The Work of Wolves (27 page)

"It was for a glorious future. A son for the Reich. For Germany. For the
Führer.
"

She stopped, watching him. He stared at her, stricken. How long he didn't know. A shadow passed across her face. A finger twitched on the arm of the chair. She jerked her head, pulling the loose skin under her chin temporarily taut. Then she composed herself.

"Your grandfather returned to his work," she said. "And to his wife. I went to live, as we had planned, in one of the houses provided by the National Socialist Welfare Organization for women in the
Lebensborn
program. Everything was for the child. The best care. The best food. All for the child. For health and strength. And when he was born, it was a celebration. He entered a community. Do you understand? He was not alone. There was even a naming ceremony for him."

Still Willi didn't respond. He tried to imagine his father as a baby in the arms of black-jacketed SS men performing some ritual perversion of naming, but his mind rejected the image.
A community?
he thought.
Not alone?

His grandmother, facing the weakness of his response, resembled a melting candle, its flame guttering, without energy, shedding a light so small and wavering that it served only to deepen the darkness beyond it. She seemed to have to talk, to finish the story, though she had lost all hope it might affect him as she needed. Her voice was almost a whisper now.

"Then everything came to an end," she said. "He lost the war. We lost everything. Except our love for each other. With the war lost, your grandfather saw no reason to remain married to his wife. He divorced her, married me. And our son. Our son." Her voice broke when she said the word, the slightest catch, like a thin, damp cracker breaking, only that. "We were able to get him back. He'd been given to a family to raise, but without the
Lebensborn
support and money, they were happy to return him."

"And my father found this out," Willi stated. He'd been silent so long his grandmother's voice had come to seem the only voice in existence and his own voice sounded foreign and otherworldly.

"He did. He kept searching. He had to know. Why did he have to know? Tell me that, if you can? He was our son. We loved him. We raised him. Isn't that enough?"

Her voice still guttered, still whispered, but it had the force of plea. Her last one. But Willi shook his head. She'd not given birth to a son. She'd given birth to a sacrifice. To a weapon. A rifle or bullet or bomb. A soldier for the Reich. And she couldn't repent, because she would first have to admit the wrong, and it was a wrong too grievous to name. For protection against what she'd done, she'd turned herself into this dried and desiccated thing, hoarding her memories of passion, nursing her sense of wrong.

Since he'd found out about his grandfather's role in the SS, Willi had felt some shame at being the grandson of a man who had supervised death and suffering. Now he understood a different shame—the shame his father must have felt when he'd taken that pistol and pressed it to his forehead, before the lights of the car containing his wailing child—that future different from the one his parents had planned for him—struck and filled the room. That shame was the shame of being born already sacrificed to a dream. Already abdicated. Given up.

Willi stood. In the room darkness had thickened. His grandmother's face was a white shape only, featureless. He turned away from it. If she could not repent, how could he forgive her? He felt a great cruelty—to destroy her illusion, even if it destroyed her. But even his cruelty was futile; there was nothing he could do.

His hand was on the door when she spoke again.

"Well. I am sorry I could not make you see. It would have been a glorious future."

Willi looked at his hand on the knob. He spoke to it. "The future's now," he said. "A future that would have been isn't a future at all."

He opened the door and walked into the night. Left her with her ghosts. He looked up, but the streetlights blinded him. He couldn't see the stars. He couldn't see the vineyards on the hills above the Mosel. But he looked anyway. They were there.

C
ARSON SPUN THE CASE TRACTOR
in a tight circle, straightened it out, shoved in the clutch, slammed the transmission into reverse, and let the clutch back out, all in one continuing motion. As the tractor backed up, he lowered the bale prongs on the three-point hitch until they were sweeping through the stubble two inches off the ground. He backed up to a big round bale of hay, slid the prongs under it endwise, shoved in the clutch, pushed the three-point hitch lever up to lift the bale off the ground, shifted the transmission into fourth, and carried the bale forward to the stack he was building. There he repeated the whole process in reverse, backing into the stack, dropping the hitch, and driving forward, leaving the bale. Then he set off for another one.

