.
Now, Nora was trying to join those other widows. She had a seizure shortly before Christmas. When Clara heard about it she took Baby Dena and went to see her. She carried in Dena, still buckled in her car seat and fast asleep, to Nora’s room, which was awash in white, wintry light. Nora’s pale hair was mummified in a bandage, and she snored quietly. She’d struck her head on the kitchen floor during the seizure and she had lain there for a day and half before her daughter-in-law, visiting from the farm, had found her. Her hazy blue eyes opened, focused on Clara. “Hello, dear,” she said, smiling. “You look well.”
Clara herself had been in the hospital for two weeks after her near-death experience, and it was not a place she was eager to return to. Hypothermic, having lost two pints of blood from the accident, Clara’s recovery went on even after she was allowed to go home with the baby. Her hair newly shorn in a boyish bob, she did not feel well. “Thank you.”
Clara brought over the baby so Nora could cluck and coo over her. “It’s too bad they rescued me. I think I was dreaming of Charlie when I had the seizure.” She paused, and Clara thought for a moment she might start crying.
“I’m going to need you,” Clara said. “This baby is going to need you.”
“Nonsense. You’ll be fine.”
“But I won’t.” Her throat thickened. “You would think I would have nightmares, but I don’t. I don’t even know what I dream when I do. I’m not afraid, not for myself, but I’m exhausted all the time. I have to keep checking on the baby every hour. Make sure she’s breathing.”
“I was the same with my first. It gets better.”
“I would die for her. I almost did.” Clara went on to talk about how Logan had changed, how well he took care of her, nursing her, but also how he still seemed ambivalent toward the baby. She described her uncertainty about what would happen to her fragile family, her fears about her marriage.
Nora sighed when she was done, “In my day we didn’t have any choice, but I’m glad Charlie stuck with me through the bad times. Every couple reaches some kind of turning point. They either break or find a way to go on.”
“Do you think we’re going to make it?”
“Who the hell knows?” Nora said. She laughed, but it was short-lived when Clara