Empire of Wild Read online

  “Did you know, those bearded guys, the ones with the big ships and the horns, what do you call them again?” Ajean said as Joan laid the tea towel on the ground.

  “Vikings?”

  “Yes, Vikings. Those are the ones. Some of those Viking men wore wolfskins. The ones that were considered the best fighters, the most fearless—the ones who couldn’t be killed.” She clucked her tongue. “Lots of power in that wolf. Maybe because he’s everywhere.”

  “How do you mean?” Joan was carefully picking away the dirt that sealed the towel into a solid clump.

  “Well, Vikings. Germans. Us here. And there’s a tribe in the Bible, one of the twelve tribes from Israel? One of them had that wolf as their symbol too. But that group disappeared. A lost tribe. But those wolves, them, they are just all over the world.”

  “You been on the internet with the seniors group again?” Ajean always came back from adventures on the internet with crazy stories, not understanding that not everything online was actual news. Joan wiped her forehead with the back of one hand and sat on her heels. “There, that’s the best I can do. Should I open it up?”

  “Not here. Get that tin there, out of my bag.”

  Joan fished out a round, blue tin that once held butter cookies. She opened it up, shook out the single button bouncing around the bottom and carefully placed the cloth bundle inside. Then she put it back in the tote and stood.

  “No, no.” Ajean smacked her arm. “Put some tobacco in that hole and close it back up.”

  Joan did as she was told. When the hole was filled and patted down, she picked up the bag and they started back home.

  “Ajean, do you think I was an asshole for taking Zeus with me to Hook River? I keep worrying I should have left him at home.”

  “Always better to have children around, you know. They see things we don’t.”

  “Yeah but, the rogarou. I mean, we got chased.”

  Ajean stopped dead. “Chased? Jesus H. Christ. With people around?”

  “Not too far away.”

  “Brave fucker, this one.” She touched Joan’s arm reassuringly, then started walking again.

  Joan followed. “How could we know what it would do? Besides, now we have Angelique’s bundle.” She patted the side of the canvas tote.

  Back at the house, they found all of the kids including Zeus snoozing on the couch. The girls were curled up, one under his arm, another at his feet, the third under a blanket on the chair. Joan regarded his plump cheeks for a moment, wondering why he was sleeping so much these days: maybe he was on the edge of a growth spurt.

  “Let’s leave them be,” Ajean said as she spread a sheet over the kitchen table and placed the tin in the centre. She went to the cupboard and took down a metal cheese grater with a red plastic handle and placed it beside the tin.

  “What do we need that for?”

  “Your brother, he grew one, out of his forearm.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” Joan sat down, finally exasperated by all this Indian shit.

  “A bone. A salt bone.”

  Ajean opened the tin and carefully lifted out the bundle. “People from Red River, on your mere’s side, have been growing salt bones for generations.” She unfolded the tea towel, revealing a lopsided ball, like a baseball skinned out of its leather. It was dark yellow, almost brown in places.

  “Your brother’s started as a lump under the skin of his forearm. It swelled up real good and the doctors said it was a sliver, infected or something, then that it was a cyst—they weren’t sure, those doctors never are. But Angelique knew. She tried to tell your brother but he wasn’t interested, him. He wanted it out right away, but the hospital wouldn’t move too fast. Said it wasn’t life threatening so he’d have to wait. Pretty sure that’s why it grew so damn fast, because it was going to be taken out.”

  Joan couldn’t help it. “So this random growth had consciousness?”

  “Listen, you.” Ajean pointed the grater at her face. “Enough with this bullshit.”

  “Funny, I was about to say the same.”

  “Ask George how he got that scar on his arm. Think it just showed up?”

  And then Joan remembered coming back from Toronto after a failed attempt to be free in her twenties to find that George had a new line down his left forearm, from wrist to elbow. It didn’t look angry—actually more like a fold in the skin than a healed cut. When she’d asked him about it, he just shrugged and said, “No big deal.” She hadn’t pursued it.

