Chapter 13: A Room in the Co-op

I did not move for a long time after the barn door closed.

The horses shifted in their stalls and the hay settled, and I stood in the tack room with my back against the shelf and my hand on the board that hid the coat and waited until I could not hear boots on gravel anymore. Then I put the board back and the ledgers back and went out of the barn by the side door and along the fence to the road.

I did not go home. I went to the co-op.

The co-op yard was dark and the elevator was quiet and the office window had a light in it that should not have been on. I stood by the loading dock and looked at it and then I walked up the ramp and opened the side door.

June was at the desk with the ledger open and a pencil in her hand.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“I could ask you the same thing.” She put the pencil down. “I could not sleep. I came down to look at the co-op books. Harold keeps the grain tickets in the back and I thought if the east field was cut early there would be a ticket for it, and there is, and it is dated the fourth of July, and it is signed by Dale and not by Harold.” She pushed the ledger at me. “Look at the weight, Wren. It is a third of what it should be. A field that size should have filled eleven wagons. It filled four.”

I sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at the ticket. It was in Dale’s handwriting, the same looping hand that was on the cull list.

“He did not cut the field for grain,” I said. “He cut it to clear the ground.”

“For the stone.”

“For the stone.” I put the ledger down. “June, I need you to go home and go to bed and not say a word about this to anyone, and I need you to do it now.”

She looked at me for a moment. Then she closed the ledger and put it back in the drawer and got her coat.

“You are not coming.”

“I have one more thing to do.”

“Is it the man in the mill?”

“Yes.”

June put her coat on and stood by the door with her hand on the frame.

“He is not what they say he is,” she said. “Is he?”

“No. He is not.”

“Then bring him here,” June said. “The co-op has a back room and Harold sleeps like a stone and the lock on the loading dock is broken. If the hunters come in the night they will look in the mill first.” She opened the door. “And Wren. If you are going to be stupid about this, be stupid somewhere with a roof.”

She went out and I heard her boots on the ramp and then nothing.

I went to the mill.

The moon was down and the trees were black and the mill stood up against the sky with its tin roof and its broken door, and the smell of him was so strong when I got within a hundred feet that my wolf sat up in my chest and would not lie down.

He was in the loft. He came down the ladder slow, and he was dressed in Owen’s coat and his boots and the scarf, and his hair was wet and he had been washing in the creek.

“You came back,” he said.

“I have been to the pack house,” I said. “I have been in the tack room. There is a coat in a box behind the ledgers with a green scarf folded on top of it, and the coat has a tear in the chest, and the tear is stiff and dark, and Dale keeps it in a box like a man keeps a thing he cannot throw away and cannot look at.”

Elias did not say anything for a moment. Then he said, “You went into the barn.”

“I went into the barn, and I heard him talking to Silas. Silas knows about the coat. Silas has known since the second night he was in town.” I looked at him. “You told me you saw a man with sandy hair and a green scarf and a coat with the collar up. That coat is in a box in the tack room of the pack house, and Dale is the man who put it there.”

“Then it was Dale,” Elias said quietly. “It was Dale, and I was not seeing things, and my memory was not lying to me.”

“It was Dale.”

He sat down on the bottom step of the ladder and put his head in his hands, and I stood in the middle of the mill floor and watched him.

“You cannot stay here,” I said. “The hunters will come back in the morning and Harlan is going to take the whole pack to the east field, and when Dale does not find a stone he is going to come looking for the wolf, and the mill is the first place he will look.”

“I know.”

“There is a room at the co-op. It has a cot and a door that locks from the inside and a window that opens onto the loading dock. Harold sleeps like a stone and June knows you are coming and nobody in this pack goes into the co-op at night except me and her.”

He lifted his head. “You are hiding me in the co-op.”

“I am hiding you in the co-op.”

“And what happens when the pack finds out?”

“The pack is not going to find out.”

He stood up. He was close to me then, and the smell of the creek water on his hair was mixed with the smell of him, and I could see the amber of his eyes in the dark.

“Why are you doing this?” he said.

“Because you were there when my brother died and you tried to hold the wound shut and you have been carrying his scars on your back for four months, and because the man who killed him is sleeping in a house a mile from here with a coat in a box in his barn.” I looked up at him. “And because I am tired of being the woman who finds the bodies and cannot do anything about it.”

He did not say anything. He got his coat and his boots and his scarf, and we went out of the mill and across the field and along the fence line, and he kept to the trees and I kept to the road, and we came into the co-op yard from the back.

The room behind the office is small and has a cot and a shelf and a window with a broken latch. I put a lamp on the shelf and turned it low and shut the door and turned the lock, and Elias sat down on the cot and looked around at the walls.

“This is the first room I have been in in four months,” he said.

“It is not much.”

“It is a door that closes,” he said. “You have no idea what that is worth.”

I sat down on the floor with my back against the desk and my knees up, and we looked at each other in the low light.

“Tell me something that is not about the curse,” I said.

He blinked. “What?”

“You have been living in a mill for four months and before that you were somewhere else doing something else, and I have known you for a week and everything you have told me has been about the curse and the stone and my brother. Tell me something that is not about any of it.”

He thought about it for a moment.

“I do not like beets,” he said.

I started to laugh.

“It is true,” he said. “I do not like them. When I was a boy my mother used to put them on my plate and I would eat everything else and leave them, and she would say, Elias, you cannot leave the beets, and I would say I can, and I would put them in my pocket and take them out to the field and throw them in the ditch.”

“Your mother.”

“She is dead,” he said. “A long time ago. She was not a wolf. My father was, and she was not, and she knew what he was and she married him anyway.” He looked at the lamp. “She died when I was eleven and I went to live with my father’s pack, and I was not happy there, and I left when I was twenty-two.”

“Where did you go?”

“Everywhere.” He almost smiled. “I worked on a fishing boat in Oregon, and I picked apples in Wenatchee, and I drove a truck for a man in Idaho who did not ask questions. I have been in a lot of places and I have not liked beets in any of them.”

I put my chin on my knees.

“What did you want?” I said. “Before the curse. What did you want to do?”

He was quiet for a long time.

“I wanted a room with a door that closed,” he said. “And someone to come home to. And a job that did not end in the fall.” He looked at me. “It is not much of a want. It is a small one.”

“It is not small.”

We sat there in the little room and talked, and the lamp burned down, and he told me about the fishing boat and the man in Idaho and a dog he had had when he was young, and I told him about Owen and the co-op and my mother and the year the well ran dry. Sometime after midnight he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes and I watched the lamp move on his face, and when he spoke again his voice was sleepy.

“Wren,” he said.

“What.”

“The moon came up tonight and I changed, and you were standing in the field, and I did not run for the trees.” His eyes opened. “I went to the stone. I went to the stone and I did not run.”

I sat up.

“You did not run,” I said.

“I did not run,” he said. “The wolf was waiting for you.”

The lamp guttered and went out, and in the dark I heard him shift on the cot, and I sat with my back against the desk and the stone in my pocket and thought about a wolf that did not run for the trees.