by Pete Hautman
I do not sleep for thinking about all that has happened. I rise well before dawn and take myself to the Sacred Heart and kneel at the wall and pray for Tobias, and Lynna, and for forgiveness for my own transgressions. My prayers are swallowed by the darkness. I turn away from the Tree and sit with my back against the low wall and close my eyes and listen to the slow rain of small fruits dropping from its branches.
It is dawn when Brother Andrew awakens me by poking my leg with the handle of his hoe. I mutter an apology and scramble to my feet. I forget my injury for a moment and gasp in pain as I put weight on my ankle. Brother Andrew watches with clouded eyes as I grab my cane from the wall.
“It is Jacob, is it not?” he says.
“It is.”
“I saw you with the young lady yesterday, did I not?”
“Yes. She was a visitor. She got lost and wandered into the Heart. I found her here.”
Andrew shakes his head. “You need not sully your soul with untruths,” he says. I see his yellow-toothed smile through his thin white beard. “I am not one to tell tales.” He turns away and shuffles slowly toward the koi pond, while I, grateful and relieved, hobble out of the Sacred Heart.
Tobias does not return to us. Days pass, and then weeks. I think of him often. I imagine him begging on the streets of some godless city. I imagine him dead in a ditch or torn apart by wolves. I remember him standing on the Knob, looking down at the Pison.
One day, while helping Wallace replace some rotting boards on the back wall of the kitchens, I find myself near Sister Judith, and I make bold to ask her if there has been any news of her son. She will not look at me, but she says, “Father Grace has told me to think of other things.”
“I pray for him,” I say.
She nods, but will say no more.
Two weeks later, Sister Kari, Tobias’s sister, gives birth.
The child is stillborn.
For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease . . .
— Psalm 38:7
Winter descends upon us like a vengeful angel; a blizzard from the plains of Canada buries us in chest-deep drifts of fine, crystalline snow. When the North Road is finally opened, the snow on either side is piled as high as two men.
My ankle has mended. It is still sore, but I no longer need my cane, and I spend two long backbreaking days helping clear the snow from the walkways and the roofs of the Village. On the north side of Menshome is a drift that reaches all the way to the peak of the roof.
Only Brother Andrew, too frail to wield a snow shovel, is thankful for the storm.
“This moisture brings joy to the Tree,” he says to me as I shovel snow from around the praying wall. “The bulbs I planted will be spectacular come spring. Father Grace will be pleased.”
We are concerned for our flocks. The sheep were moved some weeks earlier to the Low Meadows, and the early blizzard took us by surprise. As soon as the snow stopped, Peter and John trekked to the Meadows on snowshoes. They found the sheep gathered in two flocks separated by half a mile. Each flock had trampled out a circle just large enough to hold them and were huddled together, pawing at the frozen ground to reach the few blades of frozen grass. The larger flock, about three score, was gathered in a low area south of the Spine. The others were farther west, in a basin just north of the high forest. There was no way to get them out through the drifts. Peter and John left the small amount of grain they had been able to carry in their packs.
Peter says we will have to bring them food every day until we are able to get them to the corrals or until the snow melts.
The next night, it sleets. For nearly an hour, we are inundated by an icy downpour. As abruptly as it begins, the sleet is swept away by a frigid wind coming down off the mountains. We awaken to a nightmare fairyland. Every twig of every tree is coated with ice. It is as beautiful as it is deadly.
Almost at once, disaster strikes when Sister Agatha steps out of Womenshome and falls, breaking her arm. Brother Peter spreads what little salt and sand we have on the walkways. I am put to work with a steel bar, chipping ice from around doorways that have been frozen shut.
The frozen rain has formed a hard crust on the snow, strong enough to support a man. With our snowshoes, Peter, John, and I are able to slide and walk out to the south meadow to check on the sheep. We can hear the first flock bawling unhappily even before they are in sight. As we come up over a low rise, sliding on the hard, slippery crust, I see steam
rising from a circular depression about twenty cubits across. The sheep are huddled near one side of the circle, their wool clumped with balls of ice and snow. They appear as a single frozen, steaming, bawling mass, but they have survived. We climb down into the trampled circle. Peter lifts one of the ewes out of the depression to see if she can walk on the crust. She totters only a few steps before her sharp hooves break through the skin of ice, rendering her trapped and helpless. We wrestle the ewe out of the snow and return her to her flock, then leave some oats and hay for them, before going to check on the smaller flock.
