Free Little Wolves by Thomas Maltman Page A

head, not wanting her to see his eyes. It was clear to him what she had to offer. This woman had liked his son. She had not hated him the way the rest of the town had. Even now she was not judging him. “Do you think he really meant to kill a whole bunch of people like they’re saying?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “Only Seth knows.”
    He turned and walked to his truck.
    “Mr. Fallon,” she called after him.
    “It’s Grizz,” he said, facing her once more. “What everyone calls me.”
    “Grizz, would you like to come inside the parsonage and wait for my husband there? I’ll make tea. Maple tea. It’s a secret recipe my father taught me.”
    “No,” he said. “I’ll come another time.”

THE CORNFIELD
    A fter his truck passed on the road, Clara was alone in the fading day. She thought of Seth with his desk all the way in the back of the room, a circle of space around him. A kid with a face so gaunt he almost looked cadaverous.
Steorfan
. The word flashed inside her the first time she looked into his eyes, an Old English word for “starving,” a word that once simply meant “death.” She didn’t know why it popped into her brain. Seth’s eyes were slanted and golden brown, and the way his dark clothing draped on him made him appear tall and lean and dangerous.
    He had been tracked along with the kids not in precalculus and college chemistry, the ones who didn’t expect anything more out of life than to head up to Bowden Technical College for a year to study plumbing or electrical maintenance before returning to Lone Mountain. His class was hell on teachers, and they came to Clara during her fifthperiod, right after lunch, a riot of noise and distraction. Her first day they continued talking after the bell while she paced in front of the room, deeply regretting wearing heels because she wasn’t used to being on her feet all day long.
    The boys sprawled in their desks while the girls gaggled. Clara went over to the doorway and switched the lights off and on to get their attention, but this just made them ooh and aah. They were going to make an example of her to set the tone. Clara’s blood pressure spiked when she realized she had lost control of them before she even got started. A young teacher who didn’t know what she was doing. A mistake to take this job. Logan had argued against the long-term-substitute position when it was offered, reminding her that she was supposed to be finishing her dissertation, an investigation of the remaining Old English texts that described the massacre of St. Brice’s Day under the reign of King Aethelred the Unready. Clara raised her voice again to tell them about
Beowulf
, which they had just started reading before their last teacher, Mr. Gleason, had a stroke.
    Then Seth rose from his place at the back of the room, holding one of the heavy English literature textbooks. In a single, smooth gesture he let it drop from chin height to the floor. The book whipcracked the linoleum. The entire room hushed and turned in his direction, the quiet kids up front tensing and hunkering down in their seats. “Shut the hell up,” Seth told them, “and let the lady talk.”
    Clara didn’t say anything right away. Her mouth feltcoated with paste, and her eyes watered because her feet were killing her. In the new silence, she took off her heels and tossed them into a corner and let her swollen feet kiss the cold floor. She sipped from her water, drew in her breath, and shut her eyes. Then she began to sing them the story in Anglo-Saxon as it was meant to be told, her voice starting low and then rising in pitch, a lilting soprano that drew in all the cadences of Old English alliteration and bound it together in a weave of sound. Clara, a music minor at the U, had sung in the choir but never soloed before this. She felt all their eyes on her. She hadn’t done this for the earlier class, the smart kids who bent to their reading and the questions at the end of the section