Eden West (17 page)

“It is Jacob, is it not?” he says.

“It is.”

“I saw you with the young lady yesterday, did I not?”

“Yes. She was a visitor. She got lost and wandered into the Heart. I found her here.”

Andrew shakes his head. “You need not sully your soul with untruths,” he says. I see his yellow-toothed smile through his thin white beard. “I am not one to tell tales.” He turns away and shuffles slowly toward the koi pond, while I, grateful and relieved, hobble out of the Sacred Heart.

Tobias does not return to us. Days pass, and then weeks. I think of him often. I imagine him begging on the streets of some godless city. I imagine him dead in a ditch or torn apart by wolves. I remember him standing on the Knob, looking down at the Pison.

One day, while helping Wallace replace some rotting boards on the back wall of the kitchens, I find myself near Sister Judith, and I make bold to ask her if there has been any news of her son. She will not look at me, but she says, “Father Grace has told me to think of other things.”

“I pray for him,” I say.

She nods, but will say no more.

Two weeks later, Sister Kari, Tobias’s sister, gives birth.

The child is stillborn.

Winter descends upon us like a vengeful angel; a blizzard from the plains of Canada buries us in chest-deep drifts of fine, crystalline snow. When the North Road is finally opened, the snow on either side is piled as high as two men.

My ankle has mended. It is still sore, but I no longer need my cane, and I spend two long backbreaking days helping clear the snow from the walkways and the roofs of the Village. On the north side of Menshome is a drift that reaches all the way to the peak of the roof.

Only Brother Andrew, too frail to wield a snow shovel, is thankful for the storm.

“This moisture brings joy to the Tree,” he says to me as I shovel snow from around the praying wall. “The bulbs I planted will be spectacular come spring. Father Grace will be pleased.”

We are concerned for our flocks. The sheep were moved some weeks earlier to the Low Meadows, and the early blizzard took us by surprise. As soon as the snow stopped, Peter and John trekked to the Meadows on snowshoes. They found the sheep gathered in two flocks separated by half a mile. Each flock had trampled out a circle just large enough to hold them and were huddled together, pawing at the frozen ground to reach the few blades of frozen grass. The larger flock, about three score, was gathered in a low area south of the Spine. The others were farther west, in a basin just north of the high forest. There was no way to get them out through the drifts. Peter and John left the small amount of grain they had been able to carry in their packs.

Peter says we will have to bring them food every day until we are able to get them to the corrals or until the snow melts.

The next night, it sleets. For nearly an hour, we are inundated by an icy downpour. As abruptly as it begins, the sleet is swept away by a frigid wind coming down off the mountains. We awaken to a nightmare fairyland. Every twig of every tree is coated with ice. It is as beautiful as it is deadly.

Almost at once, disaster strikes when Sister Agatha steps out of Womenshome and falls, breaking her arm. Brother Peter spreads what little salt and sand we have on the walkways. I am put to work with a steel bar, chipping ice from around doorways that have been frozen shut.

The frozen rain has formed a hard crust on the snow, strong enough to support a man. With our snowshoes, Peter, John, and I are able to slide and walk out to the south meadow to check on the sheep. We can hear the first flock bawling unhappily even before they are in sight. As we come up over a low rise, sliding on the hard, slippery crust, I see steam
rising from a circular depression about twenty cubits across. The sheep are huddled near one side of the circle, their wool clumped with balls of ice and snow. They appear as a single frozen, steaming, bawling mass, but they have survived. We climb down into the trampled circle. Peter lifts one of the ewes out of the depression to see if she can walk on the crust. She totters only a few steps before her sharp hooves break through the skin of ice, rendering her trapped and helpless. We wrestle the ewe out of the snow and return her to her flock, then leave some oats and hay for them, before going to check on the smaller flock.

The other sheep are harder to get to. The crust in the basin is not strong enough to support us, even with our snowshoes. After a half hour of difficult trudging, we see the circle the sheep have made, but this smaller flock is silent. We quickly find out why.

It is an abattoir, a circle of blood-soaked snow and ice and torn bodies and fluffs of red-stained fleece and ropy entrails. We stand wordlessly, staring with horror at the carnage. The harsh tang of blood smell hangs in the air. I look at Peter; his face is suffused with rage and grief. John looks simply nauseated. I feel much the same.

“Coyotes,” John says under his breath.

Peter takes off his snowshoes and climbs down into the ring of gore. He steps carefully through the scattered remains of the flock, examining the trampled snow. John and I remain on the edge. John is fingering the stock of his rifle, staring off at the edge of the high forest, not more than two hundred paces to the south. Peter rejoins us and clamps on his snowshoes.

“Brother Jacob, as I recall, last winter you claimed to have seen a wolf?”

“I
did
see a wolf.”

“Have you seen any wolf sign since?”

“The night I injured myself. A wolf paced me for a time.”

“And you said nothing?”

