It’s what I wanted to tell you. One day I will find the guts to tell you with more than these words. I will tell them all in a way no one can forget
.
H ER HANDS TREMBLED AS she smoothed the edges of the paper she held now. Seth. She had seen him working on this very same drawing the week before the shooting, and now someone had brought it here to her door. Seth Allis Fallon. There had been nothing between them. The only thing between them was that she had wanted to mother him, a student all the other teachers loathed and feared. Had he misread how she wanted to keep him safe, even from himself? How stupid, how arrogant of her to think that she had tamed him.
The drawing was a cover for the story he never bothered to turn in, the riddle some dark and bloody parody of the ones she had taught his class, but seemed to refer to both Seth’s and the sheriff’s death. It spooked her, especially the parts about the woman with “a child in her skin.” This could only be Clara, could only mean that she was being hunted, but there was no reason for her to feel any danger, not anymore, and what was her sin?
We are all born into Adam’s sin, her husband Logan hadsaid to her once, each of us tasting exile in our mutual fall. Out of this grows our longing for the lost garden, for the paradise we might know again. It’s what he told her the first time they talked about faith, holding her damaged hand in his, speaking of a place where they might be whole inside and out. And if she doubted anything, she did not doubt this man’s goodness, even if she feared him doubting hers.
She scanned the yard, but there was no one there, just the winding gravel path that led to Logan’s church and, beyond the empty graveyard, the blond field of corn and the encroaching woods.
WERGILD
A s the day went on, the sun cooked up a heat so cloying even the wind lay still before it. His empty house droned like a dead phone line. Like Grizz was some kind of dog whose ears peeled back when he heard a faint calling from someone loved and gone.
There’s things you don’t know
, the girl had said. Will Gunderson had kept a shack in the woods and he taken his son there if she spoke true. He believed her, but he was going to have to see with his own eyes. Grizz only believed in what he could lay his hands on. That’s why he needed to go to town, talk to the pastor. He was going to have to see the body.
After the cattle were gathered in and the fence fixed, Grizz went into the house to get cleaned up. He washed his face in the sink, rinsed out his mouth, and then eased his bladder. He paused when he went into the kitchenbecause Seth’s mother was ever present in this room. The kitchen table and walls and cabinets were still the same matching lime-green color that she’d painted them before Seth’s birth. Framed watercolor vistas of sugary sand beaches and glowing seas hung on the wall. Jo had hated the cold, and in the wintertime she’d sit in this room with the gas stove open, drinking chamomile tea while she worked on transcribing notes for Dr. Salverson’s office.
Someone had been here and gone; he saw right away from the cleanliness of the floor. The visitor had come while he was sleeping and whoever she was had also taken the time to sweep up dirt the sheriff’s men had tracked in from the fields and broken glass from the floor. A note on the kitchen table waited for him. He picked it up:
Do not dispair give up
,
Your not alone
.
Hotdish in the fridge
,
Cook thirty minutes at 350
.
The handwriting was unsteady, arthritic. One of the women from the Naomi Circle at church, the meddlesome old biddies. The world wasn’t ready to leave him alone; he couldn’t hide from it anymore. He crumpled the note in his fist. Grizz needed something in him to soak up the acids in his stomach, and hotdish, the food of solace in these parts, wasn’tit. He got out some saltine crackers from the cabinets and forced these down with tap water.
When he was
.
H ER HANDS TREMBLED AS she smoothed the edges of the paper she held now. Seth. She had seen him working on this very same drawing the week before the shooting, and now someone had brought it here to her door. Seth Allis Fallon. There had been nothing between them. The only thing between them was that she had wanted to mother him, a student all the other teachers loathed and feared. Had he misread how she wanted to keep him safe, even from himself? How stupid, how arrogant of her to think that she had tamed him.
The drawing was a cover for the story he never bothered to turn in, the riddle some dark and bloody parody of the ones she had taught his class, but seemed to refer to both Seth’s and the sheriff’s death. It spooked her, especially the parts about the woman with “a child in her skin.” This could only be Clara, could only mean that she was being hunted, but there was no reason for her to feel any danger, not anymore, and what was her sin?
We are all born into Adam’s sin, her husband Logan hadsaid to her once, each of us tasting exile in our mutual fall. Out of this grows our longing for the lost garden, for the paradise we might know again. It’s what he told her the first time they talked about faith, holding her damaged hand in his, speaking of a place where they might be whole inside and out. And if she doubted anything, she did not doubt this man’s goodness, even if she feared him doubting hers.
She scanned the yard, but there was no one there, just the winding gravel path that led to Logan’s church and, beyond the empty graveyard, the blond field of corn and the encroaching woods.
WERGILD
A s the day went on, the sun cooked up a heat so cloying even the wind lay still before it. His empty house droned like a dead phone line. Like Grizz was some kind of dog whose ears peeled back when he heard a faint calling from someone loved and gone.
There’s things you don’t know
, the girl had said. Will Gunderson had kept a shack in the woods and he taken his son there if she spoke true. He believed her, but he was going to have to see with his own eyes. Grizz only believed in what he could lay his hands on. That’s why he needed to go to town, talk to the pastor. He was going to have to see the body.
After the cattle were gathered in and the fence fixed, Grizz went into the house to get cleaned up. He washed his face in the sink, rinsed out his mouth, and then eased his bladder. He paused when he went into the kitchenbecause Seth’s mother was ever present in this room. The kitchen table and walls and cabinets were still the same matching lime-green color that she’d painted them before Seth’s birth. Framed watercolor vistas of sugary sand beaches and glowing seas hung on the wall. Jo had hated the cold, and in the wintertime she’d sit in this room with the gas stove open, drinking chamomile tea while she worked on transcribing notes for Dr. Salverson’s office.
Someone had been here and gone; he saw right away from the cleanliness of the floor. The visitor had come while he was sleeping and whoever she was had also taken the time to sweep up dirt the sheriff’s men had tracked in from the fields and broken glass from the floor. A note on the kitchen table waited for him. He picked it up:
Do not dispair give up
,
Your not alone
.
Hotdish in the fridge
,
Cook thirty minutes at 350
.
The handwriting was unsteady, arthritic. One of the women from the Naomi Circle at church, the meddlesome old biddies. The world wasn’t ready to leave him alone; he couldn’t hide from it anymore. He crumpled the note in his fist. Grizz needed something in him to soak up the acids in his stomach, and hotdish, the food of solace in these parts, wasn’tit. He got out some saltine crackers from the cabinets and forced these down with tap water.
When he was
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