Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman Read Free Book Online

TWO MONTHS , read one, while the other, in stark black and white, admonished THOU SHALT NOT KILL .
    The entire town clung to the south face of a steeply sloping hill overlooking the river lowlands, prone to flooding, where the Harvestland silos loomed over taverns and railroad tracks and mobile homes occupied by migrant workers during the pea and corn harvest at the Del Monte plant in nearby Amroy.
    The town had all of these things by her accounting, but no sign of the mountain for which it was named, and this troubled her. During Clara’s first few weeks here she made a habit of bumping over county roads in Logan’s ’69 Nova in search of one. She spotted a few low green hills knobbed by granite outcroppings and spindly cedars, but nothinglike the vision of the mountain she held in her imagination. The locals she interrogated proved evasive.
    “Oh, the mountain,” said one codger when she asked about it during social hour in the church basement. “It’s just east of town a little ways.”
    Clara nodded as if this made sense, wondering if the mountain could be little more than a glorified hill named by the homesick Germans who settled this valley.
    “No, no,” the man’s brother interrupted, his mouth full of half-chewed chocolate-chip cookie. “You want to get there, you hook a left at the granite pit, head southeast down the gravel road ’bout a quarter mile. You can’t miss it.”
    Clara knew who these men were because Logan had given her a church directory from a few years back with pictures from the congregation. The Hendriks brothers, Abel and Abram, were Dutch bachelor farmers who lived a few miles outside town.
    Both men had bald, sunburned heads and bulbous frog eyes and puffy mouths. They wore western-style long-sleeved shirts and suede dress coats with patches on the elbows. Both sat up in the balcony along with a group of senior citizens Logan had already identified as malcontents after he roped off the balcony one Sunday, hoping they would sit closer to the front. Without a word they tore down his barrier, their sisters and wives leading the way, and climbed the steep winding stairs to sit where they had sat for generations. Gloating, triumphant. “Stiff necked as the Israelites in Canaan,” Logan groused after the service.These German Americans had endured Indian uprisings, locust plagues, two worlds wars, the Depression, a hail storm that destroyed most of the windows of the church, and an ongoing farming crisis killing their way of life. They would survive one upstart pastor fresh out of seminary trying to get them to change their ways.
    So Clara wasn’t surprised these men were directing her according to landmarks they took for granted, guided by a compass she was not born with. Neither of the Hendriks brothers offered to shake her hand or introduced himself, partly because she was a young female and partly because some residents here expected her to know who they were without being told.
    The Hendriks brother with his mouth full of food was also staring at Clara’s breasts, swollen because of the pregnancy, while he licked a crumb from his lip. Clara held up her left hand to her chin, as though contemplating something, to show her missing fingers. The old man swallowed hard and coughed. He gulped boiling coffee from a Styrofoam cup and, wincing, looked away. Most men didn’t ask about the hand; they shuddered to imagine it touching them. She was damaged goods, and that’s all they needed to know. Clara leaned forward, pressing her advantage. “Which granite pit do you mean?”

    So many of her father’s stories featured this missing mountain, a sacred, healing place. If she could find it, she wouldfind the place where she was from. Knowing this would root her. A part of Clara felt as if she had opened the door that day and received the obliterating blast from Seth’s shotgun, scattering bits and pieces of her true self all about where they could never possibly be gathered together again.