Now one boy had come onto his land, a boy from an enemy family. While the coffee percolated on the stove, Grizz fired up another burner and cut nubs of butter to
coat an iron skillet. He whipped the melting butter into a froth and then cracked eight eggs, folding them together with a spatula. “I would make toast, but the loaf’s gone moldy.” The rich smell of the eggs mixed with the aroma of the coffee. It had been a long time since Grizz cooked breakfast for anyone but himself, but he enjoyed it. Seth had slept in late most days, a constant battle to get him to wake up and go to school on time.
The Mirro percolator thumped this whole time as water rose and washed over the grounds. When the eggs were done, Grizz shut off the gas stove and carried over a plate for each of them. For a boy who claimed not to be hungry, Lee shoveled in his food.
“How’s your brother?”
Lee shrugged. “The same. That girl Leah comes over all the time.”
“You mean the girl who just moved here from the Cities.” Seth’s girl.
“I’m not supposed to follow. They keep to themselves. Mostly, I take care of the pigs. My mom calls me her little man, says it all depends on me on account of me being the responsible one. It’s not easy. That’s what she’s always saying. This isn’t easy for me, you know?”
Grizz made a humming sound in his throat. “How often does the girl come over?”
Lee shrugged once more, and Grizz decided not to press him. What had it been like growing up in the household of Will Gunderson? Lee raised his gaze. “I charge three
dollars an hour, and I can only come on Saturdays, when my mother is working at the nursing home.”
“Those are fair terms.”
“What kind of work do you have for me today?”
G
RIZZ TOOK HIM OUT
to the truck garden, among the viny rows of potato plants overgrown with weeds. He pointed out the difference between the potatoes and the weeds, the velvety lamb’s ears and pestilent burdock that grew among the crop. The plants were carefully hilled, and Grizz loosened the ground with a spade and then tugged one up by the base and shook out the loose black dirt from the small clump of potatoes. “These are Yukon Gold,” he said, “about half the size they should be.”
Lee whistled. “We only got eighty bushels an acre this year in corn. It’s bad all over the county.”
“I planted sweet corn and peas and carrots, but this is all we have left.” Earlier in the summer, Grizz had hand carried buckets of water from the well to save what he could from the relentless sun. Now he rubbed the potatoes to clean off the dirt and tossed them into a gallon bucket.
Without being instructed further, Lee worked the dirt with his shovel, crouched, and tugged out a plant of his own. He held up a potato mealy with holes. “What do I do with the bad ones?”
Grizz took it from his hand and hurled it off into the trees. He left the boy to go do chores. There was a surprise he was preparing in the woods, something he’d
been working on to keep his mind occupied, to escape his troubling fire dreams. When he came back an hour later, Lee had finished a row and filled three of the gallon buckets. He was a better worker than his son had been. Together they carried the buckets up to the porch, where Grizz had filled a pitcher with well water and grape powdered Kool-Aid. The well water was so cold it made his fillings ache.
Lee stood and dusted his jeans when they were done, heading for the back field. “Hold on,” said Grizz. “We’ll finish the potatoes another day. I got something to show you.” He trundled over a wheelbarrow he’d made ready for the purpose and slit open a bag of dried concrete with a spade. Grizz showed Lee how to mix it with gravel and water to get just the right consistency. Chilly well water splashed up and soaked Lee’s sleeve, but he didn’t complain. Grizz let the boy push the laden wheelbarrow up the driveway and into the woods.
An empty figure of mesh wires waited there, leaning against a tree. Metal posts had been driven through the legs and spine to give it support.
“You’re making more of them?” Years had passed since Grizz had added anything to the Frozen Garden, his forest of statues growing mossy with time. “What’s this one going to be?”
“That’s Minnehaha herself, the hero’s bride.”
She leaned against a silver oak, her head drooping. Around them on the ground lay more gallon buckets with
broken green glass bottles and the cowrie shells Grizz used for skin.
“What happened to her?”
“She dies of sickness in the story. It happens before his last battle, before Hiawatha must face Pau-Puk-Keewis, his ultimate enemy.”
Lee touched the empty metal wires. “Why do you make the statues? Everyone in town says it because you’re crazy.”
“What do you think?”
