Wolf Season

by Helen Benedict

  He drove her to three places that first day, each in a neighborhood defiled by poverty and crime. A windowless basement, a tenement that hadn’t had working plumbing in years, the back room of a house littered with needles and excrement. She bore all this with equanimity, saying little, pulling at her fingers, sitting with her narrow back straight. She wasn’t wearing a hijab or abaya, only blue slacks and a jacket, her hair in a long black rope of a braid. But he felt her holding herself away from him and knew she was humiliated by having to sit alone in a car like this with an American man she didn’t know.

  “I do not mind somewhere small or even in bad repair,” she told him at the end of the day. “But I did not take my son out of war only to bring him to yet more danger. Cannot the center find us a safer place to live?”

  The second time they met, she brought Tariq, explaining that her mother-in-law, Umm Khalil, whose given name was Hibah, had been hospitalized with pneumonia and so could not look after him. Tariq was only six then and so proud of his newly fitted prosthesis, the first he had ever had, that he lifted his pant leg to show it off within minutes of their meeting, and then dashed about, a red scarf pinned to his shoulders, insisting in surprisingly good English that Louis call him Nabil Fawzi.

  “Who’s Nabil Fawzi?” Louis asked Naema.

  “Oh, he is some sort of superhero he found in a Syrian comic book.” She gazed at Tariq a moment. “It used to break my heart to see my little one on his crutches pretending to fly with the grace of a bird.”

  That evening, as Louis was driving them back to their lodgings in Slingerlands, the day having proved as fruitless as the first, she looked at him and said, “My sponsor, Sergeant Donnell, he and his wife, Kate Brady, they were soldiers like you, Mr. Martin. Or is it Sergeant?”

  “Sergeant. How could you tell?”

  She turned her head away.

  The third time he picked her up, she was friendlier. “After we see today’s apartment, could we take my son somewhere more suitable? These dangerous streets and run-down buildings, they are not good for his spirits.”

  “They’re no good for mine, either.”

  She pushed her braid behind her shoulder. “Perhaps we could go to a museum? Or, as it is a pleasant day, to a park? If you have time, that is.”

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty of time.” He stole a glance at her. “Tariq can walk on dirt trails, right?”

  “He can walk on anything.”

  Louis drove them to his favorite refuge, a nature preserve called Myosotis, just south of Huntsville. During those nights in Iraq when the sleep was driven from him by doubts or heat, aches or illness, the deeds of the day burning into him like a branding iron, he would try to escape by walking through this park in his memory, forcing himself to recall every twist of its trails, landmark oak or hemlock; every hawk or bald eagle he had seen sailing over its lake. Myosotis, he knew, was Greek for forget-me-not.

  Parking on the edge of a tree-shaded road, he led them down a pebbled path, a stream on one side, a mossy bank on the other, a wash of golden-green light trickling through the dense woods around them. It was a torpid August day, but here the air was leaf-cool and fresh, and as he gestured for Naema and Tariq to move ahead of him, he saw her lift her face and inhale.

  “See that bridge?” He pointed to a small wooden footbridge arcing over the stream. “When we get to it, you’ll find a surprise.”

  “It is safe? For Tariq, I mean?” Naema turned to face him on the narrow path, and he was struck by the grace with which she moved, dressed that day in loose jeans, her back slender under a royal blue tunic, the braid swaying over her hips.

  “Sure, as long as he sticks to the trail. He can walk for a while?”

  “Oh, yes. Now that he no longer needs crutches, he can walk for hours.” She fell in beside him, Tariq trotting ahead of them. “He was only three when he lost his leg, you know, and for years, he had to hobble and limp on crutches. Now, he can go anywhere. Now he is free.” She smiled then, for the first time, and Louis felt his heart, which had been so crimped for so long, shake itself like a small, cold animal, and stretch.

  The surprise was a waterfall, hidden by a fern-covered bluff and visible only from the bridge. Tariq was already there, jumping with excitement at the sight of the water tumbling in great sheets of white and silver, weaving itself into ribbons, scattering at the touch of a rock into a rush of foam. He reached out as if to hug it, and each time a splash caught him, he laughed.