His father was using a Farmhand fork on an old International M to build the second and third layers of the stacks, Carson establishing the base and his father finishing. Carson was a couple of stacks ahead, a quarter mile separating the two tractors in the field. He shoved the last bale into place on the stack he was building, then slipped the Case into neutral and let it idle, watching the M move across the field, a bale nearly as large as the tractor itself hoisted in front of it. The image he'd been seeing again and again interposed itself before his eyes: Magnus's hand striking Rebecca's face, thick fingers coming from nowhere, her head jerking sideways.

That image had been in his mind when Earl called about Greggy Longwell. Carson had listened to Earl's perfunctory description of what had happened, but he found it hard to pay attention.

"Guess that's what we expected," he said when Earl finished.

"You guess that's what we expected?"

"Never was much of a chance Longwell'd take it seriously."

"So things are going according to plan? Is that what you're saying?"

"I need to think about things some more."

"I guess we do. I got to go think right now, you know?"

Carson didn't know what Earl expected from him. Was he supposed to apologize for Greggy? Tell Earl how bad he felt? Greggy was a bigot, and he'd behaved like they thought he would. Carson had never wanted to go to him in the first place. Or was Earl just responding to Carson's listlessness? Carson tried to recall the anger he'd felt when he first recognized what was being done to the horses. But the image of a hand striking Rebecca's face—her startled, hurt expression, her hair swirling in chaos under the blow—kept interposing, and he couldn't recapture his former concern for the horses. This other despair overwhelmed it.

He'd left the house after Earl's call and found his father replacing one of the hydraulic rams on the Farmhand parked near the Quonset shed.

"You got anything goin on tomorrow?" Charles asked.

"What're you thinkin?"

"Hay needs stacked."

It was the job he'd told Rebecca needed doing the Saturday he'd gone to work Surety, hoping she'd ride with him. And she had, and they'd gone to the Elmer Johannssen ranch. A sharp regret struck through Carson. "Yeah," he said. "Guess we oughta get that done."

His father glanced at him. Carson didn't meet his eyes. He didn't know whether his parents suspected anything or not. The day he'd come home from shooting the cow, Carson had entered the new house and walked up the half-flight of steps into the upper level, where his parents were eating. He'd reached into his pocket for the ugly bundle of bills and placed it down in front of his father's plate. All three of them looked at the crumpled wad as if it were some soggy thing he'd found in a culvert.

"Job's done," Carson said.

"He paid you in cash?"

"Appears so."

"Man's got 'n odd way a doin things."

Carson started to turn away.

"It's your money," his father said.

"It's the ranch's money." Carson felt the tightness in his voice.

"Put it in your own account."

"I don't want it 'n my account."

There was a hitch in the conversation, a hiccup of silence. Then the conversation skewed off in a different direction, avoiding recognition.

"All right. Those horses train OK?"

"They trained fine."

"Rebecca," his mother asked. "She's done learning, too?"

"She can ride. I'm finished with Magnus Yarborough." He turned away again.

"Carson?" his mother said.

"Yeah?"

"Eat with us."

"I gotta clean up. I'll eat over there."

"This money'll help," his father said.

"Only reason I took the job."

Now, standing next to the Quonset shed, Carson felt his father's gaze on him and saw his father's gloved hand, wrapped around a pair of blue-handled channel lock pliers, stop working the spring pin out of the hydraulic ram.

"Things OK?" his father asked.

"Fine. The Case ready?"

Charles nodded. He gripped the pliers and pulled, but the pin was tight and didn't budge.

"You could tap that out with a hammer," Carson told him.

"Could. Didn't have a hammer handy. Had a pair a pliers."

Carson started toward the toolbox on the M to see if there was a hammer in it.

"I'll get it," Charles said. "Just need a yank a bit harder."

Carson reached the toolbox, found an old wooden-handled hammer, blackened with embedded grease and dirt. He was about to hand it to his father when Charles grunted and twisted, and the pin slid out of its hole. Charles held the pin up, and they both looked at it as if it were a trophy they'd been competing for.

