by Carolyn Wall
Praise for
Carolyn Wall’s astonishing debut novel
SWEEPING UP GLASS
“This EXTRAORDINARY debut novel … is filled with arresting images, bitter humor, and characters with palpable physical presence. The fresh voice of that clear-eyed narrator reminded me of Scout in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I literally could not put it down.”
—The Boston Globe
“A RIVETING story full of intrigue.”
—The Oklahoman
“Wall gives her heroine a POWERFUL voice in this HAUNTING debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Carolyn Wall is a BRILLIANT STORYTELLER and this book is a wonderful read.”
—MARTHA BECK, author of Steering by Starlight
“Carolyn D. Wall has created an engaging character in Olivia Harker and a complex and densely interconnected community in Aurora, Kentucky. Her evocative prose recalls the regional style of such authors as Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and Eudora Welty.”
—Mystery Scene
“A REAL STUNNER, with plot and characters the like of which you’ve never seen.”
—MLB News
“HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for all collections.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“This is a perfect little book, like a head-on collision between Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee, with a bit of Faulkner on a mystery binge. I LOVED EVERY PAGE of it.”
—Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award winner
This book is for my father,
who listened as if my words were absolute
and my voice could save a nation.
Acknowledgments
My eternal gratitude goes to the Dead Writers Society for their suggestions and for listening while I ranted. Thank you, Rafael, for your fine editing, and gratitude to all the folks at Poisoned Pen Press. Most of all, my undying love and appreciation belongs to my children, all, and to Gary for being the best spouse a writer ever had.
1
The long howl of a wolf rolls over me like a toothache. Higher up, shots ring out, the echoes stretching away till they’re not quite heard but more remembered.
There’s nobody on this strip of mountain now but me and Ida, and my grandson, Will’m. While I love the boy more than life, Ida’s a hole in another sock. She lives in the tar paper shack in back of our place, and in spite of this being the coldest winter recorded in Kentucky, she’s standing out there now, wrapped in a blanket, quoting scripture and swearing like a lumberjack. Her white hair’s ratted up like a wild woman’s.
I’m Ida’s child. That makes her my ma’am, and my pap was Tate Harker. I wish he were here instead of buried by the outhouse.
Whoever’s shooting the wolves is trespassing.
“I’ll be out with the boy for a while,” I tell Ida.
I’ve brought her a boiled egg, bread and butter, a wedge of apple wrapped in cloth, and a mug of hot tea. She follows me inside and sits on her cot. Ida’s face is yellowed from years of smoke, her lips gone thin, and her neck is like a turkey’s wattle. Although there’s a clean nightgown folded on a crate by her bed, she hasn’t gotten out of this one for almost three weeks.
Pap once told me that when he first met Ida, she was pretty and full of fire. She rode her donkey all over creation, preaching streets of gold over the short road to hell. She still calls daily on the Lord to deliver her from drunkards and thieves and the likes of me. Last summer, she sent off for Bibles in seven languages, then never opened the boxes. It’s dark in Ida’s shack, and thick with liniment and old age smells. Maybe it’s the sagging cartons, still unpacked, although my Saul moved her here a dozen years ago. Then he died, too.
“I can’t eat apples with these false teeth,” she says.
“Will’m saved it for you.”
“Pleases you, don’t it, me stuck in this pigsty while you and the boy live like royalty.”
Royalty is a cold-water kitchen behind the grocery store. Will’m sleeps in an alcove next to the woodstove. I take the bedroom. Here in the cabin, I’ve tried to better Ida’s life, bring a table, hang a curtain, but she says no, she’ll be crossin’ soon.
“I’ll be out with the boy for a while,” I repeat.
“I’ll ask God to forgive your sins, Olivia.”
Ida’s not the only thing that sets my teeth on edge. I worry about the way folks come for groceries but have no money. Most of the time, they take what they need. Will’m and I write everything down, and they pay as they can—sometimes in yams or yellow onions, a setting hen when the debt gets too high.
If Pap was here, he’d tell me everything was going to be all right.