The other sheep are harder to get to. The crust in the basin is not strong enough to support us, even with our snowshoes. After a half hour of difficult trudging, we see the circle the sheep have made, but this smaller flock is silent. We quickly find out why.
It is an abattoir, a circle of blood-soaked snow and ice and torn bodies and fluffs of red-stained fleece and ropy entrails. We stand wordlessly, staring with horror at the carnage. The harsh tang of blood smell hangs in the air. I look at Peter; his face is suffused with rage and grief. John looks simply nauseated. I feel much the same.
“Coyotes,” John says under his breath.
Peter takes off his snowshoes and climbs down into the ring of gore. He steps carefully through the scattered remains of the flock, examining the trampled snow. John and I remain on the edge. John is fingering the stock of his rifle, staring off at the edge of the high forest, not more than two hundred paces to the south. Peter rejoins us and clamps on his snowshoes.
“Brother Jacob, as I recall, last winter you claimed to have seen a wolf?”
“I did see a wolf.”
“Have you seen any wolf sign since?”
“The night I injured myself. A wolf paced me for a time.”
“And you said nothing?”
“I was delirious. I was not sure it was real. And the first time, when I said what I had seen, I was not believed.”
Peter sighs and shakes his head. “You will be believed now. These prints are too big for coyotes.”
On the side of the sheep circle facing the forest, he points out a set of bloody paw prints the size of my palm.
“Looks like a loner,” Peter says.
“Why would it kill the whole flock?” John wonders aloud.
Peter shakes his head. “It’s not normal. Bloodlust, I guess. Wolves usually kill only to eat.”
I am thinking, Not this wolf. This wolf kills to let us know he is here.
We follow the tracks to where the beast entered the forest.
“It is watching us,” says Peter.
I agree with him. I can feel its eyes upon me.
It is a long, quiet walk back. We leave John to guard the larger flock. When we arrive at the Village, Peter recruits several of the Grace to help break a path for the sheep. It takes all day, and the sun has set by the time we herd the last bleating ewe into the corral.
The next morning, John returns with Jerome to the scene of the slaughter. They build blinds and stake out the scene, hoping the wolf will return to feed, but the dead sheep attract only ravens and a pair of young foxes.
A cold front moves in that night. It is as if we are being shown the entire range of Montana weather in a matter of days. Temperatures drop below zero degrees for seven nights running. Our hens stop laying, and several of them die from a respiratory disease we have never before encountered. Womenshome’s septic tank freezes, forcing the single women to use the facilities in Elderlodge. Jerome and John both suffer frostbite on their ears and fingers
from long hours spent in the field hunting the wolf. Although they have brought in three deer for our larders, they have seen no wolf sign, not even so much as a track.
The death of Sister Kari’s baby hangs over Nodd as well. The infant was buried in our cemetery without a funeral. Brother Von chiseled through the frozen loam and dug the grave. It is one of the few tasks with which he is trusted. We are not even told whether it was a boy or a girl. The grave is marked with a simple wooden cross, now buried deep beneath the crusted snow.
On the tenth day of the cold spell, Father Grace gathers us together in the Hall of Enoch to announce that another soul will soon be joining us. Sister Ruth is pregnant.
“It is a miracle,” Father Grace says, holding Ruth before him as if displaying a prize. Already the swelling of her womb is visible, and it has been less than three months since she was wed to Father Grace. “The Lord’s Quickening,” he says. “It is a sign of His forgiveness. Over the past difficult weeks we have been punished for our unspoken sins, for our doubts, for our pride. But now we are forgiven. This child is to be our reward.”
Later, I overhear Sister Juliette, Father Grace’s second wife, talking to my mother.
“Father may be a prophet, but first he is a man,” Juliette says. I can hear anger in her voice. “He had that girl in his bed months ago, even before he left on his mission.”