  “Anyways, one night it pushed right through the skin. Your mere got it the rest of the way out and put him back together. Not sure what he did with it. Hopefully Angelique put it aside for him.”

  “So whose is this, then?”

  Ajean sighed. “You’re no good at listening. This one is your mere’s—it’s Angelique’s, for cripe’s sake.”

  “People don’t just grow extra bones, Ajean. Not like that.” Joan pointed at the calcified ball on the table.

  “You think you’re born with every bone you live with, you? Babies grow new bones when they leave their mother. Your family just grows more later on, is all.”

  “Okay, so where exactly did Mere grow this—out of her arm like George?”

  Ajean laughed. “No, no. Angelique, she had to always be different. She grew this one on her head.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Yeah, imagine that. She had to wear double kerchiefs for a month until it fell off.” Ajean stuck her tongue out in concentration as she lined the grater up against the porous surface.

  Joan rubbed her hands along her shoulders and down her arms. What if she had extra bones in there now? She imagined tiny limbs like a centipede, or bony wings poking out of her shoulder blades, too stiff for flight. “Why grow anything at all?”

  Ajean shrugged. “Someone figured out if you grind them up, they make salt. And you can protect yourself with it.”

  “With salt from bones.” Joan pictured throwing bone salt in the rogarou’s eyes and running away while it screamed and tore at its face. So her secret weapon could be beaten with a bottle of Visine?

  Ajean started grating. The sound made Joan’s teeth ache. “How do you keep unwanted things from coming in your house?”

  “A lock?”

  No answer.

  “A shotgun?”

  “No, stupid, with this salt. You put salt around your house and no spirit, no rogarou, can come in.”

  Ajean produced a pile of granules about an inch around and half an inch high. The exposed inside of Mere’s bone was a lighter shade of beige and solid. Was there no marrow in salt bones?

  Ajean nodded toward her sewing table. “Get me a piece of fabric.” Hanging from the chair was a bag of scraps she used for quilting. Joan grabbed a red square and brought it back. Ajean tore a thin strip from one side. She carefully piled the gratings in the middle, then twisted it up and used the strip to secure it. Then she rewrapped the bone in the grubby tea towel and put it back in the tin. “When this is all over, you’ll rebury this where we found it. For next time.”

  “Jesus, I hope there is no next time.”

  Ajean laughed. “You think all we have around here is good men and handsome women like me? There’s just as many bad. We gotta keep it in balance.” She twisted in her seat and tossed the grater in the sink behind her. “Someone has to.”

  Ajean got up and set the tin on top of the fridge where all the important things lived. She handed the little red pouch of bone dust to Joan, who took it reluctantly, trying not to imagine how it had grown on her grandmother’s head.

  “So, what do I do with this, then?” She held the bundle by the tie. It was almost weightless.

  “You keep it with you. If you need to contain the rogarou, you put it around him. If you need to keep your house safe, you put it around that. If you need to keep yourself safe, well, same thing. It’s like Indian Alarm Guard.” She started humming a jingle from a TV commercial on home security, but for once Joan didn’t f
ind her jauntiness funny.

  She pushed the little pouch into the pocket of her pullover and linked her fingers on the table. “Ajean, how scared should I be?”

  The old woman chewed her lip, looked out the screen door and knitted her sparse eyebrows together. “You need the boy.”

  The boy? Joan felt like she needed a lot of things—a handgun, a plan, a destination, a miracle—but the boy?

  “Why would I need Zeus?”

  Ajean pulled her braid out of her sweater, flopped it over her shoulder and played with the end. “A child makes you think before you go acting out all crazy. The boy will remind you to come home.”

  Joan pushed back from the table and crossed to the stove, where she flipped on the kettle. She leaned against the counter, staring out the window as a small fox stuck its head around the corner of the church across the street, then trotted through the parking lot and into the trees.

  If the Reverend Wolff really was Victor, as she believed, she had to manoeuvre around a rogarou, steal him back from the ministry and get their asses home to Arcand. And all she had on her side was a moody twelve-year-old, an old woman and a bag of bone dust that her grandmother may or may not have grown like a fucking unicorn.

