The Work of Wolves Read Online Free PDF Page B

box of glass bulbs and porcelain figurines.
    "You're quitting already?" she asked.
    He removed his work gloves, put them in his back pocket, stepped to her, lifted the box from her hands, stepped back again, set the box on the carpet, stood again. He reached up, removed the wool Scotch-plaid cap from his head, held it down near his knee, flicked it in the direction of the box.
    "Didn't want you to drop that," he said. "Somethin happened. Grampa's had 'n accident. Tryin a ride that Scooter horse an fell. It's bad, Mom. He's dead."
    It wasn't the first or the last time his mother would wonder who this son of hers was. She stared at him, the way he stood before her, holding his cap, watching her.
    "You said dead," she said.
    He nodded.
    "But ... Oh, my God!"
    Only then did her hands fall, which all this time had been lifted as if she still held the box, and Carson saw that if he hadn't removed it she would indeed have dropped it.
    She rushed toward the doorway, but he was in the way. She ran into him, was surprised to find him there. Her hair swung forward past her cheekbones as she rebounded, and then she was like a broken, motorized toy which, thrown off course, limps in circles. To Carson she was suddenly a stranger who had bumped into him and who stood flustered for a moment, giving him a brief second to observe her and wonder who she was. And perhaps because his grandfather lay dead only yards away in snow already covering him, near a horse that, having killed him, was already sleeping standing up in the slanting snowfall, Carson saw his mother as both beautiful and old. Perhaps she was both because she was so suddenly lost and fragile.
    He dropped his cap on the floor and reached out with both hands and took her upper arms. He intended only to stop her shimmering, her circling within herself. He grasped her in the oddest way he'd ever used with her, as if he were grasping a railroad tie to set it firmly in place in a fence post hole he'd dug.
    "Mom," he said. "What are you doing?"
    "We've got to call an ambulance."
    He'd reached out to her in gentleness, but the look on her face, the desperation there, and the hope, disturbed and angered him. With his arms fully extended, he gripped her triceps and pushed her downward. A week later he would notice black and blue and yellow marks of fingers on her upper arms as she washed her hair in the kitchen sink—a habit left: over from the time when she had lived in the old house without a shower—and he would almost ask her how the hell and who the hell. His mind would race, trying to think who might have done that to her, his father beyond possibility—and then he would realize the answer and stare at his thumb and finger on the handle of his coffee cup and scrape back his chair and go outside, where the sun had not yet risen, and wind was driving snow across the pastures, and Venus was alone in the eastern dark.
    He gripped her hard and drove her down against the floor. Her knees almost collapsed.
    "I didn't say hurt, Mom. I said dead. He's dead. He's laying out there dead."
    Surprise and pain bubbled for a moment to her face, then went. Suddenly her eyes became clear and unclouded.
    "You did," she whispered. "Yes. You did say dead."
    She was back. Here. He needed her here. He relaxed his grip on her shoulders, his forearms trembling. She stumbled, caught herself. Steadied. Pushed back a strand of hair.
    "But how do you know?" she asked.
    He grunted. Now she'd turned sly. A riddler. Looking for the right answer to death's recognition, and if he got it wrong she would insist again that the old man lived.
    But her eyes remained steady and clear. Carson saw the question was only what it was: a desire to know if he'd passed a hand over lips, felt the neck for a pulse. Carson was baffled. There were no such details to provide.
    "I know dead, Mom," he said. "I've seen dead."
    She pursed her lips, then nodded, the barest gesture of assent.
    "I suppose you have."
    It calmed her, this