  Naema joined him, bending to kiss the top of his head. And then she, too, stretched out her arms as if to grasp the waterfall. Louis stayed back, watching. He knew from the Refugee Center that her husband had been killed by the same car bomb that had mutilated her son and scarred her face. That she had also lost her father and brother to the war. Yet there she was, laughing.

  For the next four weeks, Louis drove Naema and Tariq from one calamity of an apartment to another, interspersed with restorative trips to lakes, movies, playgrounds, and museums. Once Khalil’s mother was released from the hospital, she would sometimes come, too, a bent and silent old woman in a black hijab and abaya, with an unsmiling face as withered as a prune and dim, suspicious eyes. But usually it was only the three of them.

  “Try to understand if Umm Khalil, she does not warm to you,” Naema told Louis in the car one of the mornings Hibah was absent. “After Khalil and his father, they were killed by the bomb, she managed to cope as long as it was necessary to help us survive in Damascus. But now we are here and relatively safe, she has fallen into a depression I am afraid might kill her.” Naema paused. “It was very hard for her when Khalil, he chose to work for your American army. He had to change his name and live away from us so we would be in no danger. Often, we did not see him for months. He did this because he wanted Saddam brought down and he wanted true democracy in Iraq. Did you work with interpreters like that when you were a soldier?”

  “I did.”

  “In return, Sergeant Donnell, he promised to protect Khalil. But he did not protect him. And now we find ourselves staying in the back room of this same Donnell’s house.”

  “You’re all in one room?”

  “Yes, but that is not my point. My point is, I am living with the man who hired my husband for the job that killed him and I cannot bear being the object of his attempts at restitution, his guilty charity. It is suffocating. And it is even worse with his wife.” She paused again, as if to gather herself. “Do you understand this, Louis?” she asked, using his given name for the first time.

  “I do. It’s not your job to help us soldiers forgive ourselves.”

  She regarded him gravely, the gold of her irises and the white of her scar vivid in the morning’s silvery light. “Exactly. This is why I must leave.”

  “We’ll get you out of there as soon as we can.”

  They kept looking until, at the end of the month, Louis took her to a new place on the center’s list in a slightly better neighborhood than those they had seen so far. She gazed up at the brown brick building, four stories high, its windows cracked and filthy, its front door slashed with graffiti. “Ah, this looks like home,” she said, her voice dry. But then she turned to him and he saw she was joking. “Come, my friend, let us go inside. There is always hope, no?”

  7

  MOON

  Rin is worried about Juney. She moves her wafty little self through her chores willingly enough, helping to resurrect the shell-shocked vegetable garden, put up a new bear-luring bird feeder, and repair what other storm damage she can, but she is doing it without any of her usual chatterbox joy. And when she hums in that secret-private way of hers, fingers fluttering, head swaying, she sounds so sad it winches up Rin’s heart tight as a high wire.

  So, at lunchtime, while Rin is making egg salad sandwiches and Juney is sipping lemonade at the kitchen table, both dirt-grimed and due for showers, Rin asks if something is wrong.

  “Nope.”

  “You sure?”

  “Leave me alone, Mom
my.” Rin is about to object to her tone when Juney takes up a new song, its tune meandering and frail, giving it lyrics that catch Rin’s words in her throat.

  “Hiccup is a kitty, Hiccup is a cat.

  She lives in a box under the ground.

  Her box is dark and lonely;

  Her box is quiet as earth.

  Her only friend is a flower,

  A blue and sad little flower.

  And maybe one worm.”

  She sings it again and again, rocking in her chair until Rin can’t bear it. “Are you lonely like Hiccup?”

  Juney stops singing. “Mommy, I’m not a baby. I know Hiccup’s dead. It’s just a song.”

  It isn’t until later, after lunch and showers, when Rin finds her sitting still as a shrub in the vegetable patch, head tilted in her listening pose, that she gets it. Juney is waiting for that boy. The one who appeared out of nowhere and dropped his leg off, bringing back memories Rin had hoped were erased for good. Juney is lonely. Naturally, she is. She is nine years old, so of course Rin isn’t enough anymore. Even the dogs and remaining cats and goats—even the wolves aren’t enough.