“I was delirious. I was not sure it was real. And the first time, when I said what I had seen, I was not believed.”

Peter sighs and shakes his head. “You will be believed now. These prints are too big for coyotes.”

On the side of the sheep circle facing the forest, he points out a set of bloody paw prints the size of my palm.

“Looks like a loner,” Peter says.

“Why would it kill the whole flock?” John wonders aloud.

Peter shakes his head. “It’s not normal. Bloodlust, I guess. Wolves usually kill only to eat.”

I am thinking,
Not this wolf. This wolf kills to let us know he is here
.

We follow the tracks to where the beast entered the forest.

“It is watching us,” says Peter.

I agree with him. I can feel its eyes upon me.

It is a long, quiet walk back. We leave John to guard the larger flock. When we arrive at the Village, Peter recruits several of the Grace to help break a path for the sheep. It takes all day, and the sun has set by the time we herd the last bleating ewe into the corral.

The next morning, John returns with Jerome to the scene of the slaughter. They build blinds and stake out the scene, hoping the wolf will return to feed, but the dead sheep attract only ravens and a pair of young foxes.

A cold front moves in that night. It is as if we are being shown the entire range of Montana weather in a matter of days. Temperatures drop below zero degrees for seven nights running. Our hens stop laying, and several of them die from a respiratory disease we have never before encountered. Womenshome’s septic tank freezes, forcing the single women to use the facilities in Elderlodge. Jerome and John both suffer frostbite on their ears and fingers from long hours spent in the field hunting the wolf. Although they have brought in three deer for our larders, they have seen no wolf sign, not even so much as a track.

The death of Sister Kari’s baby hangs over Nodd as well. The infant was buried in our cemetery without a funeral. Brother Von chiseled through the frozen loam and dug the grave. It is one of the few tasks with which he is trusted. We are not even told whether it was a boy or a girl. The grave is marked with a simple wooden cross, now buried deep beneath the crusted snow.

On the tenth day of the cold spell, Father Grace gathers us together in the Hall of Enoch to announce that another soul will soon be joining us. Sister Ruth is pregnant.

“It is a miracle,” Father Grace says, holding Ruth before him as if displaying a prize. Already the swelling of her womb is visible, and it has been less than three months since she was wed to Father Grace. “The Lord’s Quickening,” he says. “It is a sign of His forgiveness. Over the past difficult weeks we have been punished for our unspoken sins, for our doubts, for our pride. But now we are forgiven. This child is to be our reward.”

Later, I overhear Sister Juliette, Father Grace’s second wife, talking to my mother.

“Father may be a prophet, but first he is a man,” Juliette says. I can hear anger in her voice. “He had that girl in his bed months ago, even before he left on his mission.”

The women move away, and I hear no more of their conversation, but I cannot stop thinking about all the times Ruth looked at me and smiled, even as she was secretly spending her nights in Gracehome. I imagine her face buried in Father Grace’s thick beard, and the secret sounds of their fornications. How could I have loved such a girl? The thought sickens me to the core, but at the same time it is liberating. If not for Father Grace, I might have married myself to a girl who would do such a thing.

Still, could I really blame her? Father Grace speaks with the voice of the Lord. Had he asked me to lie with the devil, I might have done so. It is beyond confusing when those who speak for the Lord reveal themselves to be men of flesh.

Fortuitously, with the announcement of Ruth’s pregnancy, the weather turns. One day the thermometer reaches forty degrees, and then fifty, and then a glorious day when it is so warm that water runs from the roofs and the last of the ice melts from our trees and the walkways. We lead the remaining sheep, some heavy with lamb, back to the south meadow, where tufts of brown grass are showing once again between the melting drifts. It is not spring, as many weeks of winter lie ahead, but it feels like redemption. I throw myself into my work, as do all the Grace, and I think about Lynna only in the darkest hours of the night.

Our respite from suffering is brief, alas, as a few days later, Sister Mara and Sister Kari steal Father Grace’s SUV, leaving behind nothing, not even a note. A week later, the SUV is found abandoned in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.

That Sister Kari ran off was no great surprise. She was despondent over the loss of her child, and she had not been long in Nodd, and she is sister to the apostate Tobias. But Mara had lived here all her seventeen years, and although she was known to be irreverent and bold, no one had ever questioned her devotion and righteousness.

Tobias and Kari’s mother, Sister Judith, takes to her bed and refuses to perform her chores. She is visited by Father Grace, and soon she is back at work in the kitchens. I see her from time to time, trudging expressionlessly from task to task.

As if the apostasy of Sisters Kari and Mara was not enough, a few weeks later, when the temperature has once again dipped into the single digits, Brother Von is apprehended in the milking barn tearing the clothing off the girl-child Sarah, who has fewer than ten summers. Von’s heinous act is interrupted by Brother Wallace, who heard the girl’s terrified cries coming from the barn. Brother Von is beaten and thrown into the Pit. For days on end we hear his anguished moans and mutterings.