  “What the hell do I do now?”

  Ajean shrugged, soft in her layers. “Not sure. How about make some tea.”

  * * *

  Joan had convinced Zeus that it was time to put in an appearance at his own home, so she dropped him off and drove back to her place alone. She parked out front and sat in the Jeep. She missed Mere. Mere would have known what to do. Even if she didn’t, at least she’d be waiting with the kettle on.

  What in the fuck is going on? she asked the emptiness of the car. Where had her life gone, the one where she roofed with her brothers, drank Labatt 50 with her mom, drove into town to shop for new clothes once a season with her favourite cousin? The life where she was married to a good and helpful man who turned her thighs unstable when he so much as touched her hand.

  Her house was a cold, quiet tomb. In the foyer the lights were off, just as she had left them. There was none of the old music, or Victor singing in the shower, no footsteps coming toward her after a hard day at work, saying, “Let me take that belt off of you.”

  He liked to do that: open the screen door for her and unbuckle her tool belt. Truthfully, she’d put it back on when she got out of her car—there was no way to drive with a hammer sticking out from your hip—but he liked taking it off of her so much, loving the idea of her sweaty and laden with tools.

  “Mmm, poor baby,” he’d say. “You look exhausted. Here, let me help you out of those dirty clothes.” And she would obediently raise her arms as he pulled her T-shirt up over her head.

  “Oh, look at that. You’re going to need a shower.” He’d run a finger down from her collarbone, along her sticky skin.

  She’d nod. Yes, of course she needed a shower. “You too.” He was always still in his work clothes, smelling like clean wood and hot metal blades. She’d help him out of his shirt, sliding it off sunburnt shoulders that told her he’d worked shirtless that day. This would make her a bit jealous—a pinch in her lower stomach as she imagined the appraising looks from women who wandered by the job site. Her beautiful Victor, stripped to the waist, standing walls that should have taken two men to raise.

  He’d bend down to unlace her boots, looking up into her face from where he crouched, so close to her crotch she could feel his breath. He’d pull off each one, and then her socks. Standing up, he’d lift her, a hand under each buttock, and carry her to the bathroom, her breasts pushed up under his chin so that he had a choice of either rubbing his face into the bounce or admiring her sun-darkened face. Such a dilemma for a man.

  They’d leave the bathroom door open. There was no one to interrupt.

  Tonight she pulled off her own shoes and wandered to the couch, feeling her life’s great emptiness like a weight that would not yield, pushing down and down and down. She sat and pulled Zeus’s blue blanket up to her chin.

  * * *

  She woke before the sun rose, tipped sideways on the couch. Her neck was sore where it had rested at an odd angle and she rubbed it as she walked to the kitchen to get a drink of water. She took a glass from the draining board and filled it with cold tap water, downing it where she stood. She was refilling it when he spoke.

  “Hi, baby.”

  She dropped the glass into the sink, where it hit the bread knife, a round chip the size and shape of a bottom lip flying.

  She spun around to find Victor sitting on one of the kitchen stools, a wide grin on his dirty face. She held on to the edge of the sink to stay on her feet, all the air knocked out of her.

  “Victor…” she managed.

  “I’m really sorry about the other night,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just, you know, was thinking that you keep saying you want to be able to get out of here. To hit the road in an old van, remember? One of those Eighties specials with curtains in the windows and La-Z-Boy chairs in the back? But I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just happy to be with you, no matter where.”

  Her knees started to buckle and she locked them, bone into joint. “Victor, where have you been?”

  He rubbed his scruffy chin. He looked past her out the kitchen window and his eyes grew dark.

  Joan kept hanging on to the edge of the sink, squeezing the cool aluminum against the meat of her palms. His T-shirt was torn. It was his favourite too, the one with the pin-up girl leaning against an old bicycle. He’d gotten it from Abita Springs at a second-hand store because they ran out of clean clothes and were too busy fucking to do laundry. He’s gonna be pissed, she thought.

  He stood and his shirt moved. Through the tear she saw the glaring white of bone.