Lee rubbed the arm he’d wounded coming down the mountain, kneading the muscle as he peered up at Grizz. “I think it’s because you’re sad. You’ve been sad for a long time.”
Grizz swallowed. “I guess that’s a good enough reason. They were for my brother. Maybe an apology for all that I couldn’t do for him.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“This was all before your time. You never got to see the pageant, did you?”
“I was just a baby when they did the last one. Dad said it got to be too much trouble for the town. And every year less people visited to see it.”
“It’s true.” Grizz picked up the spatula and started scooping in the cement before it could dry. Minnehaha was going to be his largest statue yet, well over eight feet tall.
“Why do you miss it?”
“Nostalgia, I guess. It brought people together. It was an old story that people made sure to keep alive and pass on.”
But even as Grizz spoke he knew it was more than that. The play was a direct line to his family’s past, his great-grandfather’s role in the hangings, an entire town craving redemption for what they’d done to Indians a hundred years before, dressing up in the costumes of the ones they had killed or driven away. He handed an extra spade to Lee, and they filled the base of the empty skeleton with concrete, Grizz smoothing and shaping the rough edges into a textured skin.
“Now comes the fun part. Before the concrete dries we got to put in cowrie shells and glass. Make her pretty. So when the sun shines people will see her from the road.”
“You going to put some clothes on her?”
Grizz had styled realistic clefts in the buttocks and given the giantess a massive bosom. “Nah. It’ll scandalize the little old ladies driving by on the road.”
Lee stepped back to study the statue taking shape, maybe trying to imagine. “Seth used to tell us about the naked woman they found here in the woods.”
Grizz sucked on his teeth at the mention of the woman, unsure how to respond. “Hypothermia. That was why she didn’t have any clothes on. If you’re freezing to death it feels like you’re burning up. When did Seth tell you all this?”
Lee was about to say more when the sound of snapping twigs made them turn. A young man in a russet rain slicker approached, his eyes grim and slitted. Kelan, Lee’s older brother. Lee dropped his spade into the wheelbarrow and lowered his head.
“You get on home,” his older brother told him.
“He was just helping me,” Grizz said, standing. “We have an arrangement.”
“Fuck your arrangement. Let’s go, Lee.”
“I want to stay,” Lee said. “It’s my choice.”
In answer, Kelan came forward and grabbed his little brother by the ear. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Mom thought you had fallen into one of the hog pits. She was worried sick.”
“Let him go,” Grizz said.
Lee struggled and kicked, and there were tears in his eyes, but when Kelan released him he bunched his hands into his coat pockets and started walking, not looking behind him.
“You stay away from my brother,” Kelan said, jabbing a finger in Grizz’s direction.
Grizz could have caught the finger in midair if he wanted and snapped it like a chicken bone.
The boy was walking away. The strange presence of both brothers on his land troubled him.
You may have to live with not knowing
, the pastor had said, but Grizz couldn’t leave it at that.
LOCK-IN
L
ee Gunderson surprised Clara and Logan when he showed up for the Luther League’s fall festival lock-in. He had walked from his farm outside town and arrived without sleeping bag or change of clothes. He also didn’t have the required signed permission slip, so Logan tried to call his mother but was unable to reach her. It seemed cruel to send the boy back home, so they let him stay. The other children left a circle of space around him. Clara was there to keep order along with a couple of other adult volunteers. Logan had told her how he struggled working with young people, and the kids might be especially wild on All Hallow’s Eve. “Children and bees can smell fear,” he said.
“Try stronger deodorant.”
But she was here. She oversaw the apple bobbing and watched the older teens play hide-and-seek in the
darkened sanctuary and basement, a few still finding shadowy recesses where they could make out. Only around sixteen youths from the Luther League came, most parents wanting to keep their children close to home this year. There had been talk of canceling all Halloween trick-or-treating because of the coyotes that had been seen roaming the night. No one knew how dangerous they were.
Around midnight, Logan put in a Betamax tape of
The Goonies
for the boys to watch while they fell asleep, and Clara took the girls next door to the parsonage. The girls unrolled sleeping bags on the living room floor and passed the hour telling ghost stories about the woman in the woods. She had long claws they said, her hair a ragged nest, and she wanted a child, any child. If she snatched you she would take you off in the woods with her, and you wouldn’t ever be seen again. The ghost stories devolved into gossip about boys and then to giggling, which Clara finally silenced.