  Rin sits next to her on the warm ground and strokes her cheek, so soft to her calloused hand she can scarcely feel it. Juney is only wearing a faded blue T-shirt and shorts today, but she looks like a fairy-tale princess nonetheless, her hair braided into the coronet Rin pinned around her head to relieve her from the heat. This muggy pressure hasn’t let up for all ten days since the storm and it’s cooking the drowned plants in their garden to mush. They reek of mildewed washcloths and sneaker feet.

  “What’s your friend’s name again?” Rin asks, although she remembers it only too well.

  “What friend?”

  Rin feels a splat of annoyance, along with no considerable wonder. Her little Juney, who only a moment ago was as free of guile as a newborn, is being coy. “I mean that kid who popped up in our yard like a gopher.”

  That makes Juney smile, which allows Rin’s inner winching to relax a fraction. “His name’s Tariq.” And then: “Mommy, what’s he look like?”

  “Who, the gopher?”

  “Mommy, come on.”

  “He looks like any kid.”

  “Mommy!”

  “I’m sorry, little bean, I wasn’t thinking. Let’s see. He’s tall for his age, taller than you. Skinny. He’s got a narrow little face, curly black hair—”

  “I know that. But what are his eyes like?”

  “Oh. Well, they’re big and round and the color of—they’re brown. Reddish brown.” Rin realizes that won’t tell Juney anything. Rin has tried to teach Juney to name the true colors of things, but Juney isn’t interested, and given that blue is green to some folks and vice versa, while others can’t even recognize red, Rin doesn’t see that it matters. Who is she to railroad her daughter into the vocabulary of the seeing? “You know when I roast chestnuts in winter?” she says in her earthbound way. “That color.”

  “Hmm. And how’s he walk on his fake leg? Does he hop?”

  “No, he walks normally. Maybe just the tiniest limp, like when you get a thorn in your shoe.”

  Juney pulls up her pale, pointy knees and rests her chin on top of them, making herself into an egg. “He told me his leg got blown off in a war.”

  Rin closes her eyes.

  “Tariq,” Juney says, drawing out the word. “What kind of a name is that?”

  Rin stands up, the few pebbles of tolerance she has for this topic rolling clean away. “Ask him. I need to work on the barn. You going to be all right?”

  “Yep. I’ll do the veggies.” So Rin leaves her to feel for leaf-munching beetles and flood rot while she tries to purge Tariq from her mind for long enough to figure out how to remove the two enormous trees the hurricane sent crashing into the back of her barn.

  The trees are ancient, one a willow, the other an oak, and she is deeply sorry to see them die. The willow was a beauty, forty feet tall and some seventy-five years old, with vine-thin branches bursting from its trunk like a fountain and a mass of slender, feather-shaped leaves. But the oak was her favorite. Its little acorns with their crocheted berets. Its rough, wise old bark. Its thousands of intricate leaves, like tiny elongated hands with too many fingers, jammed against the barn roof now, unaware of their impending doom. Rin reckons this oak must be a century old, if not more. It has watched Jay’s farm prosper, fade and fail. Seen the woods spring up thick and wild, only to be razed for fields and then left to spring up again. Witnessed his parents come into this life, age, and die. Housed generations of birds inside its branches—woodpeckers, nuthatches, cardinals, hawks, starlings, chickadees, yellow-bellied sapsuckers—nesting, laying their eggs, raising their young, starting again. And then there are all the wars the oak has lived through: World War I and the second one, too. Korea and Vietnam. CambodiaLebanonIran. And the long string of U.S.-infested wars in just the past thirty-one years since Rin was born: GrenadaSalvadorHondurasNicaraguaPanamaGulfOneTheBalkansAfghanistan. And of course her very own war with its looking-glass name: OIF, Operation Insane Fuckers. Yes, quite an achievement, all those wars, not to mention the many little ones the U.S. fostered in between. Ah, what a waging of death upon the soil of others this American oak has seen, along with its cousin, the DoD, Dear old Democracy, Dead on Delivery, for whom Rin gave her faith, her body, her daughter’s eyes, and . . .