  “What happened to your shirt?” she asked, as if the fabric and not the bone were the issue.

  “Listen to me,” Victor said.

  “I’m listening. I’m here.” She moved across the space to him. “Baby, we had this crazy idea of a rogarou and you were somehow like, enchanted or kidnapped, I don’t know. But it can’t be true.”

  He reached for her, still looking out the window behind her head. When his hands found her upper arms, he held them, hard, then stared directly into her eyes. She watched the colour of his irises change, from black to light brown and then a yellow found only on the underside of storm clouds.

  He looked up and out the window again, and screamed, “Babe, you have to RUN! RUN NOW! FUCK, HE’S COMING! OH JESUS, GOD NO, HE’S ALMOST HERE!”

  Her arms, where he held her, were freezing. She tried to turn, to see what he was seeing, but he wouldn’t let go.

  And then the wind picked up, swirling into a smooth fist that punched up from the linoleum. Pots fell from their hooks. Plates flew out of the dish rack like Frisbees, smashing against the wall that held the thimble holders, which fell to the ground in a cacophony of tin and silver and porcelain. His hair—and oh, his hair was long again—blew around his terrified face and she went to reach for it, to hold it back from his face, but what she saw then, beneath the strands of tangled hair, made her stop.

  Something about his jaw looked broken and his eyes were growing wider, the skin pulling apart at either end like surgical scars reopened. His hands were red with old blood.

  “Run!” he screamed again, but his voice was farther away than where he stood.

  She fought him now but had no voice to call out—the wind had scooped that out of her lungs. Panic rose in her chest like liquid. She pushed away, trying to move. Then, she felt the edge of Zeus’s blanket in her hands and yanked it down, panting for breath.

  She was on the couch, alone. She closed her eyes hard for a second and then reopened them. The room was empty in the pre-dawn light. She sat up and saw that the kitchen was empty. As always, she was alone.

  She ran a hand over her head, then held it over her eyes to give herself a moment of dark. “Oh my god. My good god.”


  She stood up, throwing the blanket back onto the couch. “Stupid blanket. Christ!”

  She walked into the kitchen. Truly empty. The clock was loud—was it always this loud? She glanced at it and saw that it was nearly five thirty. She reached for a glass from the draining board, but there were only plates. Though there was a glass in the sink, a pink one, with a chip the size and shape of a bottom lip broken out of the edge.

  “Fuck you,” she said to no one in particular over the sound of time ticking away on the clock. And then to one person in particular she said, “I’m coming. I’m already on the way.”

  VICTOR IN THE WOODS: OVERHEARD

  I’m already on the way.

  11

  FOLLOW THE SIGNS

  Since Hook River, Cecile had been keeping a close eye on Reverend Wolff. Not that she didn’t usually watch him closely, just that now she had a reason to. No one could fault her concern. No one would dare gossip about her devotion. Migraine, he’d told them. He’d been unable to take the stage again that night. Two days later, the Reverend was still a little off, taking long pauses before he answered a question, and he had started smoking. She knew Mr. Heiser was worried.

  They’d been heading north toward the next weekend’s tent-up when he told them all to stop for a few nights at a Motel 8 off the highway, a low, sad building pushed in behind a Pilot gas station. He did this sometimes, changing their destination completely or calling a time-out as they worked out some logistics.

  From her second-storey motel window, Cecile watched the Reverend walk into the trees beyond the back parking lot. He carried a rolled-up brown sleeping bag and a green army backpack. He wore a grey tunic and black pants—no jacket, no hat.

  He slept in the woods when he could. He said that to be under the stars made him feel closer to God. She always tried to book motels that were close to some patch of wild for this reason. Tonight, though, he walked like a man twice his age. She feared perhaps he was having some sort of breakdown. Ivy’s theory was that he was distracted by the voice of God speaking directly to him. But Ivy was an idiot. Cecile had often thought about inviting her to leave the volunteer group, but lately Mr. Heiser had taken a special interest in the girl. Beyond her freckled face and giant cans, Cecile just couldn’t see why.