“Hurry up if you’re going with me,” I tell Will’m.
Damn fool’s errand. I put on my big wool cape and mittens. I have Saul’s rifle.
Will’m brings the toboggan from the barn. He’s wearing a pair of old boots and so many shirts that he looks like a pile of laundry. I can barely make out his dark gray eyes through the round holes in his wool cap. I know what he’s thinking, just like Pap used to—some injured thing might need his care.
I’ll be forty-two next year—too old and thick-legged to plow uphill through snow that makes my hips ache. I should be home in my kitchen, warming beans from last night’s supper. Behind me, Will’m pulls the toboggan by its rope. We haven’t gone far before my fingers are froze, my toes are numb, and I realize I’ve misjudged the light. Where the snow lays smooth and clean, we stop to get our breath. It’s darker up here among the alders and pine. I set the lantern on the toboggan, strike a match, and lay the flame to the wick.
Below, to the left, lights blink on in Aurora, and a car or two winks along in the slush.
“Another shot!” Will’m says. “Gran?”
I hate it when he looks to me like that, like I can fix every damn thing in Pope County. “Will’m, this winter they’ll starve to death anyway.”
But I don’t mean that, and he knows it. Shortly the hunters will go home to their dining rooms where they’ll drink rye whiskey and eat hot suppers. Past the alder line, the last of the silver-faced wolves are curling up, hungry. They’re the only wolves recorded in Kentucky, and tonight a few more are dead.
In a clearing, we come upon the two males. Will’m stares at the round dark holes in their flanks. Their right ears are gone. A small gray female has crawled off under the brush, and she lies there, baring her teeth. She’s been shot, too, and her ear cut away. The blood has run from the wound, filling her eye and matting her fur. There’s no sign of the ears.
These aren’t just any wolves. The silver-faces have lived peaceably on Big Foley for sixty-five years. Then a week ago, a male was shot and his ear cut off. Will’m and I found the wolf, and finished him off. Today, the hunter was back, and he brought others.
“Damn,” I say. “This one’s had pups, winter pups.”
“Don’t shoot her,” he says.
“There’s lead in her haunch, and she’s near bled to death.”
“We’ll take her home.”
What I’m really thinking is—I know who did this.
“Back off from her, boy.” I lay the gun to my shoulder. “Halfway down, we’d have a dead wolf on our hands.”
Will’m says, “But she’s not dead yet.”
Confound this child. I ache with the cold. More snow is likely, and when it comes, it’ll cover our tracks and the sheer rock faces. It would be right to put a clean shot between her eyes. But also between her eyes is that fine silver stripe.
I wonder if Will’m’s likening himself to the cubs. Time’s coming when I’ll have to tell him about Pauline, although he’s never asked. He hasn’t yet learned that all God’s creatures got to fend for themselves, and the devil tak
es the hindmost.
“Well, give me your scarf, boy. We’ll muzzle her good and tie her on the toboggan.”
“I could sit with her,” he says, grinning.
“You could not. You’ll walk behind and keep your eyes open. Now do as I say, or we’ll leave her here.”
“Yes’m.”
“And there’s not God’s chance she’s sleepin’ in the four-poster, or under it, either. And if there’s no change by morning, I’m putting her down.”
It’s tricky without a rope. I pull, Will’m steadies. More than once the wolf slides off, and we stop to rearrange, and trade places. God love me, every day I understand myself less. I’m so tired that the wolf and the boy and Ida run together in my mind till I can’t think who’s who, or which needs me most.
2
We lay the wolf in the kitchen, on a blanket in the corner. It would be wrong to put a sickly thing in our rattrap of a barn where she could be found by a hungry bobcat—or seen by Ida if she stepped out her door. The wolf breathes ragged, and her eyes are closed. Will’m’s scarf still softly binds her snout—the kind of loose muzzling I’ve seen Pap do. Blood seeps from the place where her ear once was.
I stack kindling in the stove and light it. Fetch a dish of navy beans from the cupboard and dump them in a pan. With a teaspoon I slide some onto her tongue, but she rolls her eyes.
