Wolves

The years after that were the wolf years, Pearl said, and she laid them out flat, because to make them dramatic would be to give them more than they deserved.

Vic drank himself to death in the house he no longer owned, over five winters, and the only useful thing he did at the end was fail: he failed to pass his misery on entirely. His boy Colt grew up at Windrow under Dane's eye, and Dane raised him the way he'd been raised, which was to say methodically: no school, no books, no arithmetic beyond what a man needed to be cheated slowly, work and more work, praise for nothing, manners from nobody. The county saw a rude boy and shrugged; they'd seen rude before. Pearl saw a father's whole revenge being installed in a child like a furnace, and could not stop it and did not forgive herself for not trying harder.

Junie had come back inside a year of the elopement, when the money and the manners were gone and the cruelty stayed. She came back to Fairhill to have her baby — a boy, Milo — and Alden took her in with a gentleness that she said afterward was the worst thing in the world, because it made the comparison impossible to miss. She lasted another year and a half in a separate wing, writing Dane letters that Pearl delivered unopened and returned. Pearl carried the last of them back herself and found Junie at the wing window with a returned envelope already in her hand, looking at it the way you look at weather. "It was the right address," Junie said, and fed the letter into the stove — unlit — and sat down to write another one, and Pearl understood there was nothing left to say to a person like that, and no reason on earth to stop loving her for it. That spring she went south for her health, as people said, and died there, of the specific health that follows a heart that has been answered with arithmetic.

That left the two children of the revenge, and Dane collected them like deeds.

Milo was a thin, pale, frightened child, sick from his first winter, who had his mother's softness and none of her luck. Dane claimed him — his son, his property, his arithmetic — and installed him at Windrow and was to him exactly what Gerald Murrow had been: not cruelty, nothing so honest. Indifference with occasional use. Milo grew up indoors, terrified of his father, counting the days by which novels he hadn't been allowed to read.

Wren Frost grew up eleven miles south in the warmest house in the county, and was her mother's daughter, all of it, the wildness banked down but there, the fence-rail habit surfacing whenever Alden looked away. Alden, who had never gotten over anything, guarded her the way you guard the last copy of a burned book. She was seventeen before she ever set foot on the ridge, and the way she came to set foot on it, Pearl said, was the cruelest thing Dane ever did, and Dane did it with paper.

The county fair in Redbank, August: Wren and her dog slipped the leash of her governess for one hour, cut across the wrong quarter-mile of range land, and climbed the fence onto Windrow ground because the ground did not know it had a sign. Dane found the dog first, then the girl, and welcomed both with a courtesy like a drawn blade; he crouched to the dog and offered the girl a drink from his own flask, and the girl — her mother's daughter to the bone — took it. When Alden came at a dead run to collect his daughter off the soil of that house, it was Dane who reached them first, unhurried. "She is mine to raise," Alden said, out of breath and out of his depth. Dane suggested — mildly, in front of the assembled fair — that a man of Alden's age ought to keep better hold of what he had.

Alden had his first stroke before the first snow. The second came the following spring, and while he lay at Fairhill in the blue twilight the strokes leave, the visits began at Windrow: Wren, riding up alone at her father's fretful urging — for Alden believed, with the broken logic of the half-paralyzed, that kindness to the Corso child might purchase peace — and there was Milo, pale and gentle and dying by inches of something the doctors in Billings never did name, and there were books, real books, which Milo had in dozens and was not allowed to want, and there was Dane, putting the two young things in the same room the way a man puts powder and fuse in the same room.