The women move away, and I hear no more of their conversation, but I cannot stop thinking about all the times Ruth looked at me and smiled, even as she was secretly spending her nights in Gracehome. I imagine her face buried in Father Grace’s thick beard, and the secret sounds of their fornications. How could I have loved such a girl? The thought sickens me to the core, but at the same time it is liberating. If not for Father Grace, I might have married myself to a girl who would do such a thing.
Still, could I really blame her? Father Grace speaks with the voice of the Lord. Had he asked me to lie with the devil, I might have done so. It is beyond confusing when those who speak for the Lord reveal themselves to be men of flesh.
Fortuitously, with the announcement of Ruth’s pregnancy, the weather turns. One day the thermometer reaches forty degrees, and then fifty, and then a glorious day when it is so warm that water runs from the roofs and the last of the ice melts from our trees and the walkways. We lead the remaining sheep, some heavy with lamb, back to the south meadow, where tufts of brown grass are showing once again between the melting drifts. It is not spring, as many weeks of winter lie ahead, but it feels like redemption. I throw myself into my work, as do all the Grace, and I think about Lynna only in the darkest hours of the night.
Our respite from suffering is brief, alas, as a few days later, Sister Mara and Sister Kari steal Father Grace’s SUV, leaving behind nothing, not even a note. A week later, the SUV is found abandoned in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.
That Sister Kari ran off was no great surprise. She was despondent over the loss of her child, and she had not been long in Nodd, and she is sister to the apostate Tobias. But Mara had lived here all her seventeen years, and although she was known to be irreverent and bold, no one had ever questioned her devotion and righteousness.
Tobias and Kari’s mother, Sister Judith, takes to her bed and refuses to perform her chores. She is visited by Father Grace, and soon she is back at work in the kitchens. I see her from time to time, trudging expressionlessly from task to task.
As if the apostasy of Sisters Kari and Mara was not enough, a few weeks later, when the temperature has once again dipped into the single digits, Brother Von is apprehended in the milking barn tearing the clothing off the girl-child Sarah, who has fewer than ten summers. Von’s heinous act is interrupted by Brother Wallace, who heard the girl’s terrified cries coming from the barn. Brother Von is beaten and thrown into the Pit. For days on end we hear his anguished moans and mutterings.
One chilly Greenday morning, as I perform my morning ablutions, I notice that his cries have stopped, and we hear from Brother Von no more.
The absence of Von’s cries is almost worse than their presence. No one speaks of it, but we are all affected. Father Grace has cloistered himself in Gracehome. He has not shown him self since he told us of his child to come. Even the younger children seem subdued, their usual laughter and shouting muted and forced.
I thank the Lord for the plentiful work we have to occupy us: feeding and guarding our remaining livestock, cutting and hauling wood for the furnaces, repairing the many leaking roofs, and rebuilding the south barn, which collapsed under the weight of the snow. My ankle is completely healed, and I immerse myself in my labors. I force my thoughts to the task at hand, and work to exhaustion every day, and pray with the intensity of Samson, and sleep the sleep of the dead. The storm, the wolf, the injuries, and the betrayals within our world have consumed us, and I have hardly let my thoughts stray beyond the borders of Nodd.
Enos declares that our edge patrols must resume, and I walk the fence for the first time in months. The snow has receded, but it is still deep in places, and the border is long.
There was a time when walking the fence brought with it feelings of peace. A time when it brought the glory of Heaven into my heart, and soothed my doubts and fears, knowing that this was our land, a holy land blessed by the Lord and protected by Zerachiel, and knowing that the Ark would come for us and take us to a place even greater than that which we have built for ourselves here on earth.
Those days are gone. Now, as I trudge through the snow, I think of Brother Von, and Tobias, and Lynna, and Sister Mara, and the child growing in Ruth’s womb, and the dead child born to Sister Kari, and the wolf that may be watching me from the shadows even now. I try to understand how all this has come to be, and I find myself growing angry with the Lord Himself, and this sends sickening waves of guilt coursing through my veins.
When dusk arrives, I have walked only half the fence. I trudge back to the Village through the south meadow, in the dark, avoiding the place where our sheep were slaughtered. I report to Enos in his office.