  And where were you when I needed you, sister-comrade-soldiers mine, that night of the . . . where were you, where were . . .

  Juney is crouching where her mother left her, head up and swaying, absorbed now in listening for birds, not boys. Over by the feeder she can hear the rough croaks of jays and crows, who never seem defeated by anything, but she is worried about how the tinier, light-boned birds fared in the storm. She knows how vulnerable they are, having held newly hatched chicks in her palms, their claws as fine as thorns, their feathers light as a tickle. How many of those little birds, the finches and sparrows and tufted titmice, lost their nests and eggs and fledglings to the hurricane? How many were beaten to the ground and drowned, like poor little Hiccup, or struggled in the wind only to be dashed against a tree? Her heart contracts at the thought of such flimsy creatures snatched up by the same force that knocked her and her mother into all that pounding water and mud.

  At night, Juney sometimes dreams about the storm. The cry of limbs being torn from trees, the splintering of glass, the human shrieks. But more often she dreams of birds, the scratch of their feathers in her hands, the throb of their pinpoint hearts, their songs guiding her, like the stony path beneath her feet and the scent of her mother’s lilacs, from the vegetable patch to the feeder. She dreams, too, of the music around her: the ten steps up to her bedroom, each stair creaking with its own woody tune; the fourteen across the living room, six shuffling over the warmth of carpet, eight slapping against the chill of bare floor. The rhythmic pant of the wolves as they move toward her through the woods, their breath heavy and hungry and yet as comforting as home; the moan of a cat in heat; the yearning cry of her mother’s call. The warm lick of the sun, cool brush of a shadow, the sting-sharp lash of winter at her neck . . . She dreams of all the eddies of scents and sounds and sensations she must sort out day and night, asleep and awake, to make sense of the world.

  “Hi.”

  She starts and turns up her face. “Tariq?”

  “Yeah. I came to see how Hiccup’s doing. That okay?”

  “Sure.” Too shy to show her pleasure, Juney wipes her grassy hands on her shorts. “I’m worried she’s lonely, even with the flower. Come look.”

  Drifting off the ground, she walks down the path to the new bird feeder, without her cane today, feeling her way along the row of lilac bushes with one hand, the petals tickling her palm, while Tariq follows. He looks down at the grave, a small heap of earth marked now by a triangle of pebbles. Juney holds the feeder pole, waiting for his words.

  “I don’t think she’s lonely,” he says. “She’s got the birds
now and all those flowers and plants right here.”

  Juney considers this. “I guess. And she’s got the maggots. I forgot about them.”

  Tariq raises his head and examines her in a way he wouldn’t dare with anyone else. His mother is always telling him not to stare, but when a person can’t see, you can stare for as long as you want. Juney’s face is as white and small as a dab of paint; her body so slight it’s almost as if he is dreaming her, especially with her flaxen hair braided and wrapped about her head like a crown. She reminds him of something, but he cannot remember what. Then it comes to him: a picture he saw long ago in one of the library books his mother used to bring him to teach him English; a book of folktales from a land far, far away and about as different from America or Iraq as a land can be. “You should know about the cultures and stories foreign to us,” she said, and opened the page to show him illustrations of pale, white-haired girls in a forest. They weren’t human girls. They were like the djinns in his grandmother’s stories, only good instead of malicious; magical creatures of the forest whose bodies were half tree and half girl and ended in wisps instead of legs, which is why he was so drawn to them. Their hair was long and floating, their eyes blue-water clear. Just like Juney’s. Maybe he could take a book like that to his mother in the hospital. Read it to her the way she used to read to him. Help her get better by making her remember happy things.

  “I can hear you thinking,” Juney says. “But I can’t hear what the thoughts are.”

  Tariq takes a moment before he can answer. “I’m thinking about these magic girls I saw in a book once. They live inside trees and they can fly. I don’t know what they’re called.”

  “Dryads.”

  “They are?”

  “Yup. I read a book about them once. Each dryad protects her own tree. And if the tree dies, she has to die, too.” Juney listens for her mother, whom she urgently wants not to intrude right now, while Tariq tries to imagine how she reads. He is about to ask when she says, “Where’s your name come from?”