“We’ve got chores to do,” I say, getting up.
Will’m stands in the middle of the kitchen. A yellow bulb hangs over our table. “But if we don’t stitch her up, she’ll lay there and die.”
“Sometimes that’s the way of things.”
“Like Wing Harris’s wife?”
My head snaps around. “Don’t you talk to me about Wing’s missus.”
“Everybody knows she gets more feeble every day.”
But I won’t hear it. “Get out there and bring in the wood while you’ve still got your coat on.”
Potato peelings lie in the sink, and I scoop them up and put them in my pocket. I kick at the snow that’s drifted under the back door and turned to slush on the porch. Take the buckets from their nails and bang ice from their bottoms. Will’m stumps out after me, and down the steps. I wish he hadn’t said Wing’s name.
When we were young, Wing and I had not a secret between us. But for over twenty years, we’ve crossed the street to avoid each other. Now we share only howdies at Ruse’s Cafe.
All in all, I have a crazy ma’am who owns a hundred dusty Bibles, a leggy boy with a too-soft heart, and no man to bed down with. And an Alaskan silver dying on my kitchen floor.
Out in the dark, Will’m works the ax from a log. “You think we could at least sew up her ear?”
Damnation. Years ago, Ida buried Pap by the boarded-up privy. Since then, I’ve trod over him ten times a day. I pass over him now on my way to the wellhouse. Pap was a self-taught veterinarian, and a truly loved man, but there’s not so much as a stick to mark his grave. Someday I’m going to move him to the hillside near Saul, and set a real marker.
For near thirteen years, I was married to Saul. When he died, I paid Junk Hanley a dollar to come up and lay a flat paving stone that said Saul Cross was a beloved husband and father. Not that I loved him all that much.
My boots break through the dark snow crust, and chunks of ice cling to my skirt. I push the door open, set the lantern on the ground, dip feed in one bucket, fill the other with potatoes. I cut down a string of onions. In the morning, I’ll take stock of the bins and shelves in our store, line up the last cans of lima beans and baking powder. If folks don’t start paying their bills, I may not be able to order again.
I let myself into the goat pen, throw the peelings to them, use a hoe handle to crack ice on the water trough. It’s so dark out here, I can just make out the squatness of Ida’s cabin and the donkey tethered in her sideyard. In spite of Ida carrying on about her supper, I’m sure she’s eaten it and fallen asleep with her pipe lit. One of these days she’s going to burn us to the ground, and when she does, I hope she takes the donkey with her. Across the yard Will’m splits kindling.
I chip through the ice on the shallow pans, too, but the half dozen hens would rather die of thirst than budge from their nests.
Will’m follows me inside, shrugs off his coat, and sits letting snow melt from his boots. I set the potato bucket under the sink.
Hell. Maybe I’ve brought the wolf home as a favor to Will’m—or because of Pap, whose old clinic still lies under this kitchen. I haven’t been down there in years, nor do I want to go now. But I bring the lamp from where it hangs on the porch. Will’m’s eyes grow round when I take the keys from the hook and open the cellar door.
My boots make hollow sounds on the stairs, but the floor at the bottom is hard-packed earth. There’s no electricity, and as Saul would have said, it’s moldy as molly hell down here. No wonder Saul stayed out of the place, mildewed and spun with cobwebs and dust. Saul said Pap needed his head examined, damned near living down here with his beasties, and the rest of the time running the still in the toolshed.
It’s the first time in years this room has seen light. It smells bad, like things died and rotted here, although Pap hardly ever lost a patient. The rot is in the tunnel he built from the cellar to the shed. It kept him from trudging through four feet of snow just to get to his still. Now both ends are boarded.
I look around at the bunks of old straw, the table running the length of the room, rusty wire cages and carriers with bent handles, buckets, a pitchfork and shovels, crates, a pair of broken lanterns. Seeing the long caged runs and water bowls, I have a minute or two of bone-deep sickness. It’s not Pap’s memory that I fear under this house.
