The Work of Wolves Read Online Free PDF

bump of his heel against the horse's haunch caused his snowcrusted boot in the stirrup to slip, which—like some perverse Rube Goldberg machine—caused his stub of smoldering cigarette to drop from his mouth onto the horse's withers, which caused the horse to startle and jump, which caused Ves's foot to slip clear out of the stirrup, and he fell down alongside the horse's flank.
    Final cause was never officially determined. The coroner could not or would not say whether death came from the broken neck when Ves hit the ground with the back of his head or from the fractured skull where the horse's hoof connected as he fell past its flank in the descending snow.
    But Carson, seeing the hoof flash up, knew beyond any need for autopsy or official statement that his grandfather was dead before his skull struck the ground. He was coming out of the barn with a rope in his hand when the accident happened. He saw it all. He saw the old man's head jerk sideways as he fell, the abrupt, strange, quick movement parallel to the ground, angling across the lines of snow. Carson heard the sound. The horse, freed, bucked away from the body. Carson did not run, and he did not raise his voice. Even if things could not be made better, they could be made worse, and a horse wild in the corral was worse. He opened the corral gate slowly, walked to the animal, speaking. Took the reins. Tied them to the fence. Only then did he go to his grandfather, the horse huffing behind him.
    Carson put one knee on the ground, put his elbow on the other one. Blood, like fluid too bright from an engine, leaked out of the old man's head onto the snowy, hoofmarred ground. In later years, recalling it, trying to know what he'd seen, Carson would think that the old man's head and neck looked like a tennis racquet he'd once seen shattered and abandoned on a street—that kind of twisted, wrongful look that proclaims beyond all doubt that this particular kind of broke is final. The smell of the old man—cigarette smoke and Copenhagen and age, and the pungent smell of unwashed sheets slept in so many weeks that Marie would periodically give in from asking Ves to bring them to her and sneak into the old house, holding her breath, and peel the greasy things from the bed, laying clean ones beside it, and swear to never do it again, though always the old man's indifference to the sheets' dirt and smell outlasted her will—came up, mixed with the metallic smell of blood and the cold distillation of snow in the air.
    Though the old man's head was twisted like an owl's or doll's, there was a smile on his face. But Carson knew that it was a mere betrayal of muscle, that the old man saw no humor or satisfaction in his own death other than, perhaps, the satisfaction of dying within his own activity, of being bested in fair competition by an animal he had many times bested and, by so dying, of leaving the world without giving money to the sonsabitches who made their livings herding old people from room to room. Other than that, the old man had no wish to die, took no pleasure in it, saw no humor in its finality. Carson, even at sixteen, standing in the corral with the horse blowing behind him and the rope he'd carried from the barn still in his hand and snow drifting out of the sky, knew, seeing the smile on the wreck of the old man's face, that the smile was not the old man's joke but instead a joke played upon him and that his grandfather would have preferred to spend eternity—if he could—stinking and farting and riding and cursing the things he hated in the world he loved.
    Carson watched snowflakes melt on the old man's face. Then turned away, not wanting to see the first flakes that would not melt. He didn't hurry to the house, and when he entered he did not call out but walked from room to room until he found his mother. She was in the spare bedroom getting Christmas ornaments out of the closet a month early. She turned when Carson entered the room, holding a cardboard