William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

She wouldn’t look at him now. “Mr. Core, my husband left me alone here with a sick child.”

“You met in this village?”

“We never met anywhere. I knew him my whole life. Since before my life. I don’t have a memory he isn’t in. And he left me here.”

“But the war.”

“I heard on the radio it’s not a real war. Someone said that.”

“It’s real enough, Mrs. Slone. People are dying real deaths. On both sides.”

“He said he’d never leave me. That’s what men say. Words can’t be worthless, just thrown away like some trash. There’s punishment for the wrong words.”

“But I’ve found that sometimes life interferes with words. Or changes what you meant by them.”

She turned from him and walked on. He followed. From a copse of birch a Yup’ik man and his boy, both with rifles, dragged a lank moose calf, barely meat enough for a family’s meal. Medora Slone and Core watched them pull it through the snow to their cabin beyond the copse.

They walked again in silence.

“That’s the pond where the first was taken.” She pointed.

He wiped his wet nostrils with a glove.

“Didn’t you bring some warmer clothes?”

“I didn’t expect this kind of cold,” he said.

“It’s not even cold yet, Mr. Core. I have some warmer clothes for you. And Vernon’s good boots.”

“You said before your son was sick.”

“He wasn’t the right one.”

“I’m sorry?”

“He stopped going to school after his father left.”

“That’s normal enough, I think. Children usually don’t like school at first. My daughter went through that.”

His daughter was of course grown, very much alive, a lifetime of school in her past. He wanted to blame his exhaustion, this ungodly cold for his carelessness, his stumbling words.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I only meant—”

“Stop apologizing to me.” She pointed again. “The wolf came from that dip in the hill, at the far side of the pond there. I found its tracks. I followed them. And there was nothing normal about our son.”

He saw at the pond the snow-covered rectangle he guessed was a dock. Children leapt from that dock in summer, but imagining the sounds of their splashes was not possible now. This village tableau repelled every thought of summer and light. He wanted to understand what warmth, what newness and growth was possible here, but he could not.

“The second was taken over here. The girl,” she said, and they moved around the pond, behind a row of cabins to where the low front hills split to form an icy alcove. “The children sled in here, down that hill there.”

He remembered: Take warning hence, ye children fair; of wolves’ insidious arts beware.

“Bailey too?”

“Bailey didn’t sled.” She paused here, hand on her womb as if the womb held memory the hand could feel. “He just wasn’t the right one.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, ma’am.”

“He didn’t sled.”

They stood staring into the alcove; he tried to imagine the animal charging down the slope. A startled child’s visage of terror. A gust lifted from their left, carried blurs of snow and yanked at their clothes. Medora Slone moved through wind and snow as others move through sun.

“How did it feel to shoot that female wolf?” she asked.

“I was there to study them.”

“And you really believe what you wrote? That a wolf taking a child is part of the order of things out there?” She gestured to the hills, past the hills.

“Yes, I do, Mrs. Slone.”

“How did it feel to shoot it?”

“I didn’t have much of a choice that day. It felt bad.”

“But not so rare?”

“Very rare,” he said. “They aren’t what you think, Mrs. Slone. What happened here does not happen.”

She stared—her eyeballs looked frozen. “What happened here happened to me .”

He closed his eyes and kept them closed in the cold, loathing the words that might come from him. He said nothing.

“I suppose you’re hungry now,” she said. “I have some soup for you.”

When they arrived back at the Slones’ front door, he asked, “Where was your son taken?”

“Around back,” she said, and gestured feebly with her chin at the corner of the cabin.

“May I see?”

“I’d rather you didn’t now,” she said, and took his gloved hand to lead him inside, a lover’s gesture he could not make sense of.

She heated caribou soup in a small dented pot on the burner. In the armchair he ate from the pot and let the broth transform him, quash his ability to fend off this insistent sleep. She traded him a mug of black coffee for the pot. He saw on a shelf a half-gone bottle of whiskey and asked if she might add some to his coffee. She poured into his mug and when he drank the heat of it filled the hollowness in him.

He asked then if she might have a cigarette and chocolate. From a cupboard she retrieved them, an unopened bag of chocolate he knew must have belonged to the boy, and a brand of filterless cigarettes he did not recognize. They sat and smoked together but they did not speak. His chest and lungs felt aflame at first, but after several pulls they remembered. He smoked smoothly with the chocolate smeared to the roof of his mouth and was thankful for this pleasure among so much sting.

She rose to answer a knock on the rear door. It was the boy of the Yup’ik hunter they’d seen earlier; he handed her an unwrapped slab of the moose calf, no larger than her palm, and she thanked him.

When she returned to the sofa Core said, “The others here love you.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not love. It’s just what we do. Everyone shares with everyone.”

“It’s not common where I’m from.”

“I left a quilt and pillow here for you, Mr. Core. I see you’re tired.” She rose from the sofa and placed her mug on the countertop. “Thank you for coming here. I can’t pay you anything.”

“It’s all right,” he assured her.

“Is your daughter expecting you?”

“I’m not sure what she expects, actually. I might call when I’m done here. Or just go. Thank you for the soup and coffee.”

She fed the fire wedges of axed wood. “You’ll get cold in the night when this fire dies. That heater there works, when the electric works. You’re free to use it, just roll it to you. Or I can start up the stove for you.”

“I’m all set,” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Core.”

She clicked off the lamp before turning into the back room. “To bed, to bed,” he heard her say, and the door clicked shut.

In the dark beneath the quilt he felt the fissure filling in him, sleep his sole respite against the strafing day. He was still disoriented in this place; he wanted badly to remember where he came from, and why he had come.

He heard the howl of a wolf seconds before sleep would drag him down into darkness. It was mournful through the iced black of night—an uncommon howl, an appeal he could not identify: part fury, part fear, part puzzlement. The female gray he had tracked and killed so long ago howled at him—he knew the howl was at him—from across three miles of flat expanse, from the center of that stripped abundance.

Many nights he expected to be jarred awake by dreams of the wolf he’d killed, by the sharp crack of the rifle round. And when he slept soundly through till dawn, he woke feeling remorseful that his rest had not been disrupted.

With sleep wafting in now he thought he heard the mutters of Medora Slone from the back room, the incantations of a witch, songs whispered through sobs. He knew what haunted meant. The dead don’t haunt the living. The living haunt themselves.