"Hammer woulda worked, too," Charles said, almost apologetically.

"What's wrong with that ram?"

"Leaking. Have to buy a new one, maybe. Never ain't something breaking down."

"Ain't that the truth."

"Guess that money from them horses'll buy a ram, huh?"

His father might have whipped him with thorns. Is that what everything added up to? A new hydraulic ram? He couldn't even sit in the old house any more without feeling its sparseness. Had he sold his stories for a ram? Learned to feel a paucity in his grandfather's legacy, and an emptiness in the air at his own side—for a ram? Had Rebecca's face been bruised for a ram?

His father was just making talk. Carson stood, letting the sting of the words pass, then said, "Guess I'll put this hammer back."

Standing behind the seat of the tractor where his father couldn't see him, Carson leaned forward, palms on the tractor's cast-iron platform, and stared at the ground, the scattered and meaningless stones. When he came back around the lugged tire, his father had the ram out and was carrying a different, smaller one from the pickup. He set it down on the Farmhand's frame.

"What'd you think a Magnus Yarborough, anyway?" he asked.

"Didn't like him much," Carson answered.

"Why's that?"

Because he runs over animals and breaks their legs,
Carson thought.
Because he hits his wife.

"He thinks everything's his," he said. "Thinks everything oughta be his. Doesn't just like getting his way. He hates not getting it."

"Big difference," Charles agreed. He picked the ram up and set it in the frame, pushed the hardened steel shaft through the holes in its end, picked up the pliers again, and pushed the spring pin through the hole in the shaft to hold everything in place. "He interfere?"

"That's why I didn't want a go over there in the first place."

He heard the accusation in his voice. "Anyway, I got 'em trained," he said, trying to dismiss and correct himself. "It's over. What time you want a start tomorrow?"

His father seemed for a moment about to say something else, but then just answered the question. "Right after chores, I guess."

Charles reached out his gloved hand and grasped the stainless steel shaft of the ram and wiggled it. The metal clunked against the pin.

"Think that ram's big enough?" Carson asked.

"It's gonna hafta be. Till we get another one."

This talk of steel and the limitations of hydraulics. The strength of seals and the pressure against them.

"It gets old, don' it—this always fixin things?" Charles asked.

NOW, TWO STACKS AHEAD OF HIS FATHER
, Carson let the Case idle, the diesel engine drumming, and watched the fork on the Farmhand open. The bale in its tines rolled ponderously onto the stack, then settled. That smaller ram seemed to be holding up. Carson thought again of all that had happened, and for nothing but money. A deep sadness settled in him. He was worried about Rebecca and wondered if she would leave Magnus, and if she didn't, what would happen to her? There was nothing he could do for her. She'd said it, and it was true. But what was he doing stacking hay?

"Shit or get off the pot," his grandfather would say. "You can mope all you want, but that won't do any good. So do what you can."

Carson had to let Rebecca deal with Magnus, and do what he could. The horses needed help. But he was unable to think of anything he could do. He laid his forehead on the Case's steering wheel and stared at the dirty platform between his feet, felt the pound of the cylinders in his skull. The engine seemed to be racketing inside his brain. He lifted his head and stared at the land again, its rolling emptiness, with the M moving slowly in the distance, picking up scattered bales. He turned his head, looked in the direction of Lostman's Lake, and thought of the horses out there. He remembered the feel of Orlando's cracked bone beneath his fingers.

His former rage over the horses mistreatment stirred within him. He'd almost acted on that rage, almost cut the wire and let them go. But Earl had stopped him. Carson remembered how the Indian kid had reached out and grabbed his wrist when Carson headed toward the fence with his pliers. Earl's grip had been so soft it was almost not a grip at all. But it hadn't loosened, either, when Carson tried to withdraw his hand. It had been that consistency that had stopped Carson, a sense that Earl would follow him right to the fence, not resisting him but not letting go either, his fingers as soft: as butterfly wings on Carson's wrist, but completely unwavering.