The girls slept well, much better, she would discover, than Logan and the boys.
All sounds magnify in the dark, especially the sound of something wounded or afraid, Logan later told Clara. He had given his blankets to the Gunderson child and made a makeshift bed of choir robes in the corner of the room for himself. A few hours before dawn, Logan woke to the sound of whimpering.
He propped himself on his elbows to better hear. Boys mummified in sleeping bags were cast about on the chilly
linoleum floor, their lumpy shapes glistening like seals on some unfamiliar shore. The children were all worn out from the games and movies, soundly sleeping, except one.
When the crying rose to a choked sobbing, Logan picked his way among the sleepers. He found him still shuddering, his breathing husky and labored. The boy’s face was a blank, contorted mask, and he cringed when Logan loomed over him.
“Hush,” Logan said, speaking in a low, soothing tone as he touched his shoulder, smelling the blankets he had loaned him a few hours ago were soaked with urine. “You were having a bad dream.”
The boy mumbled something inaudible. A dream language. Logan crouched beside him to give him time to rise from his nightmare. Lee had oily, dark hair and the chubby, shape-shifting features of a teenager whose adult face was not yet formed. Logan could only imagine what he had been dreaming as he slept on a cold floor in a strange room less than a block from where his father had been murdered.
Lee’s nostrils flared. “Do you smell it? Do you smell the gunpowder?”
“No.” This was a lie. When Lee named the odor, Logan smelled it, too. Peppery and sulfuric, the gunpowder burned inside his nostrils. But it was simply not possible, not here.
“I’m all wet.”
“We’ll have to call your mom, have her bring fresh clothing.”
“No. You won’t be able to wake her.”
“Won’t hurt to try,” Logan continued. “You never know. She might be awake and thinking of you right now.”
Lee trembled, urine chilling against his skin. “No. Not when she’s taken her pills.”
The other boys were stirring. They’d wake soon, their senses heightened by hunger, and know this child had wet himself. The girls, sleeping with Clara next door, would be over in a few hours. Time was of the essence.
“Come with me, then,” Logan said. “We’ll find something for you upstairs.” He helped the boy bundle the blankets and carried them to an out-of-the-way corner. Then he led Lee up a rear stairwell in the dark. The neon glow of an exit sign bathed the stairs in red light, and Logan thought of what eerie places even churches seemed at night; something hellish must have touched the boy in his sleep. The gunpowder smell remained on them both.
When they reached the back room, he hit a switch, waited for the fluorescent bulb to flicker on, and then fetched a dark choir robe intended for a petite woman from a mothballed closet. “Here,” he said. “You can wear this until morning. Take it to the men’s room and rinse yourself in the sink. Use the paper towels for drying.”
Lee’s stink saturated the tight quarters. He took the robe reluctantly. He was shivering all over, as if lice boiled under his skin.
“You want to tell me about your dream?” Logan asked.
A shake of his head.
“Sometimes you feel better if you name your fear aloud.”
“He’s hunting me,” Lee said, his gaze to the floor. “Seth is after me, too. I saw him. I saw him all covered in blood.”
The boy’s voice was flat, toneless. Logan said nothing, waiting for him to go on.
“I could feel him in the church. The blood was dripping down his clothes. Then he put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream. He leaned down and he was laughing; he was laughing but it sounded like something breaking inside him. I kicked and struggled and tried to wake up, but I just couldn’t.”
“Lee, do you want to pray with me?”
His head was still lowered. “I’m sorry,” he said. “So, so sorry.” In that moment it sounded like all the sorrows in the world were wrapped in his voice.
“It’s okay. You just go change. Then I want you to meet me downstairs in the kitchen. Milk and cookies are the best cure for nightmares that I know.”
His shoulders still quaking, the boy went down the hallway to the bathroom. Logan walked to the kitchen, carefully shutting a swinging door so as not to wake the other boys. He put on a light above the stove and set out two plates with some cheap store-bought cookies, the kind with cream inside. Then he poured two tall glasses of milk. In the room beyond, the other boys slept on, oblivious.