“You have missed both supper and Babel Hour,” Enos says, looking up from a ledger he is studying. His face has a hollowness I have not seen before. This winter has been hard on all. “I feared we would have to go looking for you again.”
I do not remind him that the last time I failed to return from my patrol, no one came looking for me at all.
“The snow is still deep in the woods and the low-lying areas,” I tell him. “I was able to walk only from the gate to the southwest corner.” I tell him of two breaches where trees had fallen on the fence.
“Tomorrow I will send Jerome to make repairs, and you will complete your patrol,” Enos says. “Did you see any wolf sign?”
“No. I came upon a deer carcass, but saw only coyote and bobcat tracks.”
“Let us hope it has left us,” Enos says wearily. “Yvonne is still in the kitchen. Ask her to prepare a plate for you.”
I do not go to the kitchen. Instead, I go straight to the Sacred Heart to ask the Lord to calm the storm of thoughts in my head, but kneeling on the icy earth before the Tree is not enough to distract me.
Tired to the bone, I retire without eating.
In the morning, I awaken clearheaded and famished. Brother Will remarks upon my appetite.
“You eat like the wolf,” he says.
I have seen how the wolf eats, so I ignore him and finish my second plate of bread and beans, eating more slowly. I wish there could be eggs, but I have not seen an egg in two months.
Will says, “You are walking again today?”
“So Brother Enos has commanded,” I say.
“I would take your place, but for the injury Tobias visited upon me. Samuel says I may never have the full use of my knee.” It has been a full season since the day Tobias and Will fought. I suspect he exaggerates his discomfort.
I am not looking forward to this second day of walking. Although my ankle has grown strong, it is sore after yesterday’s long trek. I make my pr
eparations slowly and do not leave the Village until an hour after dawn. It is a beautiful day, cloudless and crystal clear, with the temperature promising to rise well above freezing. I decide to begin my walk at the northeast corner, where the walking will be easier. If all goes well, I will reach the Pison by midday, and return by the High Meadow Road. I decide ahead of time not to walk the river. The trail though the Mire would be nearly impassable.
Once again as I plod along, small twinges from my ankle promising to become a throbbing ache, my thoughts go to dark places. I wonder why no one talks about Brother Von. Has he died? I imagine him hollow eyed and gibbering in the catacombs beneath the Tower. Or spirited away to someplace outside of Nodd, confined in a Worldly asylum, sedated by drugs.
By the time I reach the gate, my thoughts have moved from Von to Tobias, and his sister Kari, and Sister Mara, all of whom left Nodd of their own will, apostates doomed to an eternity of torment for their sins.
I pause and look through the gate that leads out of Nodd. The road is an easement that passes through the Rocking K Ranch for half a mile, then curves east to West Fork and the World. The Rocking K cattle have trampled a trail on the other side, while virgin snow heaps up on our side. It would be much easier to walk the fence on the Rocking K side, I realize. I think of the long miles ahead. What difference can it make if I walk on one side of the fence rather than the other? None at all, I decide. I can cross back into Nodd over where the fence meets the Pison.
I unlatch the gate and let myself through. The trail is so well trodden that I do not need my snowshoes; I take them off and strap them to my backpack. Without the snowshoes, walking is much easier. I have gone only a few hundred paces when an ATV track joins the cattle trail. My thoughts turn to Lynna, who now seems like a half-forgotten dream. Was she the one riding the ATV? The tracks are iced over, and there are cattle tracks punching through them, so the ATV must have passed this way a day ago or longer. I wonder if she still thinks of me.
The ATV tracks stay with the fence line. I pass the spot where Lynna and I had our picnic. The repair we made to the fence is invisible beneath the snow, but I know the place from the roll of the land. I shrug off my pack and open it. I have packed biscuits, and a few strips of dried mutton. I sit on my pack with my back to the fence, and chew on dried mutton and gaze off to the north and wonder what Lynna’s house looks like. I imagine a sprawling residence filled with modern appliances: computers, radios, televisions, all the things we do not have in Nodd. The things Tobias spoke of with such longing. I hope he has found a life he likes better. It would be sad to burn in Hell for nothing.