“A body could die of the damp down here.” I select from a shelf a dusty brown bottle and other things—long-nosed scissors and a pack of curved needles—then we go up the steps into the light. I lock the door and slip the keys back on the hook.
From my sewing basket I fetch white thread, tear squares of clean cotton for bandages and long strips for binding. The chloroform has lost its strength, but it’s all we have. I pour three drops on a rag. We wash our hands with hot water and soap, then sit on the floor. When the gray’s as far under as I can get her, I cut the matted hair from her haunch. She jerks and twitches, and her eyes roll white while I shave a patch of fur and dig in the wound. My face feels painfully tight, and my eyes water something terrible.
“Who d’you think did this?” Will’m says.
I withdraw my fingers. In my palm is the metal shot. I pour peroxide in the wound and watch it boil. Spin off a length of thread, snap it with my teeth, and hold the needle to the light. Curse under my breath that my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I show Will’m how to draw the edges of the wound, and while he pinches her skin between his fingers, I take a half dozen stitches. We do the same with the ear, cleaning blood from her eye the best we can. She flinches and whines. Under the men’s britches I’m wearing—plus the cotton dress, cardigan, and longhandles—I’m damp with sweat.
Will’m offers to say a prayer over her.
“You do that,” I tell him. “And while you’re at it, pray for the hunters. I’m going to make them sorry they were born.”
3
I have nothing to give the wolf for her pain. It wouldn’t do to crush up a Lydia Pinkham’s or a Carter’s liver pill, and I dare not chloroform her again. I’ll ask Dooby, the pharmacist, what will help her to heal—if by morning she has not torn the kitchen to pieces and eaten us in our beds. She breathes thready and light, and her eyes, when she opens them, are yellow and rolling with fear.
God help me if she dies in the night, and it be upon my head. A good Samaritan, after all, is not always a beneficent thing. Folks die every day in the name of love.
Between the kitchen and the grocery I have hung a curtain. The only bedroom is in the front of the house, separated from the grocery by a door. I fear for Will’m, sleeping in his kitchen alcove with nothing but eight feet of space and
another hung bed-sheet between him and the gray, so we take our supper and sit in the middle of my four-poster. I love this high-ceilinged room with its feather mattress bed, an old wardrobe, and a cricket rocker. What used to be a closet now contains a toilet, a cracked mirror, and an electric light. No matter that we have to come through the grocery and the bedroom to get to it.
I tell Will’m about how my pap could soothe a jackrabbit with a leg so busted the bone stuck through. In our nightshirts, Will’m and I tear bits of bread to dunk in our bean soup, and we talk about Ida, and the gray, and what we will do in the morning.
“Gran?” Will’m says. “Her pups’ll die without her, won’t they?”
“If they haven’t already.”
“Think we could go up in the morning and look for ’em?”
“You’ve got school, and even if we found any of them alive, she’s too bad off to nurse them.”
“We could make up some way to feed them.”
“No, we could not.”
Daylight will tell us whether the mama wolf lives or dies. And Lord help us if Ida rises from her bed and wanders over in the morning looking for her tea and oats.
I tuck the boy in beside me. We lay in the dark looking at each other. Toward morning, I drift off till something brings me hard awake. I shove my feet in boots and wrap myself in a flannel robe. I move through the grocery and peek around the kitchen curtain. Bits of gnawed rope lay on the floor, and bloody strips of sheet. Blood streaks the linoleum and the windowsill. Glass has exploded out onto the snow. The gray is gone.
“Sweet Jesus.”
I open the back door and go through the porch and down the steps, mindful of the ice. The sky is leaden and holding its breath. Bloody tracks lead to the shed and around, past the iced-over pickup and out to the barn. And there’s the gray—one leg stretched out and lying on her side. From under her belly a circle of blood spreads dark on the snow. Twenty feet away, Ida stands in her nightgown. Pap’s old Winchester is at her shoulder, and her head’s still thrown back from